The Rich Roll Podcast - Oceanographer Sylvia Earle On Resilience, Hope & Mysteries Of The Deep

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

In the words of today’s guest, treat the natural world as if your life depends on it—because it truly does. Meet absolute living legend Sylvia Earle, Ph.D. A marine botanist, oceanographer, writer, lecturer, and one of the world’s top experts on ocean science and conservation, Sylvia is affectionately called “Her Deepness” by The New Yorker and the New York Times, and the “First Hero for the Planet” by Time magazine. Over the course of her 85 years, Sylvia has logged over 7,000 hours underwater, and not to mention, set a record in 1979 that still stands for the deepest untethered dive by a woman—1,250 feet. She was one of the very first National Geographic explorers-in-residence, served as the first female Chief Scientist at NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), has authored more than 20 books, is a pioneer of submersible engineering, and established Mission Blue, an organization dedicated to protecting marine areas identified as critical to the health of the ocean, or as she calls them, “Hope Spots.” You may very well have seen her appearance in Seaspiracy or have caught word of her fascinating new book entitled Ocean: A Global Odyssey, the subject of today’s exchange. This conversation focuses on the majesty of our oceans, the tragedy of their decline at the hands of humankind, and the urgency that we must marshal for their preservation. But it’s also a conversation about hope. The power we all possess to create the change we need and desire. While I love all my guests, I have to admit I’ve never met anyone quite like Sylvia. What can be said other than to recognize the honor, the gift of spending an afternoon with her, soaking in her wisdom and experience. I have such tremendous respect and admiration for her work. Her example sets the tone for us all. And my hope is that this one inspires you into your own form of action and activism—because it really does all come down to us. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So here it is—me and Her Deepness, Slyvia Earle. Peace + Plants, Rich

The ocean and life in the ocean is critical to climate, critical to the chemistry of the planet. It's critical to you and me and it's taken all preceding history to develop this closely interacting system of systems, living systems in the ocean, mostly built of collaborations, of partnerships. It's like a giant symphony, and every piece has a place. And what we have done in a remarkably short period of time is to derail, upend, cut swaths through, disrupt this amazing system. But if we succeed in protecting the high seas, that's half the world. It's a pretty big chunk of the blue heart of the planet. It's oxygen generation, it's carbon capture,

it's wildlife sanctity, if you will. I can't despair because the knowledge is really there and it's our superpower. We have to match our superpower of knowing with an equally important superpower of caring. You have to want to take this knowledge and consider that this is a time of greatest opportunity ever. We know what to do. And there are business opportunities. But we've got to get smarter about accounting for the real cost. If enough people start moving in the right direction,

we'll get there. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hello, Earthlings. Good to be with you. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is, no two ways about it, an absolute living legend. Sylvia Earle, a marine botanist, oceanographer, writer, lecturer, and one of the world's top experts on ocean science and conservation. Called her deepness by the New Yorker

and the New York Times, as well as the first hero for the planet by Time Magazine. Over the course of her 85 years, Sylvia has logged over 7,000 hours underwater, set a record in 1979 that still stands for the deepest untethered dive by a woman, 1,250 feet. She was one of the very first National Geographic explorers in residence, served as the first female chief scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She's also authored more than 20 books,

is a pioneer of submersible engineering, and established Mission Blue, an organization dedicated to protecting marine areas identified as critical to the health of the ocean, or as she calls them, hope spots. You may very well have seen Sylvia in her appearance to the health of the ocean, or as she calls them, hope spots. You may very well have seen Sylvia in her appearance in the documentary, Seaspiracy.

Well, she's got a new book out. It's entitled, A Global Odyssey. And she is here today. And you, my friends, are in for an experience. It's coming up quickly, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their

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Okay, her deepness. What can be said other than to just recognize the honor, the gift of spending an afternoon with Sylvia, soaking in her wisdom, her experience, that's all reflected in this conversation that focuses on the majesty of our oceans, the tragedy of their precipitous decline at the hands of humankind

and the urgency that we all must marshal for their preservation. But it's also a conversation about hope, the power we all possess to create the change we need, that we desire for ourselves and for future generations. I have such tremendous respect and admiration for Sylvia. Her example sets the tone for us all. And my hope is that this one inspires you

into your own form of action and activism, because it really does all come down to us. So here it is, me and her deepness, Sylvia Earle. Just at the outset, I wanna say, I'm a long time admirer of you and all the work that you've done. It's really an honor to have you here today. Well, thank you.

To talk about the beautiful mysteries of the deep, the crucial importance that healthy oceans play in the preservation of our interconnected world, the decline in that health and what we all need to shoulder in terms of responsibility to ensure its survival for us and all the creatures with whom we share this planet. Of course, all issues that you've devoted your life to.

But I think a good place to start would be, I'm interested in hearing about your experience at COP26, because I know you participated, you did a panel with Al Gore and John Kerry. There's a whole spectrum of opinions about how productive that conference was. What was your experience being there? And what did you take away from that

in terms of where we're at? So what will be the disposition of our conversation? You're gonna spread it far and wide? Far and wide, as many people as possible to the best of my abilities. Great. So tell me, what was it like being there and what was that experience of COP26? Did you leave it hopeful?

Did you leave it feeling like people aren't getting it? What is your sense of where we're at? The panel I attended with John Curry and Al Gore and others, I think John started with a perception that, although this was really on day two of COP26, that it was already a success because we were there talking. We were gathered, focused on a topic that many people are denying even is a problem. But nations had come together with the expectation that they'd try to make some progress. And some progress was made, not nearly enough to satisfy what some of us see as the need for speed, scale up and speed up, and to put nature front and center,

often considered less important than techno fixes that attract money because you can invest in engineering solutions. And when you look at the ocean that largely is regarded as free, you can't make as much money out of saving or solving the climate problem if you're simply saving nature. But shouldn't that not be the primary focus? Of course. Something that all of us can do, even in your own backyard, be a part of the solution. Even in your own eating habits, be part of the solution. even in your own eating habits, be part of the solution?

If history tells us anything, it's that humans don't seem like they're very well wired to consider the long-term consequences of our actions, right? Like our incentives seem to be misaligned where we over-index on short-term gains over what we're going to reap long-term. And unless we can realign those incentives and create systems that reward industry, people, et cetera, for preservation and taking care

of these precious, delicate ecosystems, I find myself despairing of our ability to actually solve these problems. And yet, if you ask people about what their hopes are for the future and why they, about wanting to have a better world, or at least a world as good as what is now around for their children, there is this almost universal desire to make sure that your your kids are going to be safe and that you will be remembered in a favorable way not as a generation that has really lost the future cost the future for them but you're absolutely right that making the connection between your everyday actions or even your semi-long-term actions will be reflected in a better place for your kids.

from COP26 is that we are armed with knowledge that not only did not but could not exist even 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago or earlier. The smartest people who ever lived really did not and could not imagine what we now know because of the computer technologies that enable us to share information so quickly, to see patterns, to gather data, and not just data points, but, oh, now I see this connects to that, connects to something else. is the sweet spot in time because of what we now know that is unprecedented and also with the capacity to act once we decide that it really is urgent. And I think the one thing that was sad about not being in front and center

at the COP26 conference was a real sense of urgency. To do what we're doing as if our lives depend on it. I mean, we really took action rather quickly with COVID-19 because we realized our lives depend on it. And it's true with climate even more comprehensively, but it's less obvious. Right, right. I was watching the Netflix documentary, Mission Blue,

your documentary last night. And among the many kind of very impactful points that it makes, I think it's you who said, you said, you know, whether the ocean is healthy or dying or dead, it looks the same. Yeah, that's true. It's gonna look the same no matter what,

which makes it difficult for the average citizen to connect with the urgency of the problem. Or even the exceptional citizen, like scientists who look at the surface and they've proved the upper level of the ocean, much of the ocean is still yet to be seen, let alone explored. And if you don't know it, you don't know something, it's difficult to care about it. And we tend to make our calculations based on the evidence we've got. And here is most of the living space on the planet.

Below where divers go and where most measurements have been made, where most knowledge about the ocean rests, and that's in the sunlit portion of the ocean. Below that is where most of life on Earth actually exists. Below that is where most of life on Earth actually exists. We're beginning to appreciate that even deep water currents that were not known until fairly recently have a big role to play in climate. They're not up there at the surface.

We know about the Gulf Stream. It's right there. You can see it and measure it and taste it, but what's underneath? The currents flowing in the opposite direction and cold currents and the whole interplay of salinity and temperature and movement of water, movement of animals, movement of life in the ocean that shapes the nature of the planet as a whole. And we're just beginning to appreciate the nature of the planet as a whole and we're we're just beginning to

appreciate the magnitude of what that means and and it doesn't stop us from wanting to mine the deep sea it doesn't stop us from increasing transportation on the surface not just creating massive amounts of noise that we now know has a shockingly powerful influence on life in the ocean that we didn't appreciate 50 years ago, and many still don't. But being in the ocean as a diver and hearing the sound of engines when they go roaring past and also looking at the churning of even an outboard motor, let alone the kind of power that is generated, the churning, the mixing,

the disturbance that we create in the water column. We think of it as being just all one uniform system. I mean, why would you think otherwise looking at it from the surface? But when you get into the surface or when you lower instruments into the sea, you can see how layered the ocean is. Even when the surface looks fairly wavy and even turbulent, many of those layers, density layers with different salinity, layers of life that are related to light and temperature.

