Mission Blue: Protect and Restore the Oceans, Earth's Blue Heart

Sylvia Earle is the president and chief executive officer of Deep Ocean Technology and Deep Ocean Engineering in Oakland, California. She was the first woman to serve as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States agency that conducts underwater research, manages fisheries, and monitors marine spills. Her many publications include Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (Ballantine Books, 1995).

At this remarkable point in history, we need to pull together. More has changed in the last century, certainly in the last half century, maybe even in the last twenty-five years, than during all preceding human history.

Concerning the ocean, we have learned more since the middle of the twentieth century than during all preceding history. When Rachel Carson wrote her book The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, much of what children now know, no one knew: about the existence of great mountain chains down the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, about the occurrence of life even in the deepest sea, about the way the ocean drives climate, weather, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, the oxygen cycle, the basic functionings of the planet.

Knowledge and Responsibility

Now we know what we didn’t know. Now we have seen, not just a new explosion of knowledge and the ability to communicate knowledge, but at the same time as we’ve learned more we’ve lost more. During this time when our population has expanded at a rate that, again, is unprecedented in human history, the pressures on the natural world that keeps us alive are really profound. And here’s the thing: there are other creatures on the planet that are intelligent, “smart” if you will. Think about dolphins, chimpanzees, whales, elephants, cats, dogs, horses. They have intelligence, but they don’t know, they can’t know, what we know. Only we have the capacity to go high in the sky and look back on Earth and see that this is it, this little blue speck in the universe. Only we have the capacity to dive to the deepest places in the ocean. Only we have the ability to communicate on the scale at which we do communicate at this point in history.

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that much remains to be learned and incorporated. What we now know isn’t really incorporated into the policies of the governments that we rely on to guide us through the present and future. We’re still basing much of what we do on knowledge that is decades old.

Today, in talking about the ocean we can use video clips. It’s wonderful to be able to do this, to hold the whole world in your hands. When I was a child, this was not possible. I could have a globe of the world, but I didn’t know about the mountains, didn’t know about the hydrothermal vents, couldn’t go to a place vicariously such as the Juan Fernandez Islands. Google Earth did not exist, let alone the ocean in Google Earth. My fellow-speaker Jack Dangermond didn’t have Esri, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the company that has so transformed our way of looking at the land and looking at the sea, enabling us to dive in and explore and see what we couldn’t see, what many people still don’t see, about the nature of this little blue speck in the universe.

This entire conference really highlights the need for gathering data, organising it, disseminating it, so that we can make better decisions going forward. We humans have this unique power to draw on our deep past and the deep history of the earth, something dolphins can’t do, something our fellow primates can’t do. We have, not just the capacity to do this, we have the responsibility, knowing what we know and being able to anticipate the future like no other creature on Earth. We need to use the powers that we have, the special blessing that humans have, to act not just in our own immediate self-interest, but in the interest of all that follows. The decisions that we make in the next ten years are likely to be the most important in the next ten thousand years, because we’re right at the edge—now we know—of losing much that we heretofore could, and did, and to some extent still do, take very much for granted.

Blue Carbon

There’s much interest in today’s climate-change discussions about the role of carbon in shaping the character of the world. The value is now being recognised of the natural systems that extract carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it. What most people have not appreciated and what we’re just beginning to recognise and put on the balance sheet is the role in carbon sequestration of coastal systems—mangroves, marshes, sea-grass meadows. These systems are of course abundant in the body of water that is just offshore from where we are gathered here this morning in Abu Dhabi.

Here, as well all over the world, these coastal systems have been degraded at a rate even greater than the loss of forests on the land. And yet mangroves are now known to gather and sequester up to fifty times as much carbon as their terrestrial counterparts. Mangroves, of course, are forests too, but their roots are out there in the ocean.

