THE JOURNAL
5 MINUTE READ
Surfing With Panerai And Environmental Filmmaker Mr Jack Harries
Styling by Mr David Lamb
19 October 2022
Wetsuit on, surfboard under his arm and a Panerai Submersible dive watch strapped to his wrist, Mr Jack Harries strides out into the surf off Newgale Beach in western Wales. “I think I must have been a fish in a previous life,” laughs the filmmaker, 28. “The water is my happy place.” A born Londoner, he swims twice a week when he’s at home, finding tranquillity in the bracing waters of London Fields lido, but he tries as often as he can to make time for trips out of the city, to experience what he calls nature’s last wilderness: the ocean. “Being out there, getting tossed around by the waves, it really reminds you of the power of the sea,” he says. “You can’t control it. You can only move with it.”
But while the pummelling force of the waves is a reminder that nature is hard to control, it is not entirely immune from our influence. Indeed, it is proving to be more fragile than we thought. This is not lost on Mr Harries, who, through his work, has seen first hand the damage that climate change is wreaking on our oceans. From witnessing the retreating ice sheets of Antarctica to visiting Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Pacific, whose residents are emigrating to neighbouring Fiji in anticipation of their homeland being swallowed by rising sea levels, Mr Harries has spent the last six years on the front lines of the fight for our planet’s future.
Mr Harries is one of a generation of new media personalities to have found fame as a content creator in the early days of YouTube. He was just 18 when he launched his channel, JacksGap, during his gap year in 2011. Along with his brother, he spent the first few years entertaining his rapidly growing audience with the kind of fun, frivolous content that defined the platform’s early years: vlogs, challenges, filling your brother’s bedroom with balloons. Despite the fact that his videos were beginning to draw viewer numbers to rival primetime TV, he doesn’t recall having any grand aspirations for his channel at the time, nor was he motivated by an appetite for fame. “YouTube was just this amazing creative space back then. We had absolutely no idea it would get so big.”
Things started to change for the channel in 2014 when the brothers took part in the Rickshaw Run, a rally across India, and documented the adventure in a hugely popular multi-part series. “It alerted us to the fact that more highly produced, episodic content could work on YouTube,” Mr Harries says. It was around the same time that brands, keen to capture a slice of the youth market, were beginning to take note of the brothers’ success. In 2016, they joined the climate charity WWF on a science trip to Greenland to analyse and measure the shrinking ice; their resulting video, “Our Changing Climate”, was viewed more than a million times and marked a shift in Mr Harries’ content towards a more serious tone and a stronger focus on environmental issues. “Growing up in a city meant that I was distant from the natural world,” says Mr Harries. “But that trip brought us face to face with the effects of climate change. From that point on, it was impossible to deny.”
Mr Harries’ transition from adolescent YouTube content creator to fully fledged filmmaker was made official last year when JacksGap relaunched as Earthrise, a digital media platform dedicated to bringing the climate crisis to a bigger audience. But while his message may be more urgent now than ever, the medium has not changed; he remains a storyteller at heart. “The statistics are important, but if they’re not delivered carefully they can have the opposite intended effect,” he says. “They can bewilder just as much as they can inspire. It’s the human stories that really move people. That’s what moved me; that’s how I’m hoping to move others.”
One of the biggest challenges, he says, is tackling climate anxiety. “It’s all too easy to succumb to helplessness when thinking about the climate,” he says. “There’s a growing belief that the problem is too large, that there’s nothing we can do about it, and that humanity is doomed.” Those feelings are natural, he says, and easy to justify when you look at the failure of governments and large corporations to act. But they can lead to further inaction if not properly processed.
“It’s all too easy to succumb to helplessness when thinking about the climate,"
“There’s a level of acceptance, of recognising that we aren’t single-handedly going to stop global climate change.” Mr Harries says. “There’s a grieving process that needs to happen before we can begin to address the problem on a local level.” Striking a more hopeful note, Mr Harries highlights the work of people who are doing just that, from setting up rewilding projects in their back gardens to collaborating with local trusts to re-establish ancient forests in the Scottish Highlands. “The big picture may look bleak, but look closer and there are reasons to be optimistic,” he says.
But if major corporations have little incentive to act on the climate crisis, then brands – who answer ultimately to consumers – do have the power, and indeed the responsibility, to inspire change. “There’s loads they can do,” says Mr Harries, “from looking at traditional crafts and methods in different ways to introducing new materials into the supply chain.” The watch on his wrist – a Panerai Submersible eSteel™️, made from 52 per cent recycled materials by weight – is the perfect example, representing a small, but purposeful step towards a more sustainable future for the watchmaker. It’s not the only step that Panerai has taken to reduce the ecological impact of the watch industry and to reverse the decline of our natural environment. Separately, the brand has entered into a decade-long partnership with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO to foster ocean literacy and inspire us to take better care of that last great wilderness. After all, if we won’t then who will?
Mr Harries wears a 44mm Submersible QuarantaQuattro eSteel™️