I mean, we have significantly disrupted this harmony without even knowing where to begin to measure the consequences. Well, there is this creeping acknowledgement of how crucial ocean health is. And yet that kind of butts up against a lack of urgency to do anything about it. And at the same time,

so much of the ocean remains unexplored. Isn't it something like only 5% of it is anything that we even really have a grasp on. So with that knowledge of understanding like how crucial its health is, and yet this vast expanse of unexplored territory that is just beneath us seems rife for an influx of interest and science and exploration and greater understanding.

We're getting better about mapping the ocean, but in the next 10 years, there's a concerted effort on the part of nations, organizations around the world to have a consistent form of defining the bathymetry. Get a map of the ocean where are the ups and downs where are the mountains and the valleys and the flat places so that it can be accurately mapped at least as good as what we have for the moon and mars and jupiter they're currently much better mapped than our own ocean floor that's crazy but i know i know But from the bottom to the top, that's the ocean, the wet part of the ocean, you know. And also the water that trickles down the cracks in the bottom of the ocean. Life persists, we now know from a few samples, to at least two kilometers down.

Wow. So what exists beneath the bottom of the ocean, it's still not terrestrial the way we define life. One of the greatest anomalies in the way we look at life in the sea is that we think of whatever is out there in a way totally different from the way we view life on the land, with the exception in recent years of whales and turtles, our fellow mammals, and to some extent seabirds.

But there is a great concerted effort right now to try to stem the loss of wildlife. the loss of wildlife. And one of the biggest problems is the perverse trade in wildlife. We think of ivory, think of pangolins and their scales, think of a host of wildlife that used to be, think about egrets, that were really decimated to almost the point of extinction because of their feathers. And other wild birds similarly, and some species have gone extinct because we have favored them for food or we have favored them for ornaments or whatever. But what's missing right now in this discussion about wildlife trade and wildlife loss, including a major article in, I don't remember whether it was science or nature, I should remember, but it was about vertebrate, the loss of vertebrates and the trade in vertebrates and the efforts that are being made to stem the loss.

And they're talking, of course, about mammals and birds, even amphibians and reptiles. But the largest group of vertebrates was not even considered, fish. Fish. They are more diverse than all of the other forms of vertebrates combined. And yet we lump them together as, mmm, delicious seafood, let's go get them. Take them on an industrial scale. Measure them by the ton.

We don't even recognize tuna as individual animals. We give authority through our laws to industrial fishers to take them by the ton. It takes a lot more small tuna than a few bigger tuna to make a ton. More lives lost in the process of making a ton. But however you measure it, we shouldn't be measuring wildlife as if they're products, but they are. Yeah, there seems to be an empathy gap when it comes to fish because the human mind

has trouble connecting or finding some kind of commonality with that living being, but your work speaks very loudly to the contrary. I hear you and I say, yes, but this is learned behavior. A child, and I even, me as a child, when my brother was out with a fishing pole and he caught this little fish, it was in a freshwater lake, and this fish was struggling for its life.

And my brother had a big smile on his face because he'd caught a fish. And I looked at that fish and I said, stop, put it back. It's really, it's, it's in trouble. It's hurting. You know, I could just feel the pain. And I'm, I mean, as a kid, I didn't know that I should be turning off those emotions, As a kid, I didn't know that I should be turning off those emotions, turning off my empathy. We teach kids that it's okay to kill fish. We started at a really early age and celebrate whether it's sport fishing or commercial fishing, let alone the large scale industrial fishing.

The fish, we're taught that they're different. We're taught, don't worry, they don't feel pain the way we do. Yeah, we now taught that they're different. We're taught, don't worry, they don't feel pain the way we do. Yeah, we now understand they do feel pain. Of course they feel pain. Yes, of course they do. Your firsthand account of watching that. I mean, anybody who's been fishing and is hooked to fish,

it's pretty obvious what's going on. And one of the things that you boldly called for at COP26 was an end to commercial fishing. Well, industrial fishing, large scale, factory trawlers, factory long liners, whatever out in the high seas. And I start there because when you think about what it is costing all of us to have basically five nations disproportionately profiting, even though they're subsidized,

it's kind of a false kind of profit, given the way we account for our economy. It's taking from all of us, if we have any interest in the state of the world and our life support system. Those who buy the fish, whether it's for fertilizer or for food, for salmon or cows or chickens or pigs or for us, these are not free goods just available to be taken. We're talking millions of tons of wild animals that are being swept out of the ocean that favor a few and it's a cost to everyone.

Yeah, it's horrific the more that you learn about this large scale industrial fishing, the trawlers and what they do to the bottom of the ocean and just the amount of catch and how much of it is discarded for the few alongside, you know, the shark fin trade and what's going on with bluefin tuna and all of that. It just seems indefensible to me. Well, we have seen, I've witnessed in recent times increasing spotlight on industrial farming, where again, animals are not treated as individuals. We're really just treated as products.

Chicken farms, pig farms, cattle, whatever it is, they're just products. And sometimes you find empathy in the people who are working with them, but generally speaking, we've lost that connection with those animals that we consume and who they are. We just think about them as what they are, not who they are. And that somehow has changed the dynamic. And we think of ourselves as being lofty, humane creatures, different from all others in our ability to empathize and to somehow live in a different kind of world than quotes animals. But the more we look,

the more we find that there's empathy with other creatures and often it's lacking in our own species. Yeah, I think that creating that level of empathy only comes through exposure and education. And I know that's a big piece of your advocacy is creating greater accessibility to the oceans, getting people in submarines, getting people in scuba gear, because once you've had a small taste or flavor

for the manner in which you've spent your life, it will allow people to connect with the greater whole in a way that they just don't in their daily lives. Well, I think most egregious with respect to how we are now approaching ocean wildlife is the illusion, A, that it's healthy to eat ocean wildlife, fish generally, whether farmed or fresh. There is this headline out there, eat fish, it's good for you.

And the second one is that we have to eat fish because of food security. And you hear numbers all over the place about how many people actually either need or rely on ocean life, wildlife, for their, and then you fill in the blanks. Is it your primary source of protein, for protein, for animal protein, and then there are various numbers attached to these claims. And when you peel back the layers and ask the question, as a kid might, you know, do kid might, are we talking about need or are we talking about choice? Do we really need to strip the ocean of wildlife to feed people all over the world? People who have never eaten tuna before are now being told we have to have industrial fleets out in the ocean because we

need what the ocean provides as a source of food. When you think it through, would we say the same thing about wildlife on the land? Do we need to eat wild birds, songbirds, eagles, owls? Do we need to eat lions and tigers and elephants? I mean, some people do. They call it bushmeat. They really rely on wildlife in the places that they live. And often, there's an attitude of respect for that and understanding that if you can work within a system, take some, but the people who are closest to nature realize if they take too many, then they're out of business. They're out of groceries. So where you find examples of harmony between people who've lived a long time in a place taking nutrition from the wild, animals and plants. They don't kill them all.

Sure. When the numbers get low, either they back off or they lose the chance to have them in the future. And we have so much to learn from wisdom that has been acquired, but we no longer really face up to it. Because, you know, we've now got nearly 8 billion people to feed.

How are we going to do that? I really get that. But I also understand that we don't have to feed. In fact, we cannot imagine feeding humans with wild animals. We just can't. imagine feeding humans with wild animals. We just can't. And the idea that we can sustainably extract wildlife by the ton from ocean systems that have nothing in their history

that has prepared them for humans as predators, nothing to enable them to escape the great swaths that we're cutting through, these fine-tuned food webs, the nutrient cycles. It's amazing how we can just make assumptions because it's convenient to do so and perpetrate these claims without evidence. Yeah, yeah, the food security issue is an interesting one.

I mean, certainly there are communities that, that, you know, rely on in an indigenous way, the, you know, local fare that the oceans and the waterways provide, but that, that, the percentage of those populations are very small. It's much more of an income security issue. And we need to find new sources of income that are not destroying the planet in this way.

