Look at this.
It's an ocean full
of whale sharks.
I can't even count
the number of fins.
Are we awake or are we...
are we still dreaming?
They've been living here
for millions of years.
We're newcomers in
their backyard.
I love being a part
of their world.
They're completely innocent
of anything humans do.
Since the oil spill, this
group of whale sharks,
the largest ever witnessed
in the Northern Gulf...
has not been seen there again.
Guess we'll put this little...
beast inside.
There you go. Thank you.
In the last few years, I'm on the road...
probably 300 days out of the lot.
And I give a lot of talks... some
days just from dawn to dusk.
I can't think of anything I'd rather
be doing... other than diving.
Aren't you a radical about
protecting the oceans?
If I seem like a radical, it may be
because I see things that others do not.
I think if others had the opportunity to
witness what I have seen in my lifetime,
what I see when I go diving
and the perspective that I've gained
from thousands of hours underwater,
I would not seem like
a radical at all.
She has seen with her own eyes,
parts of this Earth few
others could even imagine.
Sylvia Earle, this country's
foremost oceanographer,
exploring depths thought
impossible to reach.
It's a pleasure to
introduce a scientist,
an engineer, a teacher
and an explorer,
Dr. Sylvia Alice Earle.
I can see in my mind's eye...
a different world,
a world that's changed
enormously just in my lifetime.
Sixty years ago, when I
began exploring the ocean,
no one imagined that we could
do anything to harm it.
It seemed at that time
to be a sea of Eden.
But now, we're facing
paradise lost.
And this is not, "Woe is me,"
this is just the reality
of what's happening.
But it's also the reality, we
have a chance to fix things.
Please welcome Dr. Sylvia Earle.
On any given night,
Sylvia Earle can be found
in Norwalk, Connecticut,
or Stockholm, Sweden, or
Cape Town, South Africa.
Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle.
In Beijing, Belfast, Davos
or the Galapagos Islands.
Think of the changes
that have occurred
in the world in the lifetime of
a 200-year-old orange roughy.
But they don't know why
their world has changed.
And that's where I met her,
at a sort of ocean summit.
I'm a big scuba diver.
I love the oceans.
I love them more now
that I've met Sylvia,
but, um, it's also people like...
like you in this room
that can save the ocean.
The world's largest fishery was,
and still the largest
fishery in the US,
is Alaskan pollock, and it's
moving into the Arctic.
Bluefin are pursued
wherever they go.
It's really wiping bluefin
ecologically off the planet.
If we fail to take care of the ocean...
nothing else matters.
I've been diving for
over half my life now...
but that is nothing
compared to her.
She's been exploring the ocean
since before I was born.
Sylvia, that turtle was a trip!
- And she came back here.
- Yeah!
She went up, got a breath of air,
came right back to that same place.
I spent one week with
Sylvia and I was hooked.
- Gular flutter.
- Gular flutter.
How could I have not known
who she was before?
After the Galapagos trip,
I really didn't wanna
leave Sylvia's world.
So I didn't.
Is that her? Yeah, yeah.
That's her.
That's her. There she is.
Thank you!
What a beautiful place.
What I didn't realize
at the time...
was that this would be the beginning
of a three-year odyssey...
a chance to see the ocean and the
world through Sylvia's eyes.
Sylvia, the minute I met you,
you became an example for me.
Like, seriously.
Just take me back to how
you became so passionate
about the ocean.
Well, it all started
in New Jersey.
As a kid, I had complete freedom
to go play in the woods,
to spend all day out,
just fooling around.
On my own, often.
I mean, a lot of the
time, just on my own.
Left bank, I'm
waiting for someone
Someone to be my friend
My mother was known as the
bird lady of the neighborhood.
People would bring injured
squirrels, birds, frogs...
anything that needed help.
Without you...
My father, who was really so bright
and so capable of fixing things.
When I was a little kid, I'd try to take
things apart to see how they worked
and he always reminded me to save
all the pieces, don't lose any,
and be sure you know how to
put it back together again.
I can't hold the sun
We're losing a lot
of the parts...
the loss of the diversity
of life on Earth...
the bits and pieces have
just disappeared...
and we don't know how to put things
back together again once they're gone.
When I was 12, we picked
up and moved to Florida.
At first, I was not particularly charmed,
because I loved the other place so much.
But the Gulf of Mexico was
this great blue body of water
that created almost this mythic
place that lured my parents there.
Some kids play in the streets.
Some kids have a backyard
and my backyard was wet.
It was the Gulf of Mexico.
It was glorious.
That's where I first fell
in love with the ocean.
I could see it. I could hear it.
I could smell it.
I could touch it.
I could splash around in it.
I loved when seaweed came
ashore in huge amounts.
It was like going to the zoo.
I had fun finding these creatures...
like little crabs.
You could take them and then gently
put them back into the ocean,
and they'd scurry off.
It was just heaven for a kid...
for me.
It will always be that way in my
mind, it's just this paradise.
Happening now, an
explosion and fire
devastate a massive oil rig
off the Louisiana coast.
Last week's deadly
oil rig blowout
remains unchecked tonight.
And it's raising fears of an
environmental disaster in the making.
As long as the oil is flowing
down here in the Gulf,
this will simply keep growing
and growing and growing,
and they have no idea
where the end will be.
How'd you feel? What was
your first reaction?
It was shocking.
And it just got worse
as the news unfolded.
Of course, the tragedy was
the human lives lost.
Then this gush of oil wouldn't stop,
wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop!
When I was a child
living in Florida,
there was only one offshore oil
well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Today, there are more
than 33,000 drill sites.
All of us... we are the beneficiaries
of having burned through fossil fuels.
Coal, gas, oil.
But at what cost?
I really come to
speak for the ocean.
We put billions into what takes
us into the skies above...
and it's paying off handsomely.