There’s so much that we need to think about and add to our calculations. How do we go forward? What does nature provide that we don’t how to duplicate, even with all the technologies that we currently have available to us? The sea-grass meadows not only gather and sequester carbon and provide food and shelter for organisms in the sea, they also generate a significant part of the oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s that process that started more than three billion years ago—photosynthesis. Photosynthesis shaped the world over the thousands of millennia that have preceded the present time and made it hospitable for the likes of us. Imagine a world where the oxygen in the atmosphere was not 20 per cent. That was certainly the case through a large piece of the time that precedes the present. It isn’t just sea-grass meadows and marshes and mangroves, it’s also a whole host of other photosynthetic organisms in the sea such as Halimeda, variations on a theme in tropical waters that contribute much in terms of gathering and sequestering carbon.

Carbonate sands around the world, especially in tropical areas, are really a significant factor yet to be accounted for. Not only do they photosynthesise, not only do they produce food, they actually have a calcium-carbonate structure much like that of coral reefs.

Coral reefs themselves are clearly carbon-based units and hold carbon in place and therefore are sequestering it and have done so over hundreds of thousands of years. Up to 90 per cent of coral reefs, so-called coral reefs, may actually consist of coralline algae—photosynthetic organisms that not only live within the tissue of coral reefs but also around the base and cracks and crevices, sometimes like pink paint over the rocks. In deep water down at least two hundred metres, in some cases more than that, you may see red algae growing. Not all of them have calcium carbonate in their structure, but many of them do. And this, too, needs to be on the balance sheet when we think, “Where does carbon go, how is it retained in the ocean?” When looking at and considering the carbon cycle, we now have the means, as we did not until recently, to explore the ocean, to understand the blue part of the planet that truly dominates the way the world works.

Ocean Exploration: A Vital Task

We’ve invested in what goes skyward—aviation, aerospace—and it has paid off handsomely. We have neglected the ocean, and it is costing us dearly because of the level of ignorance about the way the world works. Only about 5 per cent of the ocean has ever been seen, let alone explored or mapped in the same degree of detail as the land or the Moon, or Mars or Jupiter. What are we thinking? This planet, this blue planet, needs to be really explored and understood because, after all, it does keep us alive.

Owing to developments mostly in the last part of the twentieth century, and owing to Jacques Cousteau and his colleague Emile Gagnan, anybody in this room might be able to put on a tank and breathe air underwater and go down to at least fifty metres beneath the surface. If you haven’t tried, then don’t miss out. My mother waited until she was eighty-one and scolded me for not getting her into the ocean sooner. So I don’t want any of you to scold me for not encouraging you to explore the ocean personally. And if you just don’t like to get wet, there are now some new means, little submersibles that are like getting into a little sports car and driving off into the ocean, so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it, and I’m living proof.

Now there are dozens of options for exploring the oceans below where divers can go. Of course, there are tens of thousands of options for going high in the sky. People go there reading books and watching movies as I did, as high in the sky as the ocean is deep in its deepest places, but only two people have gone to the deepest place in the ocean, fifty-one years ago—seven miles down, 11 kilometres down. We have neglected the ocean and it’s costing us dearly. There is time, but not a lot, to make up for the gaps technologically, focusing on the reality that the ocean matters. The ocean drives the carbon cycle and it has been off the balance sheet to a large extent; perhaps this conference, this morning, may be able to set the stage for accounting for the blue part of the carbon cycle.

Deep in the ocean, down to almost a thousand feet in places, green creatures can endure and grow. There are calcium carbonate–infused red algae, photosynthesising, generating food, generating oxygen, sequestering carbon in the deep waters of the ocean—not quite to a thousand feet, but then most of the ocean hasn’t been seen. We don’t really know what the maximum depth for photosynthesis is. There are some submersibles in the world, not too many, that go to half the ocean’s depth, about six thousand metres. Russia has two such systems. China is building one to go to seven thousand metres, soon to be deployed. India is in the process of building a six-thousand-metre sub. France has one such system. Japan has one such system. Not much in terms of a fleet to explore most of Earth when you consider what we have available to see the rest of the planet. But in recent decades, these little dips into the ocean that we now do have produced some amazing discoveries, including the importance of chemosynthesis, fixing carbon in ways other than photosynthesis, in the absence of light. There is another whole process out there that we have yet to evaluate when we talk about the carbon cycle, food production, carbon sequestration. What is going on in the deep sea around these hydrothermal vents and in other places where hydrogen sulphide and methane are driving other cycles of life?