And that's, I mean, that's not easy to solve either. But if we succeed in protecting the high seas, that's half the world. It's a pretty big chunk of the blue heart of the planet. It's oxygen generation, it's carbon capture, it's wildlife sanctity, if you will, safe haven, with the capacity perhaps if we could at least extend protection for the benefit of everyone in the global commons. Like we have overall clean air policies that sometimes are recognized around the world as the logical thing to do if we want to have clean air to breathe these are the things you do

if you want to have oxygen generation and carbon capture on a mega scale by the natural systems that have been doing this now i mean for hundreds of millions of years then we need to back off the large-scale extraction of wildlife from the ocean just as we need to stop clear-cutting old growth especially old growth forests planting a trillion trees really doesn't cut it. If you're at the same time cutting a trillion old trees, got a long way to catch up with a loss of these old productive trees when you just put a little sapling in its place. Right. So over the course of only a few decades, I mean, dating back to maybe 1950, in this era in which the conventional wisdom

was essentially that the ocean was an undepletable resource that was more resilient than anything that we could throw at it. We've now learned that that's very much not the case. that would, you know, was more resilient than anything that we could throw at it. We've now learned that that's very much not the case. We've lost something like 50% of our coral reefs. We've seen mass underwater species extinction. We have these algal blooms and, you know,

all of the kind of disastrous implications of our developing world and the implications that that's having on our oceans. State the case for why ocean health is so critical. I mean, you mentioned carbon capture and how vital the oceans are in terms of that, but why should we care? Like, why is this so crucial that we do everything

in our capacity to protect and preserve our ocean system. When I was asked that question back in the 70s by a young woman reporting for an Australian publication, it just flashed with me that, okay, so you don't care about the ocean because you don't eat fish, you don't swim, people don't drink salt water. If the ocean dried up tomorrow, why should you care? I said, okay, you got it. Dry up the ocean. No ocean. What have you got? Only about 3% of Earth's water is not ocean, and that 3% is constantly being recharged by the ocean as water evaporates up into the clouds and falls back on the land and

the sea. It's the biggest storehouse of water. Start with the water. All life needs water, ourselves very much included. The shorthand version of that is no blue, no green, no ocean, no us. So we're not going to dry up the ocean tomorrow, but let's say you just modify the ocean, warm the ocean, make it a generator of more powerful storms and more frequent storms. Make it a generator of sea level rise because warm water takes more space than cold water. And that's part of what we're seeing right now.

It's the expansion of the ocean. Change the temperature of the ocean, either make it colder or warmer, and you've altered one of the most basic things that we take for granted, the range of temperature that is suitable for human existence. And if it's just water, it doesn't work either. It's the living ocean that makes Earth habitable. It's taken all preceding history to develop this closely interacting system of systems in the ocean, living systems, mostly built of collaborations, of partnerships, of this.

It's like a giant symphony, and every piece has a place. giant symphony and every piece has a place and what we have done in a remarkably short period of time is to derail up end cut swaths through uh disrupt this amazing system that i say it's taken four and a half billion years actually to assemble and literally about four and a half decades to significantly rip apart. And we're doing it with our eyes open, with a smile on our face. We have laws to reinforce it, laws protecting shipping, laws protecting shipping, laws protecting industrial fishing, laws actually giving subsidies to kill the ocean. Right, yeah, the subsidies are a huge problem because they provide the underpinning

for all of these systems that are destroying. I mean, one of the more heartbreaking scenes in Mission Blue is when you travel out in the Coral Sea past the Great Barrier Reef and you drop in on what was once just an epic reef system and it's completely dead. And just seeing how you're so far out there in the middle of nowhere,

and yet- The middle of everywhere. Yeah, yeah, exactly. As you heard one of us say. Exactly. It's so heartbreaking. And yet you carry yourself with such conviction and a level of hopefulness, despite all of this evidence.

You were there many years ago, you've seen this evolution. How do you hold on to that sense of hopefulness? Well, during 2020, when I had to kind of, like most of the rest of the world, sit back and reflect on questions such as this, you know, what reason is there to hope in the face of so much that's so negative. Wars, poverty, hunger, conflict. You could go on and list, and certainly climate and the loss of the diversity of life loom large in my mind. But at that time, I was also in the midst of writing this big book for National Geographic. Ocean of Global Odyssey, right? And although I had thought a lot about the question, what reason is there for hope? I really had a chance to dive in literally what we now know about the ocean. It takes time to sift through

the latest explorations, the latest experiments, the latest reflections, the latest studies on where we are. And also to reflect on what we don't know, which is enormous. You know, the more we know, the more we know we don't know. I've just been seeing that all my life. But we know enough right now to realize there are things that can be done, positive things. Every individual can take action that together magnifies into a movement, into a change of policy, into a new way of thinking about food. There's evidence that we have done this in the past about smoking, about wearing a seatbelt, about, you know, in overnight when we realized that our lives were threatened by a virus.

It's not the first time, although for the first time we could quickly identify what it was. Not so long ago, the existence of viruses was not known. We didn't even know what bacteria were not so long ago in human history. And now we have this ability based and armed with knowledge to turn around and when we get it to change. It took us longer with seatbelts and smoking, but we got it with COVID-19. We have to get it with climate change and realize that by protecting nature, recovery is possible and there's evidence. And that's partly what I focused on in my COVID year. Where's the evidence? What do we know? Okay, here's, look at what we've done with whales.

When I was a kid, whalers were celebrated. Heroic characters that would go out and brave the elements. And whales were portrayed more as monsters than as fellow citizens, as caring, intelligent beings that have language, that have society, that have families, that stick together as communities, almost like moving cities that have liquid boundaries.

Certainly with dolphins, you can see that, these great collections of several hundred thousand individuals. That is like a city. And they stick together and they move through the ocean. It just is a moving city. But they communicate. They have names. Sperm whales have what they call a coda.

Each one has a name. Orcas have, for each other, for one another, names. Dolphins, a signature whistle that is learned when they first are born, and it sticks with them for their whole life. None of this was known when I was a kid. And as people began to know whales as something more than oil and meat, the attitude changed. The Save the Whale movement really began on my watch. And by the 1980s was a voice so powerful that in 1986, a moratorium on the commercial taking of whales was agreed upon by the International Whaling Commission. I served on the International Whaling Commission for four years and watched this

interplay of different ways of looking at whales, which was in the 80s and 90s still evolving. Now there's such a very a really powerful strong recognition of the value of whales alive and i don't mean just for whale watching or the value that the international monetary fund commissioned a study that was released in 2020 at the world economic forum that a whale alive based on the carbon climate value is large enough so if you take all the whales together we're looking at at least a big trillion big t trillion dollars worth of carbon in the whales alive versus a tiny fraction of that if you want whales dead and and then it's only once. It'll decline every year as you continue to kill them. So reason for hope. There are more whales today than there were when I was

a child. More reason for hope because we're looking at other forms of life with dignity and respect, and it isn't just about the money. It's about this ethic of caring, kind of an ethic of living. Look at all the religions in the world and how valuable and how important that is to the lives of people globally through all of our history. And it puts a real value on human life and our existence and even other forms of life

that transcend dollars and cents yeah having said that look at what we do with tuna they have to be worth at least as much as whales for carbon and we don't have yet in our minds the ethic of understanding or caring about them for their intelligence, their relationships, their community, their ability to navigate over long distances with no roadmap or lunch except what they carry in their head and what they carry in their bodies. And we've disrupted the wisdom of tunas and cod and other migratory animals because we've broken those chains.

And it's not just bad news for them. That means look at the carbon cycle, look at the nutrient cycle, look at where the nitrogen and phosphates and other nutrients that these animals spread around in a way that has created the planet that we now occupy, that is favorable to us. There are more sea turtles today than when I was a kid. In the 50s, when I was just beginning to dive as a young scientist, I traveled down to the Florida Keys to go explore the shallow water, the coral reefs, the mangroves. Along the way, there are big billboards. I remember one place in particular called the Duck Inn, Turtle Steak, and they had a price tag on it.

Going down further to get to Key West, and they had turtles in pens just waiting to be turned into turtle steak and turtle soup. It's on my watch. There are these animals just being treated the way we treat most fish and shrimp and squid and lobsters. They're just things. They aren't to be treated with the kind of dignity and respect we now do accord turtles with international agreements and policies and programs that really protect the nests of turtles, protect turtles on their migrations, laws against killing turtles. Or in this country, even handling a young turtle that is coming out of its nest and making its way to the ocean. It's illegal to pick one up. I mean, we really have a different attitude and it's happened on my watch. I've seen it happen. So I know it's possible to change in a way that will get us to a

better place. Protecting any place, giving nature a break on the land, national parks, wildlife reserves, in the ocean, places that are highly or fully protected. And I don't include managed areas because they don't really work nearly as well. In fact, often not at all. That what you see outside a managed area and inside, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. But where you really say, no, we need to safeguard places where everything is protected. Everything. Treat these as sacred places because we don't know how to put them back together again once they're gone. And we need them to restore what's been lost. We need them as models to be able to really imagine what health looks like.

Imagine if all of the big redwood trees had been cut and all we had were saplings left. Kids would grow up thinking that's what redwood trees look like, these little stalks, not the giants that are still there because people before I came along had the vision to be able to protect, safeguard some of these great giants against the appetite for lumber. We're still killing the great giants despite what we now know, but there is hope. There is hope. Yeah, at least we recognize that on land because we bear witness to it.