We've neglected the ocean...
and it's costing us dearly.
The thing that's impressive
to me about Sylvia
is that she's not afraid
to point fingers...
and say, "You know what you're
doing, and it's wrong."
You know, she's kind of the
Joan of Arc of the oceans.
- Go!
- She's the one that's out in front
leading the charge in the
fight to save the ocean.
And she's made it her life's purpose
in the last couple of decades
to make sure everybody else understands
what's going on and why it's important.
It's life itself that the
ocean is delivering.
This is a turning point.
If we continue business as
usual, we're in real trouble.
Her passion for the ocean
comes from the fact that...
like myself and like many
of us who were young...
in a younger world
around the ocean,
we saw a place that was
more full of life.
It was... beyond frustrating.
It was agonizing.
Because I know what's
in the Gulf of Mexico.
I just could flash back to times when
I'd be diving in the Gulf of Mexico...
when it was a place...
an underwater paradise.
And to know that it was vulnerable, that
it could be right in the path of...
of this...
This avalanche.
It's just hard to express.
YOUR BOOK, THE WORLD IS BLUE: How
Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One.
That's a bold statement. My fate
and the ocean's are the same fate?
I don't live in the ocean.
I ain't got gills.
Why should I care about
what happens in the ocean?
It's deep, it's dark,
people drown in it
and it's full of sharks
who want to eat us.
Or don't you watch Shark Week?
Yeah, I watch. But think of
the world without an ocean.
You've got a planet
a lot like Mars.
No convenient life
support system.
Most of the oxygen that you
breathe, that everybody breathes,
is generated by the ocean.
And it absorbs much of
the carbon dioxide.
In a way, we're all
sea creatures.
Every whale, dolphin,
coral reef, whatever...
they obviously need the
ocean, but so do we.
No ocean, no life.
No ocean, no us.
So were you that geeky
girl in high school?
The science nerd?
I suppose, in today's terminology,
I would be regarded as a geek.
People sometimes have a hard time
figuring out what they want to do.
I always wanted to be whatever
it is that a scientist does,
I just didn't know
what to call it.
There's a little
library in Dunedin...
that I used to haunt.
I'd sit on the floor and that's where
I first saw a book by William Beebe,
and became entranced with
the idea of submarines.
His book, Half Mile Down, it
was published in the '30s...
described how he and Otis Barton
crawled into this little steel
ball with a tiny window in it,
and could look out and see what it was
like a half-mile beneath the surface.
What it's like in the deep sea
with these sparkling creatures
that illuminate the sea below
where light penetrates.
So, I never got to meet William Beebe,
but I regard him as a soul mate.
Jacques Cousteau was able to
vicariously, and sometimes directly,
get people in the water.
He got me in the water
by inspiring me to say,
"That's so cool! I wanna go!
I wanna see it!"
His Silent World made me
want to see what he saw.
To meet fish swimming in something other
than lemon slices and butter on a plate.
To actually go and witness
this vast blue realm.
Before the 1950s, diving had been
very risky and experimental...
until Cousteau invented
the Aqua-Lung,
and became one of the first
to use a Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus, SCUBA.
He showed how simple it could
be to explore the sea.
In the summer of 1953, I enrolled
in a class in marine biology.
My major professor
somehow managed
to get two of the very first
scuba sets that were available.
Come with me, my love
To the sea
The sea of love
I want to tell you
How much I love you
It seemed so improbable. You
can be underwater and breathe.
Come with me
Most of all, it was
the gift of time.
Be able to actually stay and watch
the creatures that were there.
And it made me want to always
go deeper, stay longer.
Was there that moment,
like in a movie,
if we were in a movie of Sylvia
Earle's life, like you're...
- The "Ah-ha" moment?
- Yeah, somebody puts...
You put the mask on and you're
seeing, and you're, like,
"Oh, my God, this is what I wanna
do with the rest of my life."
- Is that what happened?
- I already knew.
In the water, anyone
can be a ballerina.
You can stand on one finger.
You can do... back rolls.
You can look as if you are... the
most graceful creature in the world.
And along the way you see all this...
this galaxy of life.
You know, it's
just exhilarating.
If I can do it... you can do it.
I'm not Superwoman.
I'm not big and muscular.
My mother, at 81... put on a mask
and flippers and took on the ocean.
And then she would tell people,
"If you are 81, don't wait any longer.
Just do it."
Thousands of delighted visitors
are discovering the fun of a
Florida Gulf Coast holiday.
From the time I was a
child, seeing Florida,
what I thought was just
wonderful wilderness...
watching it change
before my eyes.
The Tampa Bay area
is one huge resort
with gleaming new
hotels and motels.
To watch Tampa Bay
getting dredged,
taking what was a marsh and then
putting a parking lot there,
putting a housing
development there.
Watching the Weeki Wachee
River as a witness,
this crystal river... that starts
with a spring like a morning glory.
You look down, you see this blue throat
that just seems to go into infinity,
and then it spills out into a
river that goes off into the Gulf
in this water that's so clear it looks
like there's no water there at all.
And then development along the edge,
just clouding that amazing water.
The trees were starting to
turn brown around the edge
and all the grass was dead.
It was...
that kind of
experience, a witness.
I saw the before.
I saw the after influence of what
we can do to the natural world.
The Gulf of Mexico is this
extraordinarily wonderful,
productive, magnificent place
that had the misfortune of being
right on top of a ton of oil,
and being the sewer for the people
of the United States of America.
Call it the price of progress.
For six decades, big agriculture
and industrial farming
have affected the Gulf of Mexico
from hundreds of miles away.
A little less than a third of all
the corn grown in the entire world
is grown in Iowa, Nebraska,
Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota.
That productivity is due to
the application of humongous
quantities of nitrogen fertilizer.
