TED Radio Hour - Our oceans are in danger ... but it's not too late.

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

For centuries, humans have relied on the oceans for resources and food... but even the deepest sea has its limits. This hour, TED speakers discuss how we can save our seas to save our planet. Guests include marine biologists Asha de Vos, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and Alasdair Harris, and oceanographer Sylvia Earle. Original broadcast date: June 25, 2021.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From Ted and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and this week we are diving back into the sea for part two of our ocean series. And I want to start with the biggest underwater creature there is, the whale. Which, despite its size, can be really hard to spot. They're huge, but they live in this giant, gigantic space, 70% of our planet, right? So you just stand and stare out of the horizon and you hope that an animal turn up. This is marine biologist Asha DeVos.

And before she ever had a chance to see a whale, Asha fell in love with how they sound back in college. I did a project on sperm whales and their acoustics. And I was listening to this cacophony. and I was just like, you know, this world sounds so remarkable. These are the clicking sounds that sperm whales make. So spermers are the largest tooth whales, and so when we listen to them,

they just have these beautiful patterns, series of clicks that they use for communicating with each other, for finding their food and stuff like that. And this is a humpback whale. They have the most complex songs. They're super beautiful. They evolve. I mean, it's quite magical.

But Asha says whale songs are more than beautiful. They help whales locate to find food and navigate their environment. Their eyesight isn't very good. And so their world really depends so heavily on their ability to hear. And, of course, to communicate with each other. Like mothers probably reprimanding their babies. Partners looking for mates, right? calling out, hey, beautiful, there's a response.

They have to talk to each other. How else are we going to have more whales in our future? Asha grew to love whales even more when she finally had the chance to observe them up close. It all began with an encounter with six blue whales and a floating pile of whale poop off the southeast coast of Sri Lanka. And that's literally my eureka moment.

Because Asha says whale poop, yes, whale poop, is pretty spectacular. Oh my goodness. It is the most beautiful animal poop ever. Wait, what is so beautiful about whale poop? It's bright red. Literally, it's like brick red in color, and that's because these whales feed on shrimp.

So one thing is it's really easy to find for researchers like myself who think whale poop is the bees' knees. But, you know, it is like, poop is a clue to, the secret world, right? Like, it allows us to learn more about what they feed on. But it's also incredibly important for our environment.

Here's Asha DeVos on the TED stage. As whales dive to the depth to feed and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually release these enormous fecal plumes. This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters, where they stimulate the growth of phyto-plank.

that forms the base of all marine food chains. So really having more whales in the ocean's pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem. Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals. As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it. But what's really cool is that they're also really important after their death. whale carcasses provide a feast to some 400-odd species,

including the eel-shaped slime-producing hagfish. Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon, which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans, and therefore help to delay global warming. So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographical distribution of these whale falls and as a result probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized

and dependent on these carcasses for their survival. You know, I don't think I ever realized how important whales are to all the life cycle. that are taking place in the ocean. And it sort of sounds like 200 years ago, that was the ideal. Like the ecosystems were thriving. Whales are pooping. They're dying in exactly the right places. And life in the ocean is flourishing.

Then, of course, we humans come along and we kind of screw everything up. Yeah. So we basically reduced populations of whales by, you know, down to maybe like to, 10 to 20% of prevailing numbers, right? Which is a huge blow because these are gigantic animals that, as you can tell, have many roles to play in the oceans, right? And these things are so deeply interconnected that, you know, it's almost like a game of Jenga.

You take a piece out and take another piece out and starts to wobble. And you take that third piece out and all collapses because everything's so deeply intertwined. Right. So you think about that drastic impact that. we had over those, you know, years of whaling and the long-lasting impacts, and we're still trying to recover from that. Over centuries, humans have treated the ocean as a place of endless resources. Now, between overfishing, carbon emissions, pollution, and more, our oceans are in trouble.

