SHACKLETON MEDAL 2026 // SHORTLIST NOMINEE: IN CONVERSATION WITH DENISE LANDAU

"From the very beginning I was thinking about the long-term impact of everything I was doing"

You started out as a ski pro in Colorado and ended up working in the poles. How did you make the transition from being a top skier to becoming a conservationist?

I went to Michigan State University to do a degree in Field Natural History. We were required to do a lot of volunteer work – whether that was in the environmental ed[ucation] group, the planetarium, or the nature centre. I graduated in December of 78. It was the beginning of ski season, so I packed up my car and moved to Colorado to teach skiing. But the summer prior to graduating from college, I had started working for the National Park Service as a park ranger. The way the US system works, you can apply for seasonal jobs that last for around five months. I applied for a job on the other side of the United States from where I grew up, in the North Cascades, which is just north of Seattle on the West Coast. Then I went back to school. I thought it was really good to have my park service job and go skiing in between. That covered ten months of the year, and in between I could go hiking, kayaking and rafting in national parks all over the United States.

What specifically did the park service job involve?

It's ingrained into you that the parks are protected for future generations. So we were asked to do educational programmes based on this. From the very beginning, I was thinking about the long-term impact of everything I was doing. How could we protect our surroundings, whether it was a field full of salamanders, a pond with a bunch of tadpoles in it, or the whole mountain environment? That was how I grew up. Outside was always part of me.

How did you first get involved with the poles?

I went up to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, which is in southeast Alaska, as a park ranger, and spent several years guiding trips throughout parts of Alaska. Then I got involved in the cruise line companies. I worked as a naturalist on board the ships in Alaska, giving presentations on everything – marine biology, ornithology, geology, history and the gold rush. That’s how I got started in all this.

The main focus of your work has been in the Antarctic region. How did that start?

It was through the cruise ships. I realised they were going to other places I wanted to see, so I turned my sights towards Antarctica. At first, I got hired to work for one of the cruise line companies right smack in the middle of the US to start their environmental educational programming for four ships. I was hiring 400/500 people a year to work on ships, as naturalists, as educators. I wrote job descriptions, and everything they did had to have some conservation ethic as part of their talks. Then that company took on an Antarctic ship.

I was given Antarctica, the Amazon and the Arctic too. This was before Skype, Zoom and even before email, so trying to track down educators was an interesting concept at the time. Many are still working as expedition leaders and lecturers in the field. Over time, I probably hired about 800/900 people to work in polar jobs.

You were Executive Director of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) from 1999 to 2008. But you were involved in the organisation pretty much from the start, weren’t you?

1991 was an interesting year, because that's when IAATO was set up. I came along four months later, after it was established, but it was still very much in its infancy. The company that I was working for said that if we were going to operate a ship down south, we had to be a part of this. So I joined and went to my first meeting a few months after the organisation was formed. The next year, 1992, I was asked to be on the executive committee, which was a big honour. I took the approach that the work we were doing had to be pragmatic, but it needed to have a long-term vision because tourism was growing everywhere in the world. We needed to make sure that whatever we established were solid principles of operation.

That's very farsighted of you, because now it's built into the narrative of tourism that you have to think about conservation and future generations. But in the early 90s, there wasn't the same sense of urgency that there is now.

Part of this is connected to the national park philosophy that I grew up with, so I just had to be really gutsy. I worked for a few tour operators in the 90s, and then in 1999 I took over as Executive Director. I started with 14 companies at that point in 1999 and after nine years, we ended up with 116 companies. This was partly about trying to manage the growth of tourism at a time when companies didn’t necessarily want to cooperate. So for nine years, I had to find strategies to make companies agree on issues like a waste management policy.

Did you have any significant opposition to what you were doing?

Oh yes. The example that still makes me laugh is when I said to the executive committee, “I build an Excel spreadsheet every summer, and I input everybody's day to day ship schedule”. Because we had agreed on having only one ship at one place, at one time in Antarctica. To make that happen, you have to have a mechanism. So I used to build Excel spreadsheets about where each of these ships was going. It was very laborious and eventually I thought, “This is ridiculous”. I’d been working closely with the US National Science Foundation, so I said, “Right, we’re going to sit together with computer programmers and design a program that will take into account every ship movement, every landing site that we can put into the data fields”. My executive committee responded that this was really stupid. So I said to them, “I'm doing this by hand. This is insane.” At that point we were monitoring 12 ships. I eventually won the committee over, and I computerised the entire organisation’s database with its members, as well as the ship scheduler, which I still think is probably IAATO’s greatest asset. It’s a way for the ships to make sure there are no conflicts in their timetables.