All that fertilizer runs off the land,
makes it into the Mississippi River,
comes down the river...
fuels extraordinary population
explosions of phytoplankton,
the stuff dies, it rots.
When something rots,
it uses up oxygen,
and then anything that is alive,
like crabs, little tiny fish,
they can't hightail it
out of there, they die.
They die from no oxygen.
Boom, that's the dead zone.
The Gulf of Mexico already hosts
one of the most notorious
dead zones on the planet.
The Deepwater Horizon spill
just made things a lot worse.
Around the world, hundreds of dead zones
have formed just in the past few decades.
So let's be honest.
You're 18. You're
very beautiful.
Aren't all your friends
going off, getting married?
And did that ever... No, you're
like work, all about work?
I'm not abnormal.
Of course I enjoyed
dating boys and so on.
But I wasn't
interested in anybody
who wasn't interested in
what I was interested in.
It's just very self-centered,
I suppose, but I just...
Football-schmootball. I mean "Who
cares about that?" I thought.
I was attracted to the
nerdy types, I suppose,
who loved talking about the stars,
about space, about animals,
or about diving.
So, you had this sort of
perfect, idyllic life
with this man you loved.
Jack Taylor and I got
married in 1957.
His first job was
as a park ranger,
and we moved from national
park to national park.
It was just a glorious
couple of years.
And he wanted to get his doctorate
and I wanted to get mine.
Then Elizabeth came along.
This is such ancient history.
Good heavens.
The '60s, the '70s
in all of history
really stands out as a time
of exceptional discovery.
This is the first
time an undersea boat
has ever had an undersea base.
We were exploring the ocean
aggressively for the first time,
and we were trying
to go to the moon.
Roger, the EVA is
progressing beautifully.
So it didn't matter which
direction you were going.
It was all great
because either way you were
going to a new and alien world.
As a young scientist, this spirit
of exploration was all around,
and I wanted to be a part of it.
And then came this opportunity
to go on the International
Indian Ocean Expedition in 1964.
The other side of the
world on a boat.
But it'd mean being away
from home for six weeks.
And my children were four and
two, Elizabeth and Richie.
I had never been west
of the Mississippi...
never been out of the
country before then.
And then I really went
out of the country.
Met the boat in Mombasa.
I was interviewed.
It was my first real
experience with the press.
They wanted to know,
"Why are you here?"
And somebody let it be known that I was
the only woman... and all these guys.
And the headline the next
day, Mombasa Daily Times...
- You did say seven-zero men?
- Seven-zero.
Oh, yeah. Big boat.
United States participation
in the biological program
began by converting the former
presidential yacht, Williamsburg,
to an oceanographic ship.
The purpose of the expedition
back in 1964 was... to explore.
"To explore." What a concept.
It was to document the nature
of what lived in the ocean.
No one had been to the
Seychelles diving.
No one had been to
Aldabra diving before.
No one had been to a little
island called Fungu Kizimkazi.
It was really amazing.
I think the biggest discovery
that we made in the International
Indian Ocean Expedition...
was the magnitude of how
much we didn't know.
During this cruise, a total
of 16,000 pounds of fish,
200 pounds of shrimp, nearly a ton
of swimming crabs were caught.
The sea at the time... seemed...
endless in its capacity to yield
whatever we wanted to take from it.
And whatever we wanted to
put into it, it was okay.
You'd dump things in the
ocean, deep-six things.
It was the way to get
rid of something.
It didn't clutter up our backyard,
our land, so it went into the ocean.
Our aquatic backyard.
I have yet to take a dive, even in
the deepest dive I've ever made,
and not see tangible
evidence of our presence...
to see trash, junk on the
bottom of the ocean,
two and a half miles down.
Things collect there and
just continue to gather.
So at the surface and even raining
down to the great depths below...
our signature is there.
It's not just dumping
waste and garbage.
Three, two, one...
Between 1950 and 1998,
there have been more than a
hundred nuclear test blasts.
Either underwater or on remote
islands in the middle of our oceans.
1964, when another
opportunity came
to go on the same ship,
but in a different ocean,
the southeastern Pacific,
I... had to say yes.
What about the kids? Were
you worried about them?
Well, for me, life has always been
a balancing act, if you will.
But it was particularly
true at that time.
I think, for me, the stress
was being apart from family,
and of course as a mom with kids... but
certainly with my husband as well.
And maybe it was inevitable.
We did come apart.
You don't think about it as,
"Well, I'm gonna be an explorer."
You just... You become curious
and you start to follow a path.
Then pretty soon that path
is leading you away...
from all the other
well-trod paths.
Then you start saying,
"Why am I doing this?
I'm risking every
relationship I ever had."
And then you start asking this question
that has no logical answer to it...
other than the fact that
there's something deeply woven
in the fiber of our
being as human beings,
that we just have to know
what's over the hill,
or around the corner or beyond
the edge of the lights.
1964, I was in
graduate school...
and working on a dissertation.
Gathering seaweeds from
the Gulf of Mexico.
I had a lab at home.
I began assembling records of what
kinds of plants live in the sea.
I came to understand the beauty and
the history and the importance
of these marine seaweeds.
And I haven't looked back. I
mean, they are the anchor.
Can I ask you a question?
When you say, "study seaweed,"
what does that mean,
studying seaweed, exactly?
What does that mean? Like you
pick up seaweed, you study it...
Yeah, and it's like
going to a place
that no one has ever looked
at what lives there before.
So you're an explorer basically.
You wanna find out
who lives there,
how many of what kind
of creatures are there.
Do they have names yet?
And if not... let's find a
name, let's make up a name.
I spent years
gathering seaweeds.
Ultimately, I gave my plant
collection to the Smithsonian.
There are about 20,000 specimens of
mine that have come to the Smithsonian.
There's another big batch at the
Farlow Herbarium in Harvard.
This is one of my favorites. I did
my dissertation on the brown algae.