But it's not too late. And so today on the show, Saving Our Seas, an SOS. from the ocean. From our small individual actions to big community efforts, what we can all do to stop the destruction of our underwater ecosystems. And why conservation isn't just about saving marine life, but also saving our planet. This isn't the first time that we've tried to save the ocean and the whales. In the 70s, the Save the Whales movement became one of the most successful conservation campaigns ever. Mainstream culture fell in love with whales. There were bumper stickers, t-shirts, flyers, petitions,

and even entire albums like Roger Payne's Songs of the Humpback Whale. That concerted effort, those voices really made a difference because as a result, there were, you know, it was a domino effect. The International Whaling Commission moved forward and put down this moratorium to stop whaling. And so it was a time of change. And the whales that are coming back today, that's all thanks to the work that was done a few decades ago by people coming together and saying, this is not going to work. We have to protect our whales. Let's save the whales. So the Save the Whales movement really worked for stopping commercial whaling worldwide.

But whales are still facing a lot of issues today. First, ship strikes. All across the world, we have these massive shipping highways transporting goods throughout the world. And these shipping lanes often overlap with really important areas for these whales, like their feeding grounds, for example. And so they can actually hit them, and it can be lethal, and these animals can die. Another problem, fishing nets. If they get entangled at depth, they can't come up to the surface to breathe, so they drown. And as mammals, they do have to come to the surface to breathe. And if they get entangled at the surface, they can't dive down to the depths to feed so then they can stop. And finally, something we hardly ever think about in the ocean, sound pollution.

Now, in areas where you have heavy ship traffic, for example, what can happen, especially with species like blue whales, is that the sound there, the vocalization that they create is at the same frequency as noise created by the ship. So it's like being in a cocktail party, for example. Everyone's talking at the same time and you know someone said your name but you don't know where that sound is coming from. You know, it's just a murmur of sound. And so for whales, if everything's at the same frequency, if I'm talking to you and someone's also talking across us at the same volume, at the same frequency, then I can't hear you. So how do I find my mate? But it also must be like pretty exhausting for these animals to have noise constantly bombarding them day in and day out.

Yeah, you know, I think it is incredibly stressful. And there's this, I think a beautiful study that was actually done off the east coast of the U.S. And they were looking at stress hormones in whale poop samples, right? And so when 9-11 happened, they looked at the samples. And very surprisingly, they found that the whales were less stress soon after 9-11. Wow. Exactly, right? So they stopped the shipping in the Bay of Fundy for a short period of time. Ship noise dropped.

And that was reflected in the stress levels of these whales, right? So we don't think about that. And stress is, you know, it's a silent killer, right? Like it can impact reproductive capabilities. It can affect mother calf pairs, right? If there's too much noise, the mother and calf maybe can't communicate. What if they get separated, right?

There's a lot of knock-on effects as a result as well. Okay, so someone listening is like, all right, I get it. The ocean is interconnected. And whales, they affect so many other creatures. And clearly humans have a big impact too. But what if that person listening is like, I don't even live near an ocean. What can I possibly do?

Yeah. So, you know, I always. tell people, you know, we always say all roads lead to Rome. I always say all waterways lead to the ocean. If you live anywhere, there's typically some water source, whether it's a tiny spring or the water in your tap or a big lake or a river, everything that goes in there washes out into the ocean, right? And so we are connected. I think we can all make a difference. I think we can all start to think about our individual lives, our individual capacities, our consumer habits, right? Like what plastics are we using? Where are we dumping it? But also just simple things like

sharing the stories, right? You know, we talk so much about the conservation issues which create apathy, right? But I want people to talk about the conservation wins. I want people to talk about that magic about how beautiful blue whale poop is, right? How amazing their sounds are. and the fact that that's how they see their world. I want people to remember that there's a lot of amazing things that happen out there, and that ocean does truly, truly keep us alive. That's marine biologist Asha DeVos. You can find her full talk at TED.com.

On the show today, an SOS from the ocean. I'm Manus Zameroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Before we get back to the show, I want to ask you to please consider becoming a member of TED Radio Hour Plus. You'll get extra advice, stories, and expertise from TED speakers every other week and no ads ever. And you'll be supporting public radio. Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED. Or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts.

app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And today on the show, ways that we can help save our oceans and the fish that swim in them. We need to change our relationship with the ocean. Our expectation that we will have heaps of fresh fish in the supermarket of whatever species we desire every day of the year is, completely out of sync with what nature can provide. This is Ianna Elizabeth Johnson.

She's a marine biologist and also a policy analyst, a researcher, an inventor, a podcaster, all in an effort to teach us how we can save the oceans. And Iona says globally, we have caught about 90% of large fish. Tuna, salmon, shark, swordfish, they're all in trouble. But what does that mean then for us? when we go to the supermarket. What else is we got here? They've got sock-eye salmon.