And we've done, I guess, an adequate job of carving out protected land masses and creating national parks and the like. And there is a very strong argument that that's exactly what we should be doing with our oceans and our waterways. And that's a big piece of the Mission Blue mission of creating these hope spots, right? So talk a little bit about the hope spots

and what goes into that. Well, I think for most of my life, I've been a champion of protecting wild places on the land and in the sea. I worked with the National Park System. I love the idea that we can and do give back. And it's not necessarily because we see what we now see about our life depends on protecting nature. I think during the era of Teddy Roosevelt, it was because these are beautiful places that inspire us with,

and that basically we should protect them because they really are great for recreation and great for spiritual reasons, whatever the reason. recreation and great to for spiritual reasons whatever the reason but now we know that there is a self-interest that that really includes the aesthetic reasons but really goes beyond it that our existence really depends on taking care of nature the carbon capturing, oxygen generating, planet stabilizing overall, shaping the chemistry of the planet in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways that favor us. And for us to now be at a point where we can see it and measure it and understand it, All we have to do now is to get that knowledge incorporated

into our basic thinking and make decisions that really will lead us to a better place. So you have these, how many hope spots are there now? You're nearly 140. New ones coming along all the time. They're different from the other approaches that I wholeheartedly applaud of identifying those areas that are still intact, the last wild places, if you will. National Geographic has a project that I have applauded from the beginning, the pristine seas, where you identify places that are about as intact as there are anywhere in the ocean and then you work diligently to try to encourage protection for them on a government level and expeditions there to celebrate and and share knowledge which is also what we do with mission blue we work both

at the highest government levels but we also work with communities on the ground as other organizations, World Wildlife, Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, a lot of big organizations, but a lot of small ones too that really are working at both ends from the bottom up, top down, as they say, and everything in between to try to really encourage people to do what they can locally. And with Mission Blue, what we're trying to do, and I think we're showing some success to develop a network, a network of hope, of people who are connecting with their stories, with their data.

a network of hope, of people who are connecting with their stories, with their data. We're working with ESRI, the GIS data management enterprise that's now 50 years old, based here where I am now and you are in California, that has really developed the technology to get various kinds of information and layer them, and they work with cities for city planning, with governments to understand where's the best place to put a hospital, given what we now know about the community, instead of just randomly saying, oh, here's a piece of ground, let's put it there.

No, it's more thoughtful than that. So with Mission Blue and Esri, to get a story map, to delineate basically here's the territory we're talking about. Here's who lives there. I mean, in terms of the creatures who occupy that space. Here are their images and we're getting divers. We're working directly with PADI, for example, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, We're working directly with PADI, for example, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, to encourage divers everywhere, when they go out on a holiday or if they go out on whatever it is, take pictures. And if it's in a hope spot or even if it isn't, maybe they can upload data in a related way to show here are my images of whale sharks.

And somewhere else people have taken pictures of whale sharks. And somewhere else, people have taken pictures of whale sharks. Somebody else has taken pictures of the same kinds of creatures elsewhere. Together, you really get a database around individual species, but also what makes a community. What are the fish? What are the bryozoans? What are the sponges? What are the corals? Who lives here?

And can we see their faces? And can we see them over time? Some people are able to contribute information that they've gathered over years, even a lifetime, like Randy Wells, who's a dolphin scientist in Sarasota, Florida, who's been getting to know individual dolphins over 50 years. He's got names. He's got associations of families. He knows the grandparents, the parents, the kids, the grandkids, you know, this whole assembly of information. Now putting that information into the Mission Blue website so scientists can access that. Makes information of that sort accessible, something to be celebrated and used

in a more favorable way than has been possible heretofore. That's really beautiful. And the community piece is so powerful. It's not a situation in which you're lobbying government to enact a simple policy that protects these areas. It's really boots on the ground, getting everybody who lives there involved, integrated with this shared mission.

Yeah, and they make the decision about this. In the documentary, there's the test case of the community on the Baja Peninsula. Yeah, Copacabana. Right, they transform what was once a fishing village ostensibly into this eco-tourism area and how these communities have come back. We can't claim credit for that.

The fishermen themselves did that, but we can certainly celebrate it and encourage others to say, well, they did it, maybe we can too. Right. That finding other means of making a living is certainly more secure and safer because as they depleted the local populations of fish

around Cabo Pulmo, they had to go further and further offshore and the fishermen were being lost at sea. And it was partly that that inspired them to say enough already, let's do something else. Right, right. And we've seen what has happened on the West coast of Africa or with Somalia and how, you know,

when there's no more fish, they become pirates and, you know, in order to survive. So there's all these implications downstream. Part of the reason the fish are gone are because of the high seas or even in the coastal waters where industrial european union has allowed industrial fishing to come into other countries it's not just the european union but countries are giving licenses to other countries to come in their own exclusive economic zones. And it gets a little more complicated there than in the high seas, where we're only talking about a small number of countries

that are really doing most of the taking in the high seas. And it's also fraught with other issues of human slavery, where people are really forced into labor and stay at sea for sometimes years where human life is not even valued let alone the fish life right and so there in urbina has done a tremendous service to all of us by documenting the life of fishermen aboard these high seas industrial fleets. Right. Now we're having to contend with the growth and the rise of deep sea mining as well,

especially as EV batteries and all these kind of precious minerals that we now need to power our ways in a manner that feels like it's, you know, off the teat of oil and gas, and yet also has this tragic effect on our ocean systems. Right, and that's another matter that I really took a deep dive into

during my year of reflection, but it was not the first time I began looking at the deep sea mining issues going back to the 1970s, when it first became known that these manganese nodules could be commercially valuable. And Lockheed really took an interest and began investing literally hundreds of millions of dollars to explore the potential for going several miles underneath the surface of the ocean and deploy instruments that could scoop them up

and return them to the surface and then do, at the time it was thought that at sea processing was the best way to deal with the tailings because hey who cares in the ocean if you bring those things ashore people will notice that it's a dirty business really is it's and could cause problems but after a while i mean there was a hiatus it wasn't just lucky nation a number of companies around the world really were tempted to think of this as the next profitable thing and it was so much an issue that when the law of the sea was being negotiated in the 80s it was the key issue that derailed the u.s participation

because of the idea that the technology that quotes developed countries, especially the U.S., were the only means that would truly make it possible to mine the deep sea. And that it seemed unfair for us to be able to go and take from the deep sea without sharing anything taken from the global commons in a more equitable way with nations that did not have the technology. Or to have either technology transfer, which we resisted, or to think of how you could share the profits in some way. That was a showstopper, And it kind of still is. It's the idea that other nations, that we would share our edge on technology and all the rest so that it would be shared

more globally or more equitably. So we're not signatures. Well, we're signatures, but we haven't ratified the law of the sea. So we're the outliers right now. Other nations are calling the shots when it comes to deep sea mining. We can go as observers, and we certainly have influence. We certainly have money to invest in these countries and companies that are being given leases to mine the deep sea. It's the biggest land grab on the planet right now that is largely not even acknowledged by most people. You ask anybody in a grocery store or in a meeting anywhere, what do you think about deep sea mining? They say, huh, what?

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I admit to not knowing very much about it at all and was learning about it just in preparing to speak to you today. And it's rather alarming. But there's no doubt. There's so much we don't know about the real nature of the processes that happen within these manganese nodules.

What we do know is that they're alive. They're formed gradually over long periods of time by bacteria, microbes anyway, maybe some other, maybe archaea are involved, but we know that bacteria are, that take the small amounts of these metals and other materials out of the seawater and accumulate them, starting with something like a shark's tooth or the ear bone of a whale or a bit of shell, something organic starts the process typically. And these layers are formed over years. So something the size of a walnut may have taken 10,000 years. Something the size of your fist, or they often use a potato as a size,

but potatoes come in all sizes. So what are we talking about here? But millions of years to get that big. And they're still growing. I've seen manganese nodules literally the size of a football. I don't know the age of that monster, but I know it took a very long time to get that chunk of living rock into being. So first of all, we now are really making an effort to look at old growth systems, old growth forests, coral reefs are old growth. That takes a long time to get all the pieces together, not just the corals, but the full assemblage of small, medium, and large creatures that make up a coral reef or a kelp forest. We might succeed in some cases in planting coral, planting mangroves, planting seagrasses,

but it just as a forest is not just about the trees, it's this whole integrated system. And when you take anything out, you disrupt it. So keeping these places intact in the deep sea until we really know what's the carbon cycle like, and is there a way that we could treat the deep sea creatures as a library? Could we sample a few and figure out how do those bacteria extract out of seawater, these metals, these materials? Is there a way that we could encourage them to do more of that? Could we analyze how, what is it that they are doing that we might be able to understand and cultivate in some way?