- Brown algae.
- Brown algae.
This goes back to 1955.
Were you born then?
Uh, I was not born, thank you.
Here's another one. This is 1966.
That's down in Sarasota.
- This is the Gulf then.
- This is Gulf of Mexico, right.
Galapagos.
Oh, I have so many amazing
things from the Galapagos.
Now this is... Ha!
Oh, gosh.
I'd like to go back and see if
these things are still there.
I first got to see the
Galapagos Islands in 1966.
I was one of 12 scientists on this
big ship that enabled us to dive
for the first time
in places that no one had
been to underwater before.
It was an enchanted kingdom...
underwater.
It was the sharkiest
place I'd ever seen.
Look over the side, it looked
like somebody had taken
a box of those wooden matches and
just dropped them on the bottom,
and every match was a shark.
You could dive down among them.
Sharks just
Like this, serenely
going around you...
not paying any attention to you.
But at the time, people thought
sharks were the enemy.
The only good shark
is a dead shark.
Shark, tiger of the sea.
Of all sea terrors, the shark is
the meanest, the most crafty...
Uh-oh. That flashing
white belly,
that's no tuna, that's a shark.
Our rights to the fish are being disputed
by those savages of the ocean, the shark.
But, in fact, that
wasn't the real problem.
Sharks were never after humans.
Man or woman.
We're not on their menu.
But in today's world, millions of
us are taking bites out of sharks.
What's really tragic about it is they
don't even bother to keep the shark.
They just take the fins and throw
the shark back in the water...
essentially to die.
It's tens of millions
of shark fins
that are harvested every year
for soup, principally in China.
It essentially created an
enormous hole in the ecosystem
and the way the ecosystem works.
Shark finning is one of the
most barbaric examples
of what we're doing
to the ocean.
But it's not just what's happening
to the sharks that matter.
The bottom of the
ocean's food chain,
plankton, as well as plants
like algae and seaweed,
generate more than half
the oxygen we breathe.
In the Galapagos Islands, there
are some species that...
that are missing.
And there are new things that have
come in that didn't exist before.
If you don't have a record...
you might speculate,
you might guess...
- Right.
- ...but this is evidence.
- This is hard evidence.
- Beautiful evidence, too.
Brings back such great memories.
What was your second
husband's name?
Giles Mead.
Okay, so how did you meet Giles?
I met Giles Mead at a
scientific meeting about fish.
There is a society called the Association
of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.
That's a little weird, Sylvia.
I know.
They have annual meetings
and whoop it up and talk about fish
and snakes and lizards and things.
We met at this meeting and
just began talking...
and we continued talking...
and we were still talking
at 5:00 in the morning.
And we agreed that we should
continue the conversation.
Got married in Harvard
Chapel in December of '66.
Did he have kids, too?
Yes, he actually had
three children.
And then, in 1968, my younger
daughter, Gale, was born.
So we had his and hers and ours.
Wow. The Brady Bunch.
The most ambitious project
yet in ocean research
has just started here in the sheltered
bay of a beautiful West Indian island.
Called Tektite II, it's the underwater
base for a research project
being run by a group of
American universities
with United States
government backing.
When I was at Harvard in 1969, I saw
a notice on the bulletin board.
"How would you like, as a scientist,
to spend two weeks living underwater,
down in the Virgin Islands?" That was...
the pitch.
I'd already been diving a lot,
more than a thousand hours,
published a number of things,
and it didn't occur to me
that women need not apply.
And Jim Miller, head of the program, who
had to finally make the call, said,
"Well, half the fish are female,
half the dolphins, half the whales.
I guess we can put up
with a few women."
Now a team of divers will
attempt to live for two weeks
as quiet residents
on the sea floor.
Ironically, these aquanauts
are not men with extraordinary
physical endurance and stamina,
but five young and
attractive women.
The world's first
real live mermaids.
Their leader is a renowned scientist, Dr.
Sylvia Earle,
a marine botanist and
an experienced diver.
And so they settle down with
all the comforts of home...
TV, refrigerators, and
wall-to-wall carpeting.
You're warm and dry
while you're inside,
but you slip through a hole in the
floor and you're in the water.
And we could be in the water
10 to 12 hours a day.
I felt like a kid in a candy store
except that... everything was living.
You're outside
with the creatures
and you just get to know
them as individuals.
You actually see this
group of five angelfish
that are always there first
thing in the morning...
and they have different attitudes,
different personalities.
That's, I think,
what has given me
a different perspective
than most probably have.
Not just about the ocean, but about
the creatures who live there.
I went into the Tektite project
as an ivory tower scientist,
not really in the public eye.
But Tektite changed everything.
I...
Had to get out of my shell.
We had a parade down the
streets of Chicago.
Mayor Daley gave us
the keys to the city.
On To Tell The Truth, pick
out the real Sylvia Earle.
Sylvia Earle is number two.
American woman
Stay away from me
American woman
Listen what I say
Sylvia Earle was a pioneer...
invading the flannel shirt,
bearded oceanographer image.
There was a real sense that
women simply couldn't do this.
Well, they couldn't
pick up the tanks!
"You can't pick up
that equipment.
Here, let me help you with
your gear, little lady."
She really broke
through the barriers.
And for that, every woman scientist,
for example, should be very grateful.
Months later in California,
Tektite II, the Virgin Islands
and Greater Lameshur Bay
are just memories as Dr.
Earle, wife and mother,
plays with her daughter Elizabeth,
10, and her son Richie, 8.
For Dr. Earle and her husband, Dr.
Giles Mead,
Director of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Natural History,
Tektite II is a significant
milestone in reaching...
So you became sort of
famous after this.
I mean, you became a bit of
a public face for science.
And it was also great 'cause
you were not only smart,
but you were beautiful
and you made that okay.
Well, never occurred to
me that it wasn't okay.