It does not specify. Because knowing what's okay to buy can be confusing, even when you're trying your best. Uh-huh. Oh, okay, so the snappers rated yellow. Because the snapper's rated yellow. Because it's rated yellow doesn't really mean it's bad. It means that it may be some concerns are harm.

Some stores have a green, yellow, and red color-coded system. And when you say some concerns are harm, What do you mean? But can we be really sure that green is sustainable? Wait a minute. They say they're rated, but then it doesn't say what they are. There are also terms like all natural or responsibly farmed. There's Branzini farm raised, and it says it's responsibly farmed.

And then there is sustainably caught. Um, I think that's good. Sustainable does not have a legal definition. Gotcha. Responsibly and sustainably, like these, these are not. words that have clear standards or verification processes or oversight. It's something like 20% of seafood is mislabeled in grocery stores. And so when you say mislabeled, do you mean like exaggerating the sustainability?

I mean, it's not even the species that they say it is. Oh. You mislabel seafood for profit. So you label it as whatever will get you the highest price. or whatever you have a quota for. And it varies depending on the species up to like 40 or even 50% for things like snapper and seabas. And like if it's not even the right species, like are the other labels correct?

So if the consumer does, you know, do your darnest to do your research and pick things that are sustainable, there's still a big chance that you would get it wrong through really no, fault of your own. But like, why is that? Why make it so hard for the consumer? The supply chain is so opaque and there are so many steps in it. And we really often don't know where our seafood is coming from. And about 80% of the seafood that we eat in the U.S. is imported. 80%. It's coming from all over the world. And also about one in four of the fish that we eat here, we're actually caught in the U.S. and probably sent overseas to Asia or other places to be processed and then re-imported. It's not really what we think about when we think about commodities trading or important export,

but it really is. And Diana says to keep up this complicated supply chain, industrial fishing vessels have to hunt fish by the thousands. There are these massive fishing vessels that have like full processing factors. on board. Often they're staying at sea for months, if not years. Often the labor conditions are abysmal. And often fishing with nets the size of multiple football fields or lines with hundreds, if not thousands of hooks on them. So we're talking about like a massive industry, not like acute fishing trip. And that means using pretty sophisticated tools to track down the dwindling fish

populations. You have sonar. You have helicopters and spotter planes because we've overfished to such an extent that we have to use the most advanced technology we have available to us in order to find the fish. And the shrimp industry uses some of the most harmful methods. Shrimp is the most popular seafood in the United States and it's one of the least sustainable. Often like 10% or less of what they catch is shrimp and the rest is. thrown back dead. And it's not just wild caught shrimp. Farm shrimp often destroys mangroves and other coastal habitats, usually in Southeast Asia, which makes those areas more prone to storms. They use a lot of pesticides and antibiotics. Worker exploitation is a huge problem. So I would say, if you're looking for

just like a few things to cut out, give up shrimp unless you know that it's like, you know, trap caught pink shrimp from Oregon because those fisheries are sustainable and like really deliberate. Okay. So for most shrimp, farmed and wild are both bad. So maybe just don't eat it. But for other fish, is farmed better than wild? I mean, the answer is unfortunately it depends. We need to think about the farmed fish, what are they eating? We're catching wild fish, small ones, to feed to farmed fish that are. would be bigger ones. Eating farmed carnivorous fish doesn't really make sense, right?

Like, if we think about agriculture on land, would we farm lions? Would we think that that is sustainable? Like, that is essentially what we're doing when we think about farming tuna or salmon. These are magnificent fish, which are quite high up the food chain. Okay. So then, Ianna, what would be your ideal shopping trip? Like, you'd avoid the shrimp, wild or farmed. You would avoid the bigger fish.

But then what would you eat? I think the first thing I should say is, as opposed to choosing fish from anywhere in the world where you have no idea, eating U.S. caught or locally caught seafood is a really good start. I personally support Ilyamna fish company, this indigenous Alaskan family that fishes for salmon in Bristol Bay, which is sustainable. Eating lower on the food chain is another really important thing, right? Instead of eating these top predators like tunas, we could be eating sardines and anchovies. That will be more sustainable. Eating farmed shellfish, eating farmed seaweed. That is something you can feel comfortable eating as much as you want.

