When Carmen De Backer was a toddler, she would sit on the couch staring at photos of wildlife in the worn pages of National Geographic magazines her mom bought at the thrift store. She couldn’t read the articles so she would ask her older sisters to tell her about the wildlife in the photos.
That’s where her love for and curiosity about nature started.
Throughout grade school, she would revisit the magazines, reading the articles and looking at the photographs over and over. At about 7 years old, De Backer remembers watching a video about how polar bears and their environment were being impacted by a warming planet, their feet getting stuck in ice blocks and injuring the bears…