Cyrill Gutsch: A Change of Heart

As a child, I climbed mountains. From there I could look out into the world’s vastness and my thoughts and curiosities began to fly. I wanted to know how this world and its vastness worked. When I was 8 years old, my parents took me to the sea. I was surprised by a feeling inside me that took hold quite unexpectedly. The endlessness, the size, the violence, the beauty, the power carried me and my thoughts away. There was a persistent restlessness in me, and as I sat by the sea, there was suddenly absolute calm and pause in the moment. I was incredibly excited. A love from the beginning [laughs]. The sea touched and changed me so deeply. We are all looking for a great power that holds everything together. As a child, I wasn’t equipped for all these feelings that were revealed to me. None of it has been lost since then. The thought, many years later, that I was part of a society that kills the sea marked a turning point for me. It was unbearable.

Today, I feel I have evolved towards that moment. At a certain point, I no longer saw the point in what I was doing at that time. It’s not that I didn’t love my job: I’m a creative, I like being a strategist. For a very long time, I balanced design and strategy, and yes, did my part in destroying our planet. It was clear to me. When it comes to the whole ecosystem, we’re not really making a positive contribution. I accepted that with a certain cynicism. I thought, “Yes, it’s a given that we’re going to eat up all the resources, we’re going to take what we can from each other, and eventually our time on this planet is going to be over for the human species.” I had no doubt about that. I grew up in a very environmentally conscious home in the country. It was logical to me that you can’t stop these global developments. When I met Paul Franklin Watson, who had just been arrested in Frankfurt in May 2012, something happened to me. I remember very clearly all the sensations that flared up inside me. 

Was this the signal I had been waiting for? My emotional world was already searching. I looked around and saw that a search for meaning was underway within me. My privilege was to be allowed to see and understand so many things. I had the chance to be able to take different perspectives of a view that is not granted to very many people at all. I had the opportunity to walk through doors and look into the engine room of society at a very young age. I think that’s where I started, solving complex problems in a way that finds common ground and uses ideas as a means of persuading others. That’s where I found levers to break through old mechanisms like competition and the fear that if you share, something will be taken away from you. When you truly collaborate and open up, you can only win and develop a shared reality. Together, values define themselves and become a standard. John Lennon comes to mind: “If one has a thought, it is only an idea. When you share the thought, it becomes a reality.”

Back to Paul Watson. There I was, suddenly sitting across from this man whom I had only known from television until then. He founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society [a direct action marine conservation group] and was a co-founder of Greenpeace. After his arrest in 2012, he had to report to the German police and his lawyer’s office in Frankfurt every day. At that moment, although I understood what I had to do and what my task was, I did not yet know how, nor exactly where I would go and what I would do. It became my task to continue what the environmental movement had achieved. All the big problems we have today are created by the economy. I’m not an anti-capitalist. I am a child of capitalism who had all the opportunities open to him. What I got in my life is based on the fact that I had an economic advantage. I know about the quality of economics. I know as well that we are running an old economy. This complexity we are in, starting with climate change, plastic pollution, overfishing, and resource depletion, cannot be solved just through activism and an educational stand. We have to take responsibility for our answers. Complexity has always attracted me and what I do is a kind of untangling. I isolate all the issues that prevent us from taking a step in the right direction. By that I mean: fears of financial loss, of making mistakes that could cost you your job and so on. There are so many reasons for people working in big companies or governments – as well as individuals – not to allow change. I want to crack all of that. I realised that my job is to free the issue of environmental protection from its negativity and pent-up energy. We all know – feel that – we are doing something wrong and this brings out a whole bouquet of defiance, anger, repression and inability. But none of that does any good. It doesn’t lead us in the right direction because our energies are burned up. We’re holding each other back. I felt that creativity, eco-innovation and collaboration could really transform things quite a bit. We can make everything much more attractive, sexy [laughs] and optimistic. I don’t dwell, pointing my finger at others – I turn to the solutions. It’s beautiful and motivating to fathom it; to explore, to get excited about new solutions and let old ones go. By ‘old’, I don’t always mean old, but rather an expired expiration date. Formulas: how we design, develop, produce, market products, how we run our economy and how we live – have all reached their expiration date. There are new formulas and, for me, they have been a beautiful alternative for a long time.

What’s really important is to lose your distance from big companies. Companies are made up of people who do the same things I do. Everyone in a company has someone to report to and everyone has learned to separate rational from emotional. That’s a really big problem. So many people no longer make decisions based on their instincts because they’ve learned that’s wrong. That means decisions are made based on what’s important for business. To me, the idea of separating business from personal is a mistake.

You can’t separate what you do for a living from what values you represent. For me, creatives are one step ahead at this point, because they are usually not driven by purely financial motivations. So if we understand a large company as a network of individuals that exists in its own bubble, that allows for a very different approach. Where are the fears, needs, perceived impossibilities? But also: where are the opportunities, loopholes, open fields? There are so many people, especially in my environment, who can’t handle the idea of there being an environmental problem. They have no idea of how they themselves are driving and increasing the environmental crisis every day through their personal and professional actions. The awareness is not there. What does climate change mean? What is my part in it every single day? What is the role of the ocean? Why does the ocean need to be healthy so that I, my friends, my city can be well? What is a good material and what is not? We have arrived at such a level of complexity that many people are just chasing buzzwords. We can’t expect people to get deeply involved in these topics en masse. We can’t expect the consumer to solve the problems. Everyone is busy, no one has time, everything is about their own world. However, it is clear that we have to solve the marine problem on land. In these issues, you need enormous sensitivity in communicating with each other and you need to be able to inspire and motivate people. Those of us who have actively decided to get involved demand a great deal from our counterparts. Change means loss. One loses security, money, comfortable and well-worn ways. People are afraid of change. Isolated from one side you cannot solve the global problems of our time. That’s why I am thinking through and ‘relaxing’ ideas as the next step of development. We can move into the future because we are no longer dependent on dangerous and destructive substances. We no longer think it’s cool to wear products that promote the decline of our beautiful planet. Instead, we choose better alternative materials. 

At Parley for the Oceans, we work on different fronts and we don’t go to any country, company or individual and say what needs to be done. We introduce ourselves, approach, show our ideas and our strategies. We make offers, show where people can start. If people can find their own way of doing things, then the things they believe in can become more successful. You have to be very clear in how you formulate something. To me, having a strategy is the most important thing – and a mission. At Parley for the Oceans, we want to help end climate change, address the ocean plastic problem, usher in the end of plastic as a material and stop the overfishing, exploitation and large-scale murder of animals. This is the flag we fly. Let everyone do what they can because they can.

In our first 10 years, we’ve managed to look at every corner of society worldwide and open doors. Parley is active in 30 countries. We want to go to every country with a coastline and big rivers. I think now is the point where we want to make everything we’ve learned available and go big. 

Time is massively pressing. 

We will not live without the sea.

As featured in SLEEK 72 – LOVE. Available in Print or Digital here.

Cyrill Gutsch, born in Freiburg am Breisgau, Germany, in 1971, has worked for decades as a creative consultant for major companies and has made it his mission to make ocean littering one of his most important concerns. Virtually overnight, in 2012 he transformed his New York design agency into the environmental protection organization, Parley for the Oceans. Consistent, creative, strategic, communicative and practical, his work has been successful in engaging the world. Now 10 years old, the organisation is all about implementation on a grand scale.