At the surface of the seas, that’s where we focus, where we have most information and where we know that much of the carbon is being gathered, and to some extent sequestered as it enters the food chains. Out in the Atlantic Ocean there is a floating golden forest of photosynthetic life—sargassum—in the Sargasso Sea, providing shelter for a unique system of creatures, but also generating oxygen, grabbing carbon dioxide, helping to play a part in making the world function.

The blue ocean, the high seas and most of the surface water of the world, whether it’s in shallow waters close to shore or out hundreds of miles at sea, this is truly the blue engine that is driving the way the world works. It’s where most of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from. It’s where most of the carbon goes into micro-organisms so small that in a spoonful of water that might look perfectly clear, there may be a hundred thousand of the little creatures called Prochlorococcus that produce about one in every five breaths you take all by themselves. Twenty per cent of oxygen comes from a kind of cyanobacteria, blue–green algae, bacteria, of whose existence we didn’t know until 1986, so they’re not even in many textbooks. We don’t even appreciate how much oxygen comes from the sea, but with every breath you take you are connected to the ocean no matter where on the planet you live. Yes, forests on the land are really important for generating oxygen, but the forests in the sea, those micro-forests of small creatures, are critically important to shaping not just what happens in the ocean but certainly what happens on the land as well.

Some important little creatures are called coccolithophorids. Perhaps you’ll see their names on T-shirts some day because they, too, contribute significantly to every breath you take, oxygen in the atmosphere. They are shelled with calcium carbonate, so they are also carbon sinks. There are sediments on the sea floor that are hundreds of metres thick with the bodies of these creatures that have accumulated over millions of years.

Of course, the ocean is filled with life of all sorts. When I dive into the ocean it’s like diving into the history of life on Earth. All of the major divisions of life are there. Only about half occur on the land in any form. The ocean truly is where the action is as far as Earth is concerned. There are so many creatures to which we have yet to give names; there are only 250,000 variations on the theme of life that we know about in the sea, but it’s estimated that is just a small fraction of the number yet to be discovered. We know how to eat a lot of these creatures. We know what they taste like, even if we aren’t fully aware of their role in what makes the world go round. They are, however, as Otto Leopold characterised the species that inhabit Earth, the nuts, the bolts, the cogs, the wheels that hold the planet together. And every fish, like every tree, is a carbon-based unit, and as long as it stays in the ocean it is sequestering the carbon, not releasing it into the atmosphere.

Plundering the Seas

But in recent times we’ve developed technologies that are really good at extracting wild life from the sea. We have pretty much given up extracting large quantities of wildlife from the land to feed people, commercially that is. We still take a few birds and little furry things for food from the land, but in the ocean it’s still a major activity. Close to a hundred million tons of carbon-based units—lobsters, shrimps, crabs, oysters and fish—we take from the sea every year. Sharks, abundant when I was a child, are really suffering now because of our new appetite for them. I used to worry about man-eating sharks. Now we have to worry about man (and woman, too) eating sharks because we are consuming them. Only about 10 per cent of the sharks remain. This is true, too, of creatures that were really abundant when I was child, tuna. They are a big deal for many countries economically, though they really are a luxury item. They don’t feed all that many people, but they certainly are economically important to some nations at this point. But given that their numbers—blue-fin tuna in particular—are down to, say, 10 per cent of what they were when I was a child, this cannot continue at the present pace if there are to be tuna to share space with us on into the next century or even beyond the middle of this century. When I was the chief scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I had information come across my desk that said that in the Atlantic blue-fin tuna were down to 10 per cent of what they had been in 1972. Well, that was in 1992. What is the figure today? Their numbers certainly have not prospered, given our appetite for them.