So, you know, enjoy. I think it would be best for me to buy the small stuff, right? like anchovies. I love anchovies. And sardines. They're a little too stinky for me, but if I want to stop eating like tuna steak, I've got to find something else that's delicious.

Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist. You can find all her talks at ted.com. And please check out her podcast, How to Save a Planet. On the show today, an SOS from the ocean. And Ayanna's recommendations are mainly for people living in developed wealthier countries, not for island and coastal nations that depend on the ocean for their food and their livelihoods. Like Madagascar. Madagascar's the epicenter of global biodiversity.

It's one of the hottest of the hot global biodiversity. hot spots. It's vast. There are very few roads. This is Alistair Harris. He's a marine biologist who spent most of his career on the southern coast of the country. And when there are no roads, of course, people are really, really dependent on natural resources for food, for income, for identity. The Vezu people of southern Madagascar believed that they came from the union of a mermaid called Ampelamaninisa and an official. and that accounts for their knowledge of the tides and the seas and why they're such staggeringly good fishermen. Malagasy seafarers will sail vessels with no lights, no sounders, no engines, no GPS. They'll navigate the most complex barrier and fringing reef systems with austral swells and incredibly dangerous tides,

blindfolded almost, except for the stars and night time. So when we talk about helping fishermen and women, often it's not a question of finding something else to do. Fishing is what they do. Fishing is how they define themselves. It's their identity. Over the years, threats like industrial fishing and climate change jeopardize that identity. Reefs, once teeming with marine life, were on the verge of collapsing. So in 1998, Alistaira Harris arrived, an eager young marine biologist with a big idea to save both the reefs and traditional fishing practices. Alistair continues his story from the TED stage.

I first landed on the island of Madagascar two decades ago. On a mission to document its marine natural history, I was mesmerized by the coral reefs I explored, and certain I knew how to protect them, because science provided all the answers. Close areas of the reef permanently. Coastal fishes simply needed to fish less. I approached elders in the village of Andavadok.

and recommended that they close off the healthiest and most diverse coral reefs to all forms of fishing, to form a refuge to help stocks recover, because, as the science tells us, after five or so years, fish populations inside those refuges would be much bigger, replenishing the fished areas outside, making everybody better off. That conversation didn't go so well. We were laughed out of the room. Were you literally laughed out of the room? It was considered love. Yeah. Of course it was utterly naive. And it bore no account of the economic reality that they faced, which is fishing from one day to the next or what those people would do while we're waiting for those stocks to recover.

Okay. So here you come, Englishman, going to the elders of these fishing communities with your grand plans. And just to be clear, like, what exactly were you suggesting? Well, we know that when we safeguard and set aside certain areas of ocean, perhaps 10, 20, 30 percent of the ocean within what we call a refuge, a marine reserve, a protected area, amazing things can happen. The life that's closed off within that reserve will grow, it will reproduce, it will eventually start to throw out much bigger fish, juveniles, larvae, into the more fished areas outside and help regenerate those areas as well as rebuild those fisheries. So my initial idea was to work with communities to zone off areas of these reefs as these permanent marine reserves. But of course, the hubris involved in this. The hubris involved in a 20-year-old going to Madagascar with a view to doing something about coral reef conservation beggars belief. I appreciate that.

So they didn't go for the idea because you didn't really consider their day-to-day reality. Like even if it was a great idea, they have to feed their families like today, right? Did their situation surprise you? The scale of it, the scale of it was very shocking to me. And seeing children in fishing communities go hungry at the same time as foreign industrial boats are fishing with impunity offshore. And this is going on around coasts like Madagascar and low-income tropical coastal developing states year in, year out. Okay, so you have this initial setback, a bit of humiliation. But then you come up with a new idea.

Well, not exactly a new idea, really more a new framing, right? Absolutely. That initial rejection taught me that conservation is at its core a journey in listening, deeply. To understand the pressures and realities that communities face through their dependence on nature, this idea grew into an organization that brought a new approach to ocean conservation by working to rebuild fisheries with coastal communities. then, as now, the work started by listening, and what we learned astonished us. Back in the dry south of Madagascar, we learned that one species was immensely important for villages, this remarkable octopus.