Isn't that a 21st century approach, not a 15th century or 16th or 17th or even the 20th century approach of let's just take this living system that has taken hundreds or thousands or millions of years to form and commodify it. Whether we're talking trees or the Lewis and Clark expedition,

let's go take all the animals we can find for their skins. I mean, we celebrate that as a time of exploration, but the motives were much like the deep sea mining. Let's go mine the value in the short term, in short-term value. I'm also, during my reflective year that continues on into this year and beyond, the rest of my life, to ask questions such as, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and a host of other smaller elements for our batteries, for our computer-aged material. We're getting much better at really focusing on the circular, what they call the circular economy, emulating nature. There's no waste in nature. There isn't. When you think about it, where are the junk heaps out in the ocean that aren't made by humans everything that is generated by one organism that is thought to be

you know trash a throwaway gets pounced on and used by another creature starting with that international monetary fund study that looked at the value of whales, their carbon value. Really, one of the headlines at that World Economic Forum was about whale poop. About how whales, when they consume krill or small fish, they put nutrients back that power, back that power and really emphasize the power on providing nutrients for the phytoplankton that keeps that circle going phytoplankton to zooplankton to fish to whales and around around the circle goes you take any piece out like we're taking krill out of antarctica now we break those links take the whales out you break those links and the joy right now is being a 21st century human being armed with knowledge. We can do better than we have in the past. We can recycle batteries

that whatever we make, whether it's a car or refrigerator or whatever, Think about where does it go once you're through with it in the time frame that you're going to use this thing. Packaging is one of the other issues. Packaging should never just become waste. We should figure out how to package our goods when we move them around in such a way that this becomes another product maybe other packaging which is happening in some scale now but suppose everybody did it suppose it just became a way of life suppose we had our cities our supply chain figured out so that we don't have to source new materials all the time, everywhere, every day for new things, but making better things out of what used to be discarded. Even just this week, I saw a study about how the lithium taken from batteries that are, quotes, used up,

that when the lithium from those batteries is recovered and used for new batteries, it's actually better than raw materials taken from the ground. Whatever happens in the course of processing makes them a better product for the next generation. Yeah, it doesn't feel overly idealistic to imagine a situation in which if you are going to be creating a product, that part of that development cycle considers

the afterlife of the product and that you have created an infrastructure around whether it's recycling or repurposing all of those materials in a responsible way. And if it's going to cost more as a result of that, then it's gonna cost more. But think about the real cost, the full cost. That's part of our problem with how we treat, how our economic system currently is structured, especially with wild animals and wild trees.

What is the accounting base of a live fish swimming in the ocean? Zero. It takes on a value when we kill it because you can sell a dead fish. Actually, you can sell live fish too, but in a different sort of way that fish taken out of the ocean alive sold for the pet trade or or i think probably one of the most successful aquaculture facilities pound for pound is in raising fish for home aquariums but they don't continue to take them out of the ocean you take a couple or maybe six or ten and you turn them into moms and dads that create a lot of kids that never see the ocean

but they see a lot of friendly faces admiring them as gorgeous creatures that they take care of for the rest of their lives however long they may be but the idea that i kind of got off on a track, but the idea that we don't value nature. We think of trees, board feet of lumber, or they're in the way. Let's get rid of those trees. There's a cost to burning them or cutting them so we can plant corn or tobacco or soybeans or cows. They're kind of in the way. So they're just, they're not only not free, they're a problem. That's been our habit over much of the planet. So how do we flip that, Sylvia? Start with the kids, but start with everybody. The best hope, really, I can't despair because the knowledge is really there and it's our superpower.

We have to match our superpower of knowing with an equally important superpower of caring. You have to want to take this knowledge and consider that this is a time of greatest opportunity ever. We know what to do and they're business opportunities, but we've got to get smarter about accounting for the real cost. How do you think about effective activism? On the one hand, activism takes the form of a more radical shape, protesting, extinction rebellion, young people angry in the streets. and then on the other end of that spectrum is consensus building or working within systems to create change with the powers and the corporations that be like over your many years of being immersed

in this world and trying to solve these very big problems, what have you learned about what works, what doesn't work? The world has progressed over the ages one way or another because individuals see what others do not and then share the view. Imagine if astronauts came back from the sky and didn't tell us what they saw, if they didn't really cause us to see with a different perspective. That's what we need right now, to be able to see ourselves with a different perspective, to know that the world around us is crumbling. The natural systems that keep us alive are in

serious trouble. Knowing that, this is, how could you not want to do everything you can to save yourself, to save the people you care about, to save the whole human culture that, in a sense, we should care about, art, music, all that we've accomplished? care about, art, music, all that we've accomplished, isn't it worth saving? And to do that, we might have to change some of what we've been doing in the past that has gotten us to the edge of this precarious cliff. That if we continue doing what we have been doing that seemed okay at the time, we didn't know. and so we kept doing cutting trees we kept taking whales taking fish out of the ocean going to Antarctica of all places with taking large quantities of the cornerstone krill out of the system just

as we had previously taken seals and penguins and whales, now taking fish and krill, like when are we going to learn respect for and care for the systems that underpin our existence, like first and foremost? I heard Barack Obama once say, our highest priority must be to keep the world safe for our children. He was thinking guns and things when he made that statement. But it works in a broader context too.

Keeping the world safe for ourselves and for those who follow. It has to be at this point, this precarious point, climate scientists say 10 years. It will make or break. Whether we stay within safe temperature limits through what we do or not because of what we fail to do. We're right on the edge. Why isn't everybody focused on this as a matter of extreme urgency and look, okay, we can't just leave it to governments because they're all over the place some are really moving strongly in the right direction others not so much but we as

participants in this that's our lives that's what they're talking about when they're talking climate we can take decisions and if enough of us take decisions, we can transcend the laws, speed up the process. You don't have to have a law saying, stop smoking to stop smoking. You can just do it. You don't have to have a law saying, you know, you might want to rethink that halibut that's on your plate when the next time you order, understand the carbon is being released into the atmosphere when you take it out of the ocean. And the system that captures carbon is being diminished when you remove wild animals out of the system. The nutrients they put back in, this closely knit give and take that makes Earth habitable on the land and certainly in the ocean. But we have been less ready to see what should be obvious,

that the ocean and life in the ocean is critical to climate, critical to the chemistry of the planet. It's critical to you and me. And maybe, all right, it might seem like a sacrifice to give up tuna fish sandwiches for a while maybe forever but you're doing one thing if everybody's kind of gets it that oh well carbon climate tuna carbon climate whales carbon climate me i the decisions I make, if enough people start moving in the right direction, we'll get there. That governments alone can't do it. People alone, probably the best chance we have, but they can't do it without some reinforcement from the government that at least doesn't

penalize you for doing the right thing and should reward people for doing the right thing. Right now, we're encouraging through subsidies, a lot of wrong behavior, whether it's through industrial agriculture or industrial fishing or a lot of other things, including continuing to subsidize the oil and gas industry.

Sure. And coal. It's a bottom up and top down thing. I mean, I think you mentioned saying no to the tuna and the halibut. We can issue animal products. We can say no to single use plastics. We can choose to vote with our dollars with the companies that we

patronize that are practicing sustainable conscious methods. But I think for a lot of people, there is a sense of powerlessness or an overwhelm that the existential crisis that looms is just so large and what could I possibly do? And we hear about this term climate anxiety. So- We should have climate anxiety. We should, of course. But then we shouldn't be- But we shouldn't allow that to paralyze us, right?

So, other than the things I just mentioned and that you've talked about, like when someone comes to you, as I'm sure they do all the time, Sylvia, and says, I'm inspired by your example, I wanna get involved, but I don't know how to do it. Like, tell me what to do, or where can I plug into this

where I can have the most impact in my daily life? Again, I've thought about this quite a lot and you can look around for some short answers to that. There's a little book about 50 things you can do to save the ocean. It's a winner, illustrated by Jim Toomey, the artist who does Sherman's Lagoon. The Big Shark is the cartoon hero. David Helvarg is the author, but I say nobody can tell you, whoever you are, what you can do better than that person you see in the mirror can tell you. Look in the mirror, ask yourself the question

you're asking me. Ask who are you, that person in the mirror what what do you do well are you good with music do you have a way with kids are you an artist are you a scientist are you whatever you are you have power and you might think that one person in the midst of the nearly 8 billion of us there are is trivial and can't make a difference. But when you look at history, even today, there are individuals who didn't expect to be leaders, but they started something. They took an action that they cared about, and the word spread, and they were the beginners, but they joined with others. One plus one equals two equals four equals, you know, it can magnify. Or even if it doesn't, what you do, based on what you know, does make a difference. It does.

And it makes a difference that you don't do something every bit as much as when you do something positive. If you think, well, it's hopeless. I'll just enjoy myself for the rest of life that I've got. I'll let the kids figure it out for themselves or somebody else will do it. You're part of the problem. You are because you're just coasting on the goodwill and the good behavior of others. If you really want to make a difference, then listen up. Look at what the problems are. Find a piece of that great array of things that worry you, give you anxiety, and say, I can fix this.