Or consider the little creature, the orange roughy, or deep-sea perch. Few people have ever seen one alive or even a picture of one. Few people have seen them or the way they’re caught. They see them swimming with lemon slices and butter on a plate rather than swimming out in the ocean. There’s a good reason for that: they live two thousand feet down and special nets are used to capture them. But here’s the thing: it takes thirty years for them to mature; they may live to be two centuries old; and we can do them in in about twenty minutes on our plate. This is truly not a sustainable endeavour. It’s true of many species that we’re taking from the sea today.

And it isn’t just what ultimately winds up on our plates that matters, it’s what we take in the process of gathering the wildlife from the sea. Our heavy-handed techniques remove carbon-based units that have taken two thousand years to grow; ancient deep-water coral is part of the cost of catching orange roughy from the deep waters in the southern hemisphere—one example of what happens when a trawl goes across the bottom of the ocean.

The destruction of these deep-water habitats is like catching songbirds with bulldozers. You destroy the forest and you shake out a few pounds of protein. We’re doing that to the ocean with our heavy-handed means of extracting wildlife from the ocean, carbon-based units that we are presently overlooking as we deliberate about how we should account for nature. How do we account for the carbon? We can think of many ways to mitigate environmental destruction. We can think of many ways to offset it. We can think of giving credits for protecting forests, but we must think about what we’re doing to the great blue engine that really is the cornerstone of what makes the planet function. We can’t disrupt that engine with heavy-handed techniques for extracting wildlife and still expect to prosper.

A New Ethic

It wasn’t many years ago that many nations thought it was normal to take our fellow mammals, the whales, and consume them for oil, bone and meat. Today, we look at whales and other marine mammals generally with a different attitude of respect. We understand that, living in the ocean, they have something that is of greater value to us than as products, as commodities. Not that they aren’t valuable as commodities, but there are other values that we are beginning to recognise. We’re getting out of the Neanderthal stage of our existence and into something that, if we use our special gifts, our talents, can take humankind forward with a place for ourselves within the natural systems that sustain us. We cannot do it by continuing to consume those natural systems and expect that the world will continue to work the way it always has. We now know that it doesn’t work, that the world is in trouble, the ocean is in trouble, and therefore so are we. We need a new way of looking at ocean wildlife, a new relationship, a new ethic.

Several of the speakers at this conference, Jane Goodall, certainly for one, have spoken eloquently of making peace with nature, of the ethics of our responsibility, not just for ourselves but for future generations. And one way that we can be respected by people fifty, a hundred, five hundred, five thousand years in the future, is to do everything in our power to protect what remains of the natural systems that keep us alive.

There is one place that at this point in history looks as though it may actually be given an insurance policy for the future.

I was in Australia just a couple of weeks ago where the declaration was made by the minister for the environment that close to a million square kilometres of the waters of Australia would be established for protection in the near future. And at this Eye on Earth conference, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, Henry Puna, announced his intention, his nation’s intention, by 2020 to have as much as 20 per cent of the Exclusive Economic Zone of his beautiful island-nation as a protected area and at least a million square kilometres of their ocean treasures protected by the time of the summit in Rio in June.

The Price of Failure

There is an alternative if we fail on our watch to take care of the planet. There’s Mars, our sister planet. Some people like to suggest that we could terraform Mars to be a better place for humans to live some day far in the future. Meanwhile, it would seem we are intent on “marsiforming” Earth, destroying the systems, the water, the green, the blue, that keep us alive.

We will determine the future of coral reefs. Half of them have either already gone or are in terrible shape based on the actions of the last century. The actions of the next ten years will determine whether there will or will not be coral reefs in the future. Blue carbon, blue Earth: it’s our home. It’s our only real home, and this is the only real time that we have to take decisions that will determine whether we can or cannot secure an enduring place for ourselves within the natural, mostly blue, systems that keep us alive.