The day octopus, octopus, cyanea, it's called a hugely charismatic species, but it's a very lucrative fishery, particularly for women in these coastal communities. And it grows exponentially once it's settled on the coral reef. And so we went back with another proposal, which was how, how? How about we just start with maybe 10% of the fishing ground, but only for one species and only for six months? We think you're going to see some pretty explosive results. The community thought so too, opting to close a small area of reef to octopus fishing temporarily, using a customary social code, invoking blessings from the ancestors to prevent poaching. When that reef reopened to fishing six months later,

none of us were prepared for what happened next. Catches soared, with men and women landing more and bigger octopus than anyone had seen for years. Neighboring villages saw the fishing boom and drew up their own closures, spreading the model virally along hundreds of miles of coastline. When we ran the numbers, we saw that these communities among the poorest on earth had found a way to dine, their money in a matter of months by fishing less.

One closure became three closures and then five. And fast forward and we've seen hundreds and hundreds along thousands of kilometres of coastline. And we've studied the impacts of these closures. And they've led to really important and significant increases in catches, more and larger animals, that mean higher incomes for these communities. So it's been a real fisheries management success entirely from the bottom up. And it's gone to about a dozen countries now. So these closures then, is this the way forward for conservation in these fishing communities?

Well, that in and of itself is not necessarily a conservation effort. That's just focusing on those target fisheries. But I guess you could liken it to a catalyst that has enabled us to then revisit those first conversations about, well, how about we close off those areas now, now that we know what can happen? So is it kind of like bridging the needs and the rights of the local people with the desires of the scientists and conservationists? That's a really good question. I guess we're trying to address what we might call conservation's people problem. So the world I work in has an ugly history of conflict and human rights abuses, which have often set people and conservation against one another.

Now, of course that's really not okay, but it's also a massive paradox because fishermen and women and conservationists really want the same thing, a healthy and diverse ocean. The real magic went beyond profit. Leaders from Andavadok joined force with two dozen neighboring communities to establish a vast conservation area along dozens of miles of coastline. They outlawed fishing with poison and mosquito nets. and set aside permanent refuges around threatened coral reefs and mangroves,

including, to my astonishment, those same sites that I'd flagged just two years earlier when my evangelism for marine protection was so roundly rejected. They created a community-led, protected area, a democratic system for local marine governance that was totally unimaginable just a few years earlier. And they didn't stop there. Within five years, they'd secured legal rights,

from the state to manage over 200 square miles of ocean, eliminating destructive industrial trawlers from the waters. So I guess to go back to your original hope, Alistair, when you first arrived in southern Madagascar, in addition to better fishing, are the reefs also healing? Well, we've helped those fishermen monitor those sites with scuba, and every year the reefs are getting healthier.

the resident biomass, the sheer quantity of fish in the water has got greater. And it's become a really important scientific reference site that's demonstrating the power of locally led marine conservation, not just for fisheries, but now also for that broader objective of ecosystem conservation. But we've got to a place that we could never have got to had we not put the interests of those communities first. That's Alistair Harris. Marine biologist and the executive director of Blue Ventures. You can learn more at blueventures.org, and you can watch his full talk at ted.com.

On the show today, an SOS from the ocean. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anush Zamoroti. And we want to end our series on the ocean with a look back at how much our understanding about oceans has changed over the last century, through the eyes of a legend. As a three-year-old, I got knocked over by a wave, and life in the ocean has held my attention ever since.

This is oceanographer Sylvia Earle. I'm a national geographic explorer and founder of Mission Blue. Now, Dr. Earle, can I call you Sylvia or should I call you? your deepness, as you have been referred to over the years. You can call me whatever you like. I've been called a lot of things over the years. Sylvia is 85 years old now, and what we've learned over the past six decades or so

about our oceans is in part thanks to her. I remember a day when I was able to go in the ocean with someone who knows as much as anybody in the world about what's underwater in our world. Her name is Sylvia Earle. As a scholar, she went on scientific expeditions all over the globe. She was usually the only woman on board a team documenting sea life, some of which is now extinct. In the 60s, space travel was all the rage, but Sylvia got people excited about exploring the mysteries of the deepest oceans.