What was tricky, let's say,
difficult, if anything,
was... trying to be a good
mom, trying to be a good wife,
trying to be good Mrs. Museum, Mrs.
Giles Mead,
trying to be presentable
at black tie parties,
trying to be good hostess,
trying to be good scientist.
It was... it was a tricky time.
But, I mean, it's life.
It's life.
And so... so you're in LA, and
how did it end with Giles?
Expedition to the
Comoro Islands in 1975.
A team was put together,
and Giles and I were to
be a part of this team.
We had our tickets, the
bags were packed...
and he said something had come up, that
he would meet me there, "Go ahead."
Time for his plane to arrive...
and the plane arrived,
but he wasn't on it.
I figured, "Well, he must've
been delayed somehow."
And... he was delayed.
He didn't come at all.
Being married to... a
very famous scientist,
who never understood
the glass ceiling
until, all of a sudden, she was better
than everybody where she worked.
That's really hard, you know?
I felt the pain
from time to time.
Wanting to do things that were
tough for me to do as a woman...
because I was a woman, and not
because I was a scientist.
You can think of a thousand excuses
why you can't do something.
The trick is... to not let that get
in the way of making things happen.
Numerous people have told me
that she's no June Cleaver.
Yeah, she's not sort
of the typical mom.
You don't really expect that
your mom's gonna come home with
a five-gallon bucket of algae
and recruit you out into the
garage to start laying it out
and show you the right way to label it
and, you know, these sorts of things.
Those aren't typical,
so, you know...
But it's what we always did.
As a kid, we were constantly being
yanked out of school mid-semester,
and we'd travel with her
kind of all over the place,
wherever she would happen to go.
We were able to get a
broader education that way,
even though it wasn't as
traditional as... as most.
When I came to the Caribbean as part
of the Tektite mission in 1970,
the reefs here
were full of life.
Today... those reefs are gone.
It's happening all
over the world.
About half the corals
are gone, globally,
from where they were
just a few decades ago.
The ocean is dying.
You're saying that the
oceans are in crisis.
Yes.
How so? What's... If they're
so big, if they're so huge...
'Cause they're the biggest thing
on Earth, right? The oceans?
We used to think there's
nothing that we could do
that could harm the ocean.
And we tried, right?
We tried pretty hard
to harm the ocean.
And it was frustrating us, so
we upped the ante a little bit.
There needs to be a
real rethinking.
Unless we just decide that
nature is gonna be a museum
in a few small places...
what we really have to address
is the problem of us.
The biggest threat is there
are far too many people
and our appetites
are out of control.
Not just our appetites for food,
our appetite for wood, our
appetites for fossil fuels.
The biggest problem is releasing
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
that drives these great
climate change events.
Starting in 1980, we began
to actually measure
the amount of ice deliberately correlated
with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
It tracks. It tracks like this.
The warming trends, CO2 in the
atmosphere, the melting in polar ice.
There's this cognitive link
that people just aren't making about
the role of ocean in climate.
They don't understand the ocean is
this great regulator of temperature,
of the movement of heat
around the planet.
What we're doing to the ocean, what
we're doing to the planet as a whole,
comes back to us
in bigger storms,
more powerful storms,
more frequent storms.
Nobody wants that to happen.
And if we don't want
that to happen...
we will make the connection between
what we're doing to the living ocean
and how that affects the predictability...
of our future.
Our relentless pursuit
for oil and gas,
for energy, continues to
wreak havoc on our oceans.
But ironically, it's
these same industries
that have led to breakthroughs
in underwater exploration.
There is a new tool in the sea.
It moves with the ponderous
rhythms of a mechanical monster.
But actually, it is
a new vehicle...
a personal submersible.
It can withstand water
pressure to 2,000 feet.
Normally, a diver making a
six-hour dive to that depth
would spend 20 days
in decompression.
A diver using JIM for
six hours at 2,000 feet
can surface, open the
hatch and walk away.
But now a new use for the
JIM suit is to be tested.
Dr. Sylvia Earle is
a marine biologist.
Great.
Her question...
"Can scientists use the JIM suit
for dives beyond 1,000 feet?"
If successful...
she will be the first woman to walk
the sea floor beyond 1,000 feet.
I've known Sylvia probably
30-some-odd years.
I think I first met Sylvia in Hawaii
when she was diving in the JIM suit.
I was working with Maui
divers at the time,
and so I just kind of hung around
and helped out where I could.
Ready? Yes.
Let me close you up.
The JIM suit was mounted on
the front of a little sub,
and the idea was that the sub and
Sylvia would descend together,
with the sub being
the safety mechanism
in case something went wrong
with Sylvia in the JIM suit.
Holokai, Holokai. We're
neutrally buoyant.
Sylvia is secured and the divers
are backing us off the LRT.
We are at 100 feet
and going down.
All systems go.
Roger that.
Coming up on 1,150, Sylvia.
How's your systems?
Systems fine. I'll
give you a check.
I see it! Oh! It's the bottom!
It's that thing that
explorers love to do,
which is to just get as far
away from humanity as they can.
In a way, ironically,
it puts you more in touch
with your own humanity.
Looking at a landscape
that hasn't changed in
billions of years...
you just feel the sense that
your lights only go so far,
everything out beyond the
lights is unexplored,
it's still unobserved.
So there's this almost egoless sense of...
of humility
before the vastness
of the unknown.
I had this great opportunity
for two-and-a-half hours
to walk around and explore
the ocean 1,250 feet down.
I asked them to turn off the lights so
we could have a completely dark ocean.
Except it wasn't
completely dark.
It was amazing.
The astronauts on the
moon, the first time,
they could just
look at each other.
I was surrounded by creatures.
Fish swimming by with little
lights down the side.
And there were thousands of
sparkles and flashes everywhere.
It was... I mean, I was...
just like a little kid.