That’s an astonishing breakthrough.

Part of it was really about having the courage to say, “All right, these sites need certain management principles. You can walk here, but you can't walk there, and you've got to avoid this hill because there's nesting, or whatever. So we developed a whole series of site guidelines and operational procedures that took a lot of two-step dancing or negotiating with competitors, and now it's accepted as standard.

I’d like to move onto Shackleton because you were a pivotal figure in supporting the Shackleton Heritage Project, whose initiatives include saving the Stromness Manager’s Villa, the former whaling station that was key to his rescue of his men in 1916. How did you encounter him yourself, and what has it meant for you to work to preserve his memory?

Without doubt, his is one of the greatest heroic stories in polar exploration. There are a few others, but Shackleton's got the name that nobody else has. When you operate ships or any kind of tourist program in the polar regions – the Arctic as well – how do you prepare people for the jobs that they do when they're working in polar regions? How do you expect leadership qualities to come out of your team? I've always appreciated the fact that his name was up there, but he had one hell of a team, and he was brilliant at getting the best out of them. I first encountered him by reading [Alfred Lansing’s] Endurance. I was around 16 when I read it.

You’re the President of the Friends of South Georgia Island (FOSGI) and a Trustee for the South Georgia Heritage Trust. What led to the decision to restore the Stromness Manager’s Villa?

About three or four years ago, Barry [Lipman – an American philanthropist] called up FOSGI and said he was looking for a project to which he could make a donation. At that point, we had just finished our campaign to eradicate mice and rats [invasive species that were eating albatross eggs] from South Georgia. So we were wondering what to do next. It took about a year and a half to figure it out. But I called him back and said, “We want to restore the manager’s villas from the whaling station in South Georgia where Shackleton came and knocked on the door.” He asked what we needed. I took a deep breath and said, “A couple of million dollars”. His response was “That’s fine”. So thanks to him we've just finished it this season and restored it beautifully, and now he wants to see it. We’ve chartered a ship, and we’re leaving Uruguay early in November with Barry and his family. We’re taking other people, including Dan Snow who’s making a programme for his History Hit channel.

The fact is that you’ve overseen several projects in the region. Can you describe any others?

I’ve contributed to big changes in Southern Ocean conservation. FOSGI has supported a lot of the British Antarctic Survey whale research work, as well as RSPB albatross work across the whole of the Southern Ocean. We believe in a can-do attitude. If we need to go down to the Weddell Sea and hike to the South Pole that’s what we have to do. That’s one of the big lessons that I learned early on. I carry it through everything I do and it's hard sometimes.

You’ve talked about your rat and mouse eradication project. Have you documented the species that have thrived as a result?

We saved the South Georgia pipit and the South Georgia pintail from extinction and other birds, like the sheathbills, have increased in number. But we don't know precisely because no one's gone in and done a wildlife monitoring project since. We have a project within SGHT that's just in its infancy right now called WildCounts, in which we’re aiming to get a handle on the numbers for the petrels and other seabirds that live in the Southern Ocean. It was a bit daunting to start, but like everything, you do it in baby steps.

Are there any other projects that you would like to oversee?

I would like to find a really effective mechanism to create an entire ecological zone of thinking so that everyone travelling to the Southern Ocean is working to protect it. More than 100,000 tourists were travelling in Antarctica over the last season. I would like the strategy to include the ice, all the wildlife, and the island breeding sites. Then that could be used as a model educational package for other parts of the world. A few of us are starting a preliminary sort of conversation with Falklands Conservation as well as the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. We're asking what can we do together that would actually change the educational responsibility of everybody travelling in the polar regions? IAATO’s looking at some of that, but running a scheme like that and putting it into perpetuity takes a huge effort and a lot of collaboration between organisations like the Scientific Committee of Antarctic Research, and all the island groups, and other entities, but that’s the kind of thing we do.