And in the 1970s, she lived in an underwater. lab studying coral reefs. Now a team of divers will attempt to live for two weeks. While leading an all-female team. Shocking, I know. Ironically, these aquanauts are not men, but five young and attractive women. The world's first real-life mermaids. Then, in 1979,

there is a new tool in the sea. Sylvia helped design and test a special pressurized. underwater suit. If successful, she will be the first woman to walk the seafloor beyond 1,000 feet. She set that record. Then, later, led Noah, the government agency tasked with protecting the ocean. In 1990, Sylvia Earle received a presidential appointment that for her was the culmination of a life's work.

Sylvia received numerous titles and honorary degrees, including the million-dollar TED Prize in 2009. In short, Sylvia Earle is a pioneer who has no plans to stop advocating on behalf of the ocean or stop exploring. I'm still breathing. I'm still diving. Come on. Are you still going in submarines? Why not? It's like getting into a car, for heaven's sakes. It's just... All right, so Sylvia, tell me about how you first got so curious about the ocean and marine life. You can, you can grew up in Florida, right, and you spent a lot of time exploring the beach. For me, it was an adventure every day after school to be able to get out and wade in these sea grasses and sea urchins to find little sea horses about half the length of my little

finger. They're pygmy seahorses they're known as. And I saw creatures like sea hares that used to crawl around in those meadows and as scallops you could walk out and see these blue-eyed scallops just pulsing around when they like are jet propelled when they close the two halves of their shells they would just be such an exciting adventure and occasionally to find a little octopus was such a joy and it sounds like you let that joy and all the questions that you had about these creatures, you let them kind of propel you academically because you knew you wanted to be a scientist.

I just kept making choices along the way that would lead me in that direction. All the science classes I could take, but not all the classes had answers. I had to go see for myself and find books that would answer some of the questions, but the books weren't always enough. I asked questions the books couldn't answer.

Well, so you stuck with it and you ended up getting your Ph.D. in botany, specifically aquatic plants and algae. And I love the story about how in 1964 you jumped at an invitation to work on a scientific expedition to the Indian Ocean. And you were the only woman on the boat. Their headline in the Mombasa Daily Times that next day came out, Sylvia sails away with 70, but she expects no problems. And actually, the only problem that any of us really had was, here we are, a little boat on the surface of the ocean. And our job, our goal was to explore the ocean.

How do you do that from the top of the, and the ocean is beneath you? Well, we were lucky. We had some of the first scuba tanks in an air compressor on board, and we were the first to actually use it. scuba to explore some of these legendary places like al-dabra, parts of the Seychelles, little islands that some were not populated by humans. And we went in the water and the fish were seeing humans probably for the first time, face-to-face, the way fish see fish.

So you were one of the first humans to ever go scuba diving. you were also one of the first humans to live in an underwater habitat. You have spent hours at the bottom of the ocean during your lifetime. How did all that time down there change you, do you think? So I've had a chance to live underwater ten times now in various underwater laboratories and to use more than 30 different kinds of submarines, thousands of hours seeing the ocean from the inside out and realizing this is not just rocks and water.

This is alive. It's a soup like minestrone, but all the little pieces are alive. And then to realize that most people haven't had the depth and breadth of experience that comes with thousands of hours. And I think we're right in at the time of transition now. There are millions of divers all over the world who are. now being able to go repeatedly back to the same areas and to be able to document the same individuals and to see what occurred to me was just natural. It's the way it is.

But you say that you remember when actually you were pretty young that you realized you saw that something bad was happening to nature, that marine life was thriving and then it started disappearing. And you saw it happen. Being a child in Florida, when my parents moved there in 1948, and witnessing the changes in the coastline, the marshes that I first discovered, finding horseshoe crab eggs, these tiny little creatures prospering in really clear water and going out on a dock at night and seeing these bioluminescent creatures. just flashing and glowing and witnessing the change that the waters became not beautiful, clear and blue, but muddy. That was powerful incentive to say, why are we doing this? Well, it's progress. People need a place to live, and people love the waterfront. And there's not enough waterfront.

