Kia Johnson Words of encouragement Eco-Logical Intelligence Award: To Craig Foster of the Sea Change Teacher

th e ECO-LOGICAL INTELLIGENCE Award

CRAIG FOSTER

Craig Foster is an award-winning filmmaker and co- founder of the Sea Change Project which is an organisation dedicated to learning about and protecting The Great African Seaforest, a vast marine underwater kelp forest on our coast, through innovative storytelling.

Craig has dedicated the past 9 years to diving every day in the Atlantic Ocean without a wetsuit, documenting the process of how the human body adapts to cold and builds a primal immune system. In the course of his filmmaking career, Craig spent years with the San people in the Kalahari and under their guidance, learnt to track on land. He has used this knowledge to pioneer the art of tracking underwater in the kelp forests.

He spent 25 years making documentary films with his brother Damon. As the Foster Brothers, they have over 75 international awards for their work including WWF’s Golden Panda, the “Oscar” of Natural History filmmaking.

His current film project, directed by Pippa Ehrlich (Sea Change member) and James Reed, and assisted by the rest of the team at Sea Change, titled My Octopus Teacher, is set for a global release on Netflix on the 7th of September. It is the first South African documentary feature film to be screened on Netflix. The film, which is about a special relationship he shared with a female octopus in the kelp forest is estimated to reach a potential global audience of over 300 hundred million people, in 190 countries. It will be translated into 32 languages. The film has recently been nominated for two panda awards at Wildscreen. It also won the Best Film award at one of the world’s largest environment festivals, Earth X in Dallas.

Craig has also written a book with Ross Frylink co-founder of Sea Change Project, edited by Pippa Ehrlich, about the secret world of the Great African Seaforest. To date he has discovered many new species and over 40 animal behaviours previously unknown by developing a unique method of tracking animals underwater. Some of his new discoveries he has filmed are featured in the BBC Blue Planet 2 series, including a famous octopus/shark sequence. Sir David Attenborough has applauded his film and book work.

The Sea Change Project is a group of divers, journalists, storytellers and scientists who are dedicated to making the Great African Seaforest into a global icon like the Kruger, the Serengeti and the Amazon, in order to kindle global attention and foster its long-term protection. Craig and the Sea Change team also want to mentor and create an outreach programme for young South Africans so that they can become aware of this wonderful wilderness on their doorstep and act as future custodians. The Sea Change Project calls the kelp forests off our shore the Great African Seaforest in order to give it a unique African identity. Kelp forests are found along 1/4th of our world’s coastlines and yet very little is known about them.

Craig is currently a consultant to the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) a Research Council of Norway funded Centre of Excellence (COE) based at the University of Bergen. Together with his brother Damon they have translated the science of human origins on the South African coast into a series of short films and exhibitions which are being showcased around the world. Over the next decade scientists in the COE will integrate archaeology, climate and psychology in an ambitious programme to extract, analyse and understand the processes that shaped the behaviour and cognition of our common ancestors, Homo sapiens, in southern Africa between 120 000 – 50 000 years ago. The paleo scientists have evidence from various discoveries of marine organisms in the time layers in the caves on our coast which show that the early people here depended quite heavily on foraging and feeding from the Great African Seaforest, making it on one of the wild spaces with which we humans have a 6000 generational pact. This meld of science, culture and nature, is what drives Craig and Sea Change Project’s passion for the underwater Seaforest.

Craig’s greatest passion is being in the water however and he has nearly completed the promise he made to himself about daily dives for ten years. This however will continue for as long as he can now as it has become his way of life. He believes that deep nature immersion and creating stories that spark our innate love for the wild is a key tool to the regeneration of our living planet, our home, the foundation for the air we breathe, our food and our well-being.

Comment by David Parry-Davies: Craig personifies the thinking, values and behaviours of an eco-logical human being - leveraging his impressive knowledge base, intelligence and almost superhuman physical prowess to raise public awareness about the need to protect our natural environment which he so openly and passionately loves. Quiet and modest yet fiercely determined, Craig deserves our unreserved admiration and wholehearted thanks for the amazing work he is doing for the benefit of all of us.