And that must have been...
Was that scary?
No.
The scary part is always
getting on the highway...
...to drive to your submarine.
We say we want to go to the moon, and
10 years later, we're on the moon.
Why can't we say now,
"I wanna walk around
at 37,800 feet,
the bottom of the ocean,
seven miles down"?
And, "Let's do it."
The JIM suit really
fired in me...
the desire to do something
to make it easier,
not just for me, but for everyone,
to gain access to the sea
because only 5% of the ocean,
even today, has been seen.
Let alone mapped and explored.
And I began talking with an engineer who
was associated with that project...
and we got into a lively discussion
about those claws on the JIM suit
and I didn't realize he had
actually designed them.
I was so critical.
I insulted him.
"Oh, I thought I had
a good manipulator
and she says it's a stupid
piece of machinery."
And he went back to
England where he lived,
and what he came back with
was absolutely magnificent.
His name... Graham Hawkes, written...
with such dexterity and finesse
that he could have used
the manipulator arm
to sign a check that
would've cleared the bank.
I was... I was hooked.
It was on this project that she
met her husband, Graham Hawkes.
He is an engineer and inventor who
defected from the aerospace field
when he realized that the last frontier
was not space... but the deep ocean.
What I remember was
Sylvia saying,
"Why can't we go to the
bottom of the ocean?"
I'd spent, I think, five years getting
from 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet,
and here is Sylvia saying,
"I wanna go to 37,000 feet."
When Graham Hawkes and I
first began collaborating,
we wanted to go to
the deepest sea.
Well, I wanted to go anyway.
And then, I'm thinking...
"Lady, I can tell you all the
reasons why we can't do it."
And in the end, I knocked those
reasons down in my mind,
and I kind of thought
maybe we could.
So Sylvia inspired me.
That was the way that worked.
One thing led to another,
and a system called the
Deep Rover was born.
And it's a beautiful system
that I've had the joy of
taking to full 1,000 meters,
its full rated depth...
and a little bit more.
And until James Cameron
came along with his system
that went all the way booming down
to seven miles, 11 kilometers,
we had the deepest solo dives
that anyone had achieved.
You and Graham didn't have
any children, did you?
We had submarines.
Ten years later, parted ways...
but our interest in
actually accessing the sea
and developing new
technologies...
I mean, it burned
brightly in both of us.
Sylvia started designing
her own submarines.
A company she founded
designed the manipulator arm that
was on the Deepsea Challenger,
the sub that James Cameron used
for his record-setting dive.
Are you a little disappointed that
Jim didn't take you with him?
Of course I wanted to go...
but, alas, it's a
one-person system.
The arm is right here.
Here's your arm.
I love the fact that we
have better lights than...
Sylvia was ready to volunteer.
She said, "Fine, put me
through pilot training."
And the thing is, she's... you know...
she's not but this high.
So she's actually a better... a
better deep aquanaut than I am.
You know, she's more physically adapted,
and she pointed that out frequently.
"You know, I would be better
in that sub than you."
Tonight, I'd like to
introduce you to someone
who is way up at the top
of my most admired list.
She is Dr. Sylvia Earle.
In 1990, Sylvia Earle received
a presidential appointment
that, for her, was the
culmination of a life's work.
She became the chief
scientist for NOAA,
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA oversees the nation's
coastal waters and fisheries.
I loved the opportunity to be
at NOAA as the chief scientist.
I learned things there
that I... that I couldn't know...
from being a private citizen.
I had a chance to see things
that have changed my perception...
of what's actually going on.
I was right in the thick of the
big Persian Gulf oil spill.
I went over to the Persian Gulf
on nine different occasions
to try to make recommendations.
Sylvia Earle is just
back from assessing
the environmental damage
from the Gulf War.
The environment really was shattered,
air, land and sea. Of course, the...
You know, it's very rare
that you would have someone
who is a great scientist
who would also be...
a successful administrator
of an organization like that
because you need to be able to kick
political ass, have influence,
and control the unruly
bureaucracy of people
who come from God only knows
how many administrations,
who think they know the truth,
and they're gonna outlast you.
And so they're just
gonna stonewall.
I went to one meeting of
the fisheries council
and... and I was never
allowed to go again.
A document came across my
desk saying that in 20 years
bluefin tuna populations
in the North Atlantic
had declined by 90%.
I found that shocking.
And so, when I went to
this fisheries meeting
as Chief Scientist,
I raised the issue. What
are we doing to the tuna?
Because if we're trying
to exterminate them,
we're doing a great job.
We have to stop killing them.
Well, that wasn't
a popular view.
That's when they started calling
me The Sturgeon General.
I wasn't really permitted to speak about
the things that I knew the most about.
I feel that I must resign,
and as a private citizen,
do what I can do with more
flexibility, more freedom.
Well... Much as I value the experience...
it was stifling.
I never deliberately said anything as
Chief Scientist that I didn't believe,
but I was asked not to speak on occasions
because they knew what I would say.
On the outside, you're
free to go to places
that I couldn't go... as
a government official.
I can be free to speak my mind.
Not long after I left NOAA, I
was in the Tokyo fish market.
There's no place on the planet
where more fish are brought
from more places in the world
than in Tokyo.
Tons and tons of ocean wildlife
extracted and consumed
just... year after year
after year after year.
It's hard to imagine that
the ocean can continue.
And then I saw rows and
rows and rows... of tuna.
There must be a thousand
fish here or more.
- Giant bluefin.
- Yeah.
Oh...
Many of the tuna I saw back
then were just babies.
They hadn't even reached a point
where they could start to reproduce.
And that was in the 1990s.
It's gotten so much worse.
If you go to Tsukiji today...
the bluefin tuna being bought for
restaurants all over the world
are even smaller and younger.
We're fishing them to the
very edge of extinction.
But I don't have to
stop eating fish, do I?