So building these finger-fill areas to magnify the amount of land along the coast. But building causeways out to the islands, blocking the flow of water, disturbing the seagrass beds, digging them up. And then they were gone. They were gone. So it was, I think, my experience as a witness, not reading about it, not looking at images, but watching it happen, feeling empathy for the creatures in the sea as I got to know them, and I watched them disappear. I can only imagine that you had that memory in mind when you decided to transition from doing research. to policy. So in 1990, you were asked to become the chief scientist at a U.S. agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Why go work for the government? What was your

thinking? What did you want to accomplish? What really convinced me that, yes, I should be the chief scientist of Noah was within Noah is this small but promising agency called. the National Marine Sanctuary Program, the counterpart of national parks that are actually housed in the Department of Interior. There are some marine protected areas in the national park system, but most of the idea of ocean protection

was embodied within this small but growing organization. So I thought this is an opportunity to begin to develop, the ethic of caring for the ocean in the same way that 100 years ago, you know, we began looking at the land and the need for protection. You ended up being kind of a controversial figure there. You got oceans probably in the headlines more than any other government official. I believe it was you who called attention to the fact that, what was it,

that the bluefin tuna was nearly extinct. Why were you so controversial? Why did people take issue with you? all the things you're saying seem hardly controversial. What was the tension that was going on in the 90s then? It wasn't just the 90s, it's still there. The habit of thinking that the ocean is too big to fail. And we're still taking life in the ocean for granted. We still think that we have the capacity to take fish on a scale that we currently are and continue to do it. Forever. Sustainable extraction of ocean wildlife, tuna, swordfish, cod, shrimp, what we collectively regard as seafood. And if we just think of it as sea life that keeps us alive,

we might make a transition from just looking at what lives in the ocean as something to eat or something to grind up for oil or products, to think of them as individuals as part of of the social structure of the ocean, we have made a transition with birds. We have made a transition with whales. There isn't such a large constituency of people who care about tuna and grouper for their own sake. And you're right, I got into trouble when I was at Noah because I attended a fisheries council meeting and I heard that in the Atlantic, the bluefin tuna populations were down by 90%. And I had the audacity to stand up and ask the question. So we only have 10% left from their numbers in the 1970s, a decline of 90% in 20 years from 1970 to 1990. I said, what are we

trying to do, exterminate them? Because if we are, we're doing a great job. We only have 10% left to go. What are we waiting for? Let's go get them. I mean, that's what's And they started calling me the sturgeon general. Okay, so fast forward another decade. And in 2009, you won the TED Prize. And you founded an organization called Mission Blue. My wish is a big wish. But if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world.

And you said in your TED talk at the time, like you laid out a lot of what we've been discussing. But you said at the end of it that there is good news because. 10% of the big fish remain, that there's time, but not a lot of time, to turn things around. So it's been, you know, about a dozen years since you gave your talk, since you founded Mission Blue. Tell me about how things have gone in those last 12 years. What have you been able to achieve with your organization? And what haven't you? I think one of the most important trends is the awareness and willingness to embrace

places and to recognize that protecting nature, the natural systems, have benefits back to us in terms not just of a better health, not just because they're beautiful. It's not even a choice anymore. It's necessary for our existence. We have to realize we're a part of nature. We can see the connection between trees and climate. We can see. We can see the connection between trees and climate. We can see connection between the forests in the ocean, the phytoplankton, capturing carbon, generating oxygen, maintaining a planet that works in our favor. This is common sense. You take care of your personal health because you want to live a long time and you want to be happy. You want to be healthy. But we can't be happy or healthy if we don't take care of our life support system, the planet.

So Mission Blue really has its core to protect the ocean with the network of hope spots, protected areas large enough to save and restore the health of the planet. We now have 140 places around the world with champions for hope spots and communities gathering information about places that are not always. in great condition, some of them are. They start out either with some form of protection or they're in beautiful, healthy condition, and the idea is to keep them that way and tell stories about what a good, healthy system looks like. But they're also places like San Francisco Bay, not particularly in great shape as compared to what it was 500 years ago. But with care, it can improve.

The 21st century humans are poised to be the heroes for all time, because we're armed with a superpower of knowing that we have to change our attitude about the world that keeps us alive. That we can't just continue mining and taking and taking. We have to be aware of the consequences. That's legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to ted.npr.org.

And to see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. And if you have been enjoying the show, we'd be so grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It is the best way for us to reach new listeners, which we really want to do. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Fiona Guerin, Matthew Cloutier, and Christina Kala. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkentpur. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahoussi, J.C. Howard, and Janet Ujong Lee. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Harrison V.J. Choi.

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