I can do that. I worry about the plastics that are choking the ocean. So get out there and pick some of it up and look at your life and what you generate and try to do better about what you throw away and make yourself an example. You don't have to celebrate it or make a big deal of it, but it's amazing when kids see adults careless

and throwing things away out the window of a car. They think it's okay, and so they'll continue to do that. You know, be an example, whether it's quiet or with a megaphone. Try to find that thing that resonates with you and go for it. I see that happening all over the world with kids in particular because why? They're armed with knowledge that did not and even could not exist when I was a child. And they're worried or they're inspired or both, but they're not going they're inspired or both, but they're not going to just sit back and allow the world to collapse around them. Well, maybe some will, and I feel sorry for them because we have to double down and do more

for those who aren't doing what they can if they just pick themselves up and get busy. And you've seen societies do this in times of urgency, whether it's after a storm, communities come together and they work together in ways they did not work together before. We're doing it now with COVID-19. When we're threatened with a common enemy, we get together for the common cause. We need to realize that the fabric of life that keeps us alive is really getting shredded. Whatever you can do to restore health to wild places, wild things, do it in your backyard. Okay, so you've got a big, beautiful lawn or even a tiny little lawn.

Think about planting wildflowers. Think of dandelions as your allies, not your enemies, because they are friendly to bees and bees are friendly to pollination that keeps us alive, holds the world together. You know, just look at the world with a fresh, give the world a fresh look. Think about looking back on the 21st century from the next century, or even in

10 years. What can you do between now and 2030 that will move us in the right direction? Oh my goodness, there's so many things. I have never thought of myself as one who would be characterized as an activist. I'm a scientist.

I'm a little kid with oversized curiosity. I want to know how the world works. I want to know everything about everything. It's what kids start out doing, and I never quite stopped. And I love sharing the view, which is one of the things more scientists should be inclined to do. And a lot of them are getting out of their shell and becoming more vocal about, look at this.

Look what I've discovered. Don't you want to go out and find something on your own or share with me the joy of putting the pieces together to see a new concept? That's how human civilization has been prospering. And if I can have even a small part in that, then okay, call me an activist, but I think of myself more as an educator,

as a scientist who wants to get others to see what I see. It's something that began with just pure awe and wonder as a very young girl falling in love with the ocean and wanting to explore and learn as much as possible. You could have never imagined that the planet would tip to such an extent where it would compel you to have to take a certain kind of stand and become this activist,

because essentially you're a botanist and an oceanographer and somebody who just loves these- I've been privileged, I realized to see things that others have not, to be able to spend days, nights, weeks underwater getting to know individuals, mindful that Jane Goodall spent years getting to know one species very well and transformed the way we think about not just our fellow primates and one another, but really caused us to think about life generally. We haven't had such a great kind of access to creatures in the sea,

except to some extent in captive circumstances, in aquariums. Those who get to know fish that have lived in an aquarium for 30 years get to understand that these are creatures with, not like some of the creatures that we farm that we take to market in a year or two that a grouper may be 30 years old or a halibut could be 80 years old before it comes to your plate and you can carve it up and dine on it and it's gone in 20 minutes or a tuna similarly it takes a lot to make a tuna a lot of groceries to make these creatures.

But you don't know that when you see it in the market all wrapped up in a nice little package or nicely prepared in a restaurant. We need to be able to ask those questions. Where did this come from? How long did it take to make a lobster that we dine on in a few minutes? Or what part of the world did it come from? What's the carbon signature in terms of transportation for an Australian lobster that is winding up in Chicago? It's interesting that you bring up Jane Goodall.

In reflecting on your life and your work and your legacy, I can't help but draw the comparison to her work. And there are so many parallels, not the least of which is this shared sense of hopefulness. Like she just has this book that just came out, the book of hope, which I read. And I see that very kind of strain, flowing through everything that you do.

Like you have that same sensibility. And then above and beyond that, both being people who created this bridge of empathy to the living world in a way that not only broke glass ceilings, but also really fascinated people all over the world. Of course, Jane with primates and yourself with helping us to better understand the individuality

of these living creatures underneath the surface. So talk a little bit about how that developed through your various underwater explorations and the Tektite 2 and all the things that you kind of experienced in your younger years that helped you realize something that prior to that, science hadn't really reckoned with or acknowledged? Well, the parallel between Jane Goodall and myself

probably starts with our mothers. Fathers too, but Jane speaks so lovingly about how her mother shaped her ethic and allowed her to explore as a girl and later going with her to Africa when she started out as a young scientist. when she started out as a young scientist. My mother never had the opportunity to go with me to share explorations, but she shaped the ethic early on, the respect for life, all life. She was the person in our neighborhood to whom an injured bird or an abandoned baby squirrel,

any creature was brought to be nursed back to health and released back to the wild. And I think it was that atmosphere of caring that just I absorbed as part of my being. And I can't identify a specific moment, but I do remember being on a beach in New Jersey, a little kid, and being entranced with horseshoe crabs, these big craggy creatures

whose heritage started long before there were dinosaurs. They go back like 400 million years. They're like 300 million years old, right? 300 million years old. Yeah, even more than that. Wow. But yeah, and they're still with us, at least. There are four species, three in Asia, one, maybe some slight variations on the theme up and down the Atlantic coast.

And I thought they were just magnificent. It never occurred to me to be afraid of them until adults came by and said, hey, kid, watch out, that spiky tail, they're poisonous. And I just looked at them as if they were crazy because I knew better. I was a little kid, but I knew more than those grown-ups knew about that beautiful animal. I could imagine myself crawling on the beach. And my first thought when I saw them was they're out of the water. They belong in the ocean I kept putting them back in the ocean

and then they crawl back again of course but anyway, because I was there when they come on the shore they're there to lay their eggs which forms the basis of one of the longest ecosystems on earth with birds that fly from one polar region to the other but stop off along the way to get fat on the eggs of horseshoe crabs. I grew up going to Rehoboth Beach in Ocean City

along that seaboard and remember very well those creatures. Cause for people that don't know, I mean, they're very large and quite striking when you see them on the beach. And as a child, you feel compelled to pick it up and examine it and just go, I've never seen anything like this. I mean, they are dinosaurs. Yes, the kids are not naturally afraid of creatures

and they don't naturally want to kill them. We teach them not only to be afraid and we also teach them that killing is good. We celebrate the killing of things. And yes, my father and uncles would go out hunting and bring back wild birds. But I could never imagine doing that myself. imagined doing that myself. And I never, you know, since then, one of my uncles was a market hunter, literally. Used to take wild birds, ducks and geese by the truckload to market. That was the way of life early in the 20th century, even. We don't do that to wild birds in the 21st century, mostly.

I mean, not for commercial markets, mostly. There's some exceptions, but mostly we've got, but we do that, we continue to do it with ocean wildlife. And that's a thing that we ought to know better. You can see, we can learn from the past, and we have to speed up learning from the past, what works, what doesn't, and how to find a better place for ourselves

within the natural systems that sustain us. And Jane has, I don't know when she started just eating animals, eating plants, not animals, but at an early age, I don't know when she started just eating animals, eating plants, not animals, but at an early age, I gather. And so when people talk about food security, we've got to kill a lot of things for food security. She'll look at them and I look at them and say, well, look at the numbers.

It's actually the current part of civilization that is odd. Throughout most of our history, we have been sustained mostly by plants. Now we have increasingly taken an animal-based diet or made a celebration of eating animals, that this is a good thing. But now that we can really use our intelligence and look at the numbers going forward, we can't continue to do this, at least not at the current level. There aren't enough fish in the sea,

not enough land to support the animals to be able to even keep up with the current population, let alone those going forward in the future. So anyway, part of this is logic, part of it is empathy for life, but it's just we're at a turning point, I think, in terms of how we're going to feed ourselves deliciously and nutritiously and sustainably in the future.

Yeah, there's exciting solutions afoot here though. I think that the plant-based movement has really caught on and has gone mainstream in a certain way. I think it's here to stay and people are starting to wake up and realize that. Just imagine if you go to banquets and instead of having a vegetarian option, you have a vegetarian menu with a meat option,

just flip it around. Right, well, it should be that way. And certainly, I read some news articles that at COP26, there was all kinds of animal products on the menu at all of these events, which just seems to me to be insane when you're at this climate conference to address these problems.

Like, you know, when I hear that, it's hard for me to hold onto that hopefulness when I see stuff like that, that seems like such low hanging fruit and obvious. Symbolic, of course, but important nonetheless. Well, I can look to National Geographic, but I think the last time they had their big annual banquet, it was vegetarian-based. I mean, you could get some meat if you wanted to, but they did just what I've been suggesting here.

That was a while ago because we haven't had a big celebration recently because of the COVID crisis. Right. But there are institutions that are heading in the right direction. Anyway. But I think it's, just to put a pit on that, I think there is a human kind of inclination to sit back and just trust that somebody is going to innovate our way out of this. And I think that shirks our own personal responsibility. And yes, there are amazing entrepreneurs and scientists who are figuring out new ways of harvesting food

and all kinds of crazy stuff on the horizon near and far. And that's fantastic, but I think it's still incumbent upon all of us to do what we can in our daily lives. It's one of those things that anybody can do, do your part. Think differently about your carbon intake, where it comes from.