Well, I have.
- You've stopped eating fish?
- I have, because...
'Cause you've been down
there under the ocean
and you've seen them do the
dirty business, and you...
- I know too much.
- That probably turns your stomach on it.
But... I...
We eat a lot of fish. Fish is
supposed to be the healthy food.
- That's the...
- I mean, how else am I supposed to
get my mercury?
If we... if we went off of the major
fish that we eat in the oceans,
what... what should we eat? I
mean, should we be eating...
We can't eat the cows, right?
We can't eat the pigs 'cause those
industrial farms hurt us, too.
What's left? Invertebrates?
You know?
We're gonna have to give them a new name
just to make us eat them, you know?
The way we called Patagonian toothfish
Chilean sea bass to get us to eat that.
Orange roughy, the... what
scientists call them, "slimeheads."
- Slimeheads?
- Mmm-hmm.
So we changed the name
to "orange roughy"
- and then we started eating them?
- That's right.
Why don't we start calling...
why don't we start calling
earthworms Appalachian yard trout?
- And then we'll just...
- I like it. I like it a lot.
...we'll start eating those
and it'll be all fine.
Fishing is one of the more important
occupations along the coast.
Strangely enough... the
most important catch
is not primarily a food fish...
but the fabulous menhaden.
An important marine
industry has been developed
based on the valuable oil
extracted from the menhaden.
Most people have never
heard of menhaden.
Menhaden used to be
unbelievably abundant
to the point that you
just couldn't see through
the schools of billions of fish.
And now these guys come in
and they suck up with their vacuum
cleaner vast amounts of menhaden.
For what? For chicken feed.
So that we can eat chicken
that tastes like fish.
We're so good at
killing menhaden,
so good at turning them
into fishmeal and fish oil.
My doctor tells me,
"Take Omega-3 pills.
They're very good for you."
So what do I do?
We don't have to kill fish
to get the omega oils
that we really value and
that are good for us.
We can get them from the
plants that the fish eat.
Fish don't make
those oils anyway.
You know, menhaden are really
quite extraordinary fish.
What they in fact act as is the...
the kidneys of the ocean.
They're cleaning up the water of
excess phytoplankton and detritus.
And then on top of that,
they are the base of the food chain
for bluefish and striped bass
and all of these fish that are
incredibly valuable, incredibly tasty.
And as menhaden have disappeared,
so have these very valuable fish.
Once the menhaden are gone,
the Chesapeake Bay will not
be the same intact ecosystem.
This is the face of industrial
fishing in the Chesapeake Bay.
Fleets of boats, spotter
planes, and huge nets
that capture entire schools of
fish in a matter of minutes.
Get 'em in there!
Get in there! All
the way in there!
You guys come on this side! Let's get...
let's get in there.
Back away! It's dangerous! Go away!
Get out of there!
- Here we go.
- Got it?
I've looked at any number of charts,
graphs... numbers on a page.
I've seen lots of photographs of
industrial fishing operations.
But to actually be in the
water with the fish...
It was surreal...
to see those little
fish captured
in a way that is unlike anything
in the history of the planet
until we came along.
For a moment... I felt as if...
a piece of me was being ripped
out of the ocean as well.
Overfishing, it's an
amazing phenomenon.
Who would've ever thought
that people would be able
to fish so efficiently and so
effectively and so strongly
that we would reduce the stocks of
these species that were present
by the billions
to the point of obliteration
or near-obliteration?
But we have done it systematically
with enormous success.
We've done it to Atlantic tuna.
We've done it to sharks.
We've done it to cod.
We've done it to halibut...
to anchovies, to
herring, to sardines.
We've done it to...
just about every damn thing
you would ever wanna eat.
Good job, Bryce.
We have this idea, we humans,
that the ocean is so big,
so vast, so resilient,
it doesn't matter
what we do to it.
That was... that was crazy.
Our ignorance
is really the biggest
problem that we now face.
We now can learn
from the past...
and as never before,
do something about it
before it's too late.
Sylvia has a wish
for the planet...
what she calls her Mission Blue.
And it's really very simple.
Protect the ocean in the same
way we now protect the land.
In 1872, the United States began
establishing a system of parks...
that some say is the best
idea America ever had.
About 12% of the land around
the world is now protected,
but only a fraction of 1% of the
ocean is fully protected globally.
How did you come up with
the idea for Hope Spots?
On the land,
people have recognized places
that are in good shape,
but they're under
threat as hot spots.
Hot spots.
And I said, "Well,
we need to do the same thing,
of course, for the ocean...
but why don't we call
them Hope Spots?"
Because, if we take
action, recovery,
we're at least making them better
than they otherwise would be...
Cause for hope.
She's just asking people
to do everything in their power to
preserve large portions of the ocean.
Not pin pricks, but large
portions of the ocean.
That's a reasonable wish.
The biggest thing we've done to
change the oceans to date...
is kill things that live there.
And if you can say, "In this place,
we're not going to do that,"
that's really worth doing.
You know, the Hope Spots
can't just be pretty places.
The Hope Spots have to be places
where the potential is identified,
the threats are identified...
and some kind of concrete
action is taken.
This is Cabo Pulmo, Mexico.
For more than a century, it was
a thriving fishing village...
and then the tourists came...
and then the sport fishermen...
and then the industrial fleet
with their long lines and nets.
By the 1980s, so much had been taken
from the surrounding water...
that nothing was left.
In 1997, the people who live
here took the ocean back.
Together they created a Hope Spot
70 square kilometers around,
making it completely off limits to
fishing and dumping and drilling.
Okay, come on, come on, come on.
Since the protected
zone was established,
Cabo Pulmo has replaced
fishing with ecotourism
and the community is thriving.
Well, how is it possible that
this is our first dive together?
- I don't know, but it's true.
- It is true.
It is absolutely true.