And some of those things are not really explored in great detail in this book where I tried to reflect on the ocean, why it matters to everyone everywhere all the time. But one of the things I did, you're asking about how you do explore the ocean. Here in the 21st century, when we can go to the moon, and we're sending things up to Mars to gather information and send it back to Earth. Why do we know so little about the ocean? And what do we know? What are we doing? So I love the fact that we're beginning to put little weather stations out in the ocean, monitoring stations. It's baffling to me that it has taken us so long, but the knowledge that we're getting

back about being able to measure currents in the deep sea with these little devices known as Argo floats and sharing information. One of the ways that nations are cooperating around the world is with environmental data sharing. We do it with weather and now doing it with knowledge about the ocean, which all ties together. And to be able to imagine a time when you might be able to go to Hertz or Avis and rent a submarine for the day. Right. I know that's your big ambition.

Let's talk about submarines. I mean, submarines is a big part of your whole thing. I mean, you actually have a whole company that builds these submarines. That's my daughter's enterprise. Daughter and son-in-law took over. But you started it back in the day. Yeah, I did, but it wasn't the first time.

The first time I teamed up with engineers was after I used the gym suit, this diving suit that looks like an astronaut suit. Right. Or the Michelin Man. And went down to 400 meters off the coast of Hawaii and walked around for two and a half hours, mindful that it was about the same length of time

that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. But they didn't see anything live except each other. I saw this amazing, just this kaleidoscope of creatures. And it was dark. I could just barely see up from down the faintest gray up and deepest dark black flow. But these creatures, including bamboo coral that flash with this amazing firefly kind of light, well, actually like a blue light. Fireflies tend to be golden in their color, but in the ocean, this blue fire is just so amazing.

And like 90% of the creatures in the deep sea or even in shallow water at night, you can see bioluminescence almost everywhere. Yeah, the bioluminescence thing is unbelievable. I mean, that was, so you're at like 1,280 feet, still the deepest that any woman has ever gone, correct, to this day, putting your eyes on something that no human being had ever seen up close

and personal ever before. I mean, it was also this great age of exploration, right? You talk about the, when you went on that initial six week expedition with the 70 men, the mandate was to explore. Right, exactly. Like, we're here to explore, this is what human beings do.

And there was that era of NASA and space exploration and oceanic exploration that marked a very special time that is kind of a bygone era. Like we don't value that to the extent. It really is not. You just, if that's, when you think what we have learned in the past half century which some people say the great era of exploration

was like in the 1700, the 15, 16, 1700s, maybe tiptoeing into the 1800s with the Challenger expedition that for the first time really circumnavigated the world and with a mission of exploration. But when you think it isn't just the skies above where our mandate is to go explore. Now we know what we could not know before, and every new discovery leads to new discoveries in a much deeper and even more meaningful way. Like the diversity of life, we once were really focused on species, that if you had two of anything, like the Endangered Species Act, well, okay, you know, as long as you've got a viable population, and basically a small population would do,

well, now we understand that doesn't cut it. It really doesn't. Species all by themselves, and the fact that the ocean has more diversity of life and going beyond species, looking at the main divisions of life, like the 30 or so great conduits of life, kinds of life,

they're all out there in the ocean. In the book, The Ocean Odyssey, we celebrate that diversity with something really kind of special. National Geographic figured out how to take a four double page, what's eight pages? It's four pages that you fold out both sides. And there is the kind of the history of life on earth and,

and full living color. Some of these divisions of life have not previously been discovered until my watch on my time on the earth. Like the whole, not only the kingdom, but this great category called archaea that now we know are associated with the manganese nodules in the deep sea. They're associated with hydrothermal vents. They look like bacteria, but they're as different from bacteria as elephants are from ferns. I mean, they're really different. Or I should say fungi, because it's in a different kingdom. So they occur in us, the digestive systems of cows. And they're in the water column. We didn't even know they existed until discovered in the late 1970s, associated with hydrothermal vents offshore from the Galapagos, two miles beneath the surface.

Now we know they're everywhere, kind of everywhere. And what else is out there? The organism that generates maybe as much as 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, prochlorococcus, a nerdy word, but kids can master words like poinsettia and Lollapalooza. They ought to be able to articulate Kids can master words like poinsettia and Lollapalooza. They ought to be able to articulate prochlorococcus.

It's fancy sounding, but anyway. These are little green, blue-green bacteria that have existed almost among the earliest photosynthesizers on the planet. So spanning like more than 2 billion years. And they're still with us. And they're doing the heavy lifting, capturing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, generating oxygen, providing the basis along with diatoms and cocalithophorids,

another nice name that you should learn. Call them cocos if you want, but coccolithophores. What's wrong with that? And other organisms that are doing this amazing function that keeps us alive. We didn't even know prochlorococcus existed until 1986. We didn't even know prochlorococcus existed until 1986. And it was on an expedition in some of the clearest ocean water on the planet, off Bermuda, in the Sargasso Sea. Penny Chisholm, an MIT scientist with her colleagues, used a new technique for looking at chlorophyll,

looking at microorganisms in the water column. And they found this minute creature. It's thought to be perhaps the smallest cell. It's tiny, but there are a lot of them. And they're throughout the tropical and temperate waters right down to the waters in polar seas. And variations on the theme, it's not just one kind of prochlorococcus, but together this family of microbes

making our existence possible. And we don't, who knows? Chlorococcus, a few crazy scientists, but we need to celebrate it. We celebrate it in the book we hope everybody will get on board and say thank you and keep the chemistry of the ocean at a level that is favorable to them but as we warm the planet as we acidify the ocean as we put toxic materials and exotic things in the ocean, there'll be winners and losers.

And I hope Prochlorococcus is among the winners because overall there are estimates that the level of phytoplankton in the ocean is on decline, perhaps by as much as 40% since 1950s. 40%. So don't despair. Realize that they're mostly still out there. If we change our behavior,

we can shift in a direction more favorable, not just to pro Chlorococcus perhaps, but we know that we can do things that are more favorable to us. So the book, "'Ocean, A Global Odyssey," I mean, it's a remarkable and beautiful book that's very encyclopedic in its scope.

It captures the majesty of the ocean. It addresses the problems that we have, but it's really kind of a celebration and it's a sort of choose your own adventure. I mean, you can open up to any page and go down a rabbit hole of one particular aspect of ocean life. But I suppose the question is like, why this book now?

Like what inspired you to do? You've written like 20 books over the years. Like, what is it about this project that you felt compelled to express now? Well, the first ocean Atlas that I did for National Geographic was about 30 years ago. And then I did another one. When I did that, I said, before the ink is dry,

we'll have to do another one because we've learned so much so fast and sorry it wasn't quite that long ago but it was a while ago I can't remember the actual publication date but what I said was absolutely true

that we kept learning new things that put the book out of date and I said we have to do another one the next one I did was published in 2008. And I said the same thing. We're learning so much so fast. We're going to have to start keeping notes on the next one. So this book is really the distillation of previous attempts to size up what we now know and to anticipate what we don't know and to encourage people to at least get up to speed with what is now out there and to enjoy this greatest era of exploration and do their best to keep up with it.

That this is like a baseline of what we now know, something we can look back on in 10 years, like 2030, and say, all right, how did we do? Where are we? Here's what we knew back in 2021. And there was a call at that time, the next 10 years, the most important, the next 10,000 years. This mapping endeavor, this era of exploration

that now nations are coming together, the decade of ocean research is now we're now just embarking on this this concerted effort to answer these questions and put things in perspective and i did not undertake this all by myself you know i had a team of people working at national geographic to gather information. Had you seen this? Or had you checked out that? Or how about this?

Or had you talked with so-and-so? And their voices of those others are in there. They're several dozen visionaries, champions, who are not only looking at the state of knowledge and are enhancing it with their work, but are also a number of the individuals, the heroes that are celebrated there are doing something about it, trying to safeguard the ocean, safeguard the earth, armed with unprecedented knowledge, but also understanding the precautionary principle. Given the unknowns,

why would we dare exploit places that we have not yet explored, like the deep sea? How can we possibly, in good conscience, go out in the high seas and just rip holes through those tightly knit communities of life because we can, just because we can. And because they're subsidized, we can. And there's a market for it. We can. No, we should look ourselves in the mirror and say, we've got to stop this. We have to use whatever power of the marketplace of choice, this. We have to use whatever power of the marketplace of choice, of influence, to just do everything we can to embrace the remaining natural wild places, land and sea, and to safeguard them early and understand why we need them. And they need us to really reverse the trend of decline while we still have time.

What percentage of the ocean is currently under some level of protection? It's very small. On the land about 15%. 15, that's actually higher than I thought. No, yeah, well, it's beginning to scale up. Not long ago, it was maybe 12%. Yeah.