The idea of protecting the
ocean to bring back the fish
is an idea whose
time has come...
and it's beginning to
work all over the world.
A Hope Spot is a place that
gives you cause for hope.
It's a big chunk of the planet... or
it can be a relatively small place.
Like Cabo Pulmo...
where... conscious
efforts have shown that
if you make an investment...
care for a place...
it can recover and be
a symbol for hope.
Bueno?
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
I think I wanna be a jack.
- You what?
- I think I want to be a jack.
You wanna be a jack?
Every place, even the small
places, make a difference.
But we need to scale up.
We need to think big.
Sylvia has invited me to join her
on a mission to Australia...
already home to one of the
largest Hope Spots in the world.
She's here to campaign for
one that's even bigger.
Whilst we were running this campaign, the
Global Census of Marine Life came out,
and it showed that Australia
had more marine diversity,
more marine species than any
other country in the world.
Like, 95% are just found there
and nowhere else on the planet.
Yeah, I was gonna say that.
- That's amazing!
- Yeah.
Sylvia wanted to
take me to a place
she'd been before
in the Coral Sea...
more than 100 miles out
into the open ocean.
Australia is a leader in terms of
establishing protection for the sea,
starting in the mid-1970s
with the establishment
of the Great Barrier Reef
Marine Park Authority...
and more recently, a
designation of the Coral Sea,
a large area that basically
hugs the Great Barrier Reef.
My first glimpse of the
Coral Sea underwater
was in the 1970s.
It was really pristine,
in the sense that little fishing had
taken place there at that time.
There are still large
areas of the Coral Sea
that are untouched
and unspoiled.
But making it a no
catch, no dump zone
is the kind of insurance that
is needed to keep it that way.
- Looks beautiful though, huh?
- Sure does.
You can kind of tell
why nobody's out here.
It's so far.
We've come out all this way
and all we find are ruins.
The place Sylvia remembered
so vividly is gone.
I am driven by what I know...
by the reality...
as a scientist looking...
at the evidence...
that my species, the world
I know, the world I love,
is in trouble.
People I know and love... may not
realize how much trouble we're in.
- So that's the Coral Sea, huh?
- Yeah.
- Lot of dead coral, though.
- Yeah.
- Still not many fish.
- No.
Not one shark. Not even one.
- Not one shark.
- No barracuda.
We were hoping for the
schooling barracuda here.
No fish. I mean...
You... you were
expecting more, right?
Oh, heavens yes. Hoping for it.
Just never thought, way out
here, we'd have no fish.
No.
Do you think it was bleaching
and just the world of...
The world is changing.
Half the coral reefs
around the world are gone.
So we're lucky to see
what we did see.
Wow.
Coral reef is like a city.
It's not just the buildings.
New York needs its taxi drivers.
It needs its doctors.
It needs the teachers.
It needs all the pieces that
make the system function.
The corals need the fish.
The fish need the coral.
You take the fish
away, the corals die.
You take the corals
away, the fish die.
We can do things to the ocean.
We will do things.
But first we ought
to think about
how can we use the ocean
and not use it up.
So, Syl, the corals just didn't
look good or they... they were...
No, the living stuff
was mostly young.
Nothing old that...
Well, the reef... the
reef here were big.
Coral's what you expect
to see in the Coral Sea.
And we're in the
middle of nowhere.
- That's what's so...
- I know this is...
- We're in the middle of everywhere?
- Middle of everywhere.
- Okay.
- Okay.
- Thanks, Sylvia.
- Yeah.
Sylvia, I honestly have
never met anyone like you.
Your energy, your
tenacity, your passion...
It's... It's inspiring.
Do you ever have that moment
where you say to yourself,
"I'm not gonna do it today. I'm
gonna just take the day off"?
If you saw a child
falling out of a
10-story window,
and you have the ability to
reach out and catch him,
you do everything you can to
position yourself to catch him.
You don't take a break and say,
"Oh... while the child is
falling out of the sky,
I'm gonna go over..."
No, you're there 24/7.
You're there every... with every
ounce of what you've got.
You want to save that child.
Looking up from underneath
Fractured moonlight
on the sea
Reflections still
look the same to me
As before I went under
And it's peaceful
in the deep
Cathedral where you
cannot breathe
No need to pray,
no need to speak
Now I am under all
We're not out of the game yet.
We could still win this thing if
we were able to turn it around.
We've just got to get out there
and make the public aware
of what's happening
and make them care about
what's happening.
We've got to really rewire
the way human beings look at
our relationship to nature.
And the arms of the ocean
Are carrying me
And all this devotion
Was rushing out of me
In the crushes of heaven
For a sinner like me
But the arms of the
ocean delivered me
In the same way that
humans have the ability
to consciously shift the balance
of the Earth, which we've done,
we also have the capacity and
capability of stopping it.
We can shift it. We have to.
It just... It has to happen.
What we have on Earth
is all we'll ever have.
We need to remember that.
The sad fact of it is that...
the ocean could be empty and
it would still look the same.
It's a very hard thing to
convey what's happening,
how it will affect
you personally.
And so as the ocean is being
emptied, and as the ocean is dying,
the surface looks the same,
the waves look the same.
If I could be born
anywhere in time,
it would be now.
It would be now because this is the
time, as never before, that we know.
We understand what we
didn't know 50 years ago.
If we wait another 50 years...
opportunities we now have will be gone.
This is the moment.
Our decisions, our actions will
shape everything that follows.
How much do I love you?
I'll tell you no lie
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?
How many times a day
Do I think of you?
How many roses
Are sprinkled,
sprinkled with dew?
How far would I travel
To be where you are?
How far is the journey
From here to a star?
And if I ever lost you
How much would I cry?
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?
And if I ever lost you
How much would I cry?
How deep is the ocean?
How high
Is the sky?
How high is the sky?