So we're getting a little bit better, but we need to do it scaling up and speeding up. Identify places here in California, in your backyard. You can make your backyard better, even if you're already doing a pretty good job of planting wildflowers and wild plants and seeing how much of the the land in your community in your city needs to be paved over can we release rivers there's a move now to what they call daylighting rivers that are now in culverts

to be a better source of absorbing rain when it falls instead of letting it run off and causing problems in the ocean and flooding that is harming our infrastructure. There are things that now armed with these new technologies, GIS technologies, we can look high in the sky and bore down into the ground itself and find out what are the actions we can take that for me personally and for my community, for my country, for the world, will make it a better place. Individuals are stepping up and planting a milkweed so the migrating monarch butterflies

can have their sustenance back. We've taken away their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and their numbers have been dropping precipitously as our numbers have increased. dropping precipitously as our numbers have increased. And if we want to have a world with monarchs and birds and coral reefs and the things that we aesthetically value, we know what to do. We need to make life better for them. And we can do it one backyard or one community garden at a time. But we don't have time to waste. No, you've mentioned a couple times this 10 year window

that is really this crucial period of time in which we have to act and start to, really turn this thing around. You also have this initiative, the 30 by 30 initiative, right? So by 2030 to protect 30%. So tell me about that. To further respond to your question, the real number for ocean protection

is about 3%, a little less than 3%. And that means 97% is open for fishing of various sorts, including this half the world open for large-scale industrial fishing. Half of the world. That's 60% of the ocean. Well, of the high seas. And then within national waters altogether, 97% is open for taking. And drilling is done in a large portion of this. Obviously, their action is now being taken. But mining, opening up the deep sea and the high seas or in coastal waters for mining is such a mistake at this point in time when we see decline all around us, and continuing the large-scale extraction of wildlife,

it's perverse. We need to protect wildlife. We get it. Got to protect the birds, got to protect the trees. Well, what about protecting the fish instead of eating them all? If you have to, if it's your sustenance, okay. But if you're just taking them because it's fun, the joy of killing something, or because you're using fish for money, and again, I take it that there are coastal communities and island countries that have this habit of cutting their trees to sell for lumber, and we're beginning to see alarm and people coming stepping up and say i'm going to pay you not to kill the trees because everybody benefits from having the trees so far there hasn't been much in the way of those who say stop killing the fish everybody

needs the fish all of us benefit from having them capturing the carbon, maintaining wild systems. The fabric of life is at risk because of what we're doing on an industrial scale to ocean wildlife. Give them a break. No, it's beginning. But I feel sometimes as if I'm regarded as a crazy person because I say such things. It's just because I see it so clearly. I can't not share the view. Yeah, well, I think the world is catching up to you,

Sylvia, finally. I'm hopeful about that. I know you are. How do you, you're so vital, you have such good energy and so much of it. And at your age, like how do you power that, keep that battery powered? You know, people discriminate against one another

for various reasons. You're too tall, you're too short, you're too fat, you're too thin, you're this color, you're that color. Ageism is another one. People look at me and they say, you're too old. It used to be, you're too young. You can't do that. Or you're that color ageism is another one people look at me and they say you're too old used to be you're too young you can't do that or you're a girl you can't do that i say it's mostly what you think you can do of course there are limitations that if you're sick or you have problems with walking or whatever but you should be allowed to define what your limits are.

Oh, 100%. I mean, I think a big piece of it, if I could be so bold, and this is projecting, is that you have this thing that you feel so strongly about, that you're so passionate about, it's work that has no end. There is a sense of responsibility and a calling in service to something greater than yourself. And I think there's something about that equation

and the people that I know that kind of live in that space seem to be much more vital through their later years than other people that I know in my life. Yeah, I can't stand the thought that people feel bored. I want to say to everyone who says, I'm bored. Okay, I'll take your time. I'd love to have your time. I'll use it. Give it to me. You don't know what to do with yourself. There's so many ways to go. The books I haven't yet read that are, they're sitting there taunting me. Read me, read me.

Places I haven't been. What, where do you wanna go? Like what is, what's on the horizon or what gets you excited in terms of projects for the future? Well, I haven't seen all of the hope spots personally yet. The deep sea beckons always everywhere everywhere even in places that you think you know like here along the coast of california who has been a thousand feet down to see who lives there

and and make the relationship to what is going on above during the national geographic goldman foundation noah project called sustainable for five years, we actually use little submersibles to go on ships and visit the national marine sanctuaries that, quite frankly, aren't very much, don't protect life that's there. You can fish squid off Monterey, for example, and sport fishing is encouraged in most of the marine sanctuaries. So I consider the managed areas helpful, but not all that useful in terms of real protection. But okay, so in Monterey, we had a teacher who joined the project, learned how to drive these little one-person subs, and got his kids, his high school kids, to learn to dive during the year that we really focused on the California coast. And there was a period when our whole expedition landed in monterey the kids had been studying methods of assessing the nature of life

down to 80 feet using scuba doing transect studies counting the fish looking at the animals and relating it to the kelp forests and the sea otters and the birds above and then their teacher came along as a submarine pilot and went down not to 80 feet he went down to 800 feet and what he saw no kelp no sea otters no abalone the place was owned by brittle stars and basket stars and creatures like little shrimp that were spaced a certain distance apart. They look like cars parked in a parking lot. They were just all lined up on a muddy bottom that underneath that mud was not just, you know, yuck, filled with creatures like another city beneath the bottom of the ocean. And it was like, this is Monterey as well as this is Monterey. And we didn't get down to 8,000 feet, but that would be another version of what we think we know as Monterey. So the opportunity that I really want to seize and take advantage of this point in time is to go deeper, stay longer, really get to know

where most of life on earth actually lives, in the dark, below where divers can go. And I want others to go too. I want to democratize access to the sea and be around long enough to see my grandkids out there just enjoying the view, if you will, and kids everywhere. This is a time when I think we're going to begin to see what life on earth is really about as we gain access to the hey when i was a child there used to be talk about hey maybe the moon is made of green cheese you know let's go find out but the idea of actually going to the moon when i was 10 years old that was so unrealistic

the thought now of going down to have kids explore the ocean seems so unrealistic. The idea of people making choices that don't include what we lump together as seafood seems so unrealistic. But, you know, if you don't aim for something, you'll never get to that place. You might stumble on it somehow, but we need to get to a better place by conscious action. We know what to do. And so I'm ready to go. As long as I can breathe, I'm ready to go. Well, I can't think of a better way to land this enterprise,

this conversation than what you just shared with me. Thank you for that. It's so eloquently and beautifully stated. And that is an aspiration that I think we can all inhabit in our own way. So I appreciate you so much and aspire to your level of hopefulness and activism. And if there's anything I can do to support you,

I just really appreciate you coming here today. One thing, maybe a last thing is just to, while you're looking in the mirror, just imagine that you didn't have the capacity to do that. Even if you can't see, to evaluate the gift of life, imagine not having that. And why not savor every moment and value it, enjoy it? And when you're starting to feel doom and gloom,

just realize that you have the power that no previous people on earth have. That's the power of understanding who we are, where we've come from, where we might go. The power of knowing that superpower. I think of it that way. And get up and get going. And don't think that it's all over. It isn't until it's over. And it's not over.

And what you do can empower the next generation just as what we have now has been empowered by the previous ones, plural, through all time. We are right at the cutting edge of the latest and greatest of what all humans have been able to figure out and deliver. And here we are, lucky us to savor it. Lucky us. It's not over, but it is an important time.

And we have to take it seriously. And we need to be more conscious about our daily actions and our behaviors, but those are things that we're all capable of doing and we're all empowered to be able to make positive changes in our lives. So thank you for setting the tone and blazing the path. So yeah, I appreciate you.

The book is beautiful. It's called Ocean, A Global Odyssey. It is a book that is packed with so much beautiful information and something you could probably display on any coffee table. It's really exquisitely rendered. So congratulations on the book. If people want to dive into your world, literally

and figuratively, beyond the book, can they get involved with Mission Blue or like, where do you like to direct people who want to learn more about you and contribute? Yeah, absolutely. Get involved, support Mission Blue. We are connected to more than 200 other organizations that we partner with them. Find an organization that is local or national or international that somehow strums your heartstrings. You say, I like what they're doing. Let me sign up with them. And for sure, National Geographic. I fell in love with National Geographic when I was a kid.

It was my library and my television, if you will, before television existed. I could travel the world. Right. And it's still like that. Were you the first explorer in residence? I was number three. Number three. Wow.

But now they've expanded that whole concept and are supporting a wonderful network of young explorers who are just at the beginning of their awakening to what they can do in places all over the world. And so it's really exciting to have been a part of that Explorer program that is in the DNA of National Geographic, but to really have them focus on supporting individuals the way they have come to be since, well, the late 1990s. I came on board in 1998. Yeah. And they've tolerated me ever since. I think they've done a little bit more than that.

Well, come back and talk to me again sometime, will you? Appreciate it. Thank you. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest,

including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube

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the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering

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