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I'm Anush Zamorodi and this week we are diving back into the sea for part two of our Ocean
series.
And I want to start with the biggest underwater creature there is.
The whale.
Which despite its size can be really hard to spot.
They're huge but they live in this gigantic space.
70% of our planet right?
So you just stand and stare out of the horizon and you hope that an animal will turn up.
This is marine biologist Aasha DeVos and before she ever had a chance to see a whale, Aasha
fell in love with how they sound back in college.
I did a project on sperm whales and their acoustics and I was listening to this cacophony and
I was just like, you know, this world sounds so remarkable.
These are the clicking sounds that sperm whales make.
So sperm as of the largest tooth whales and so when we listen to them they just have these
beautiful patterns, these are clicks that they use for communicating with each other,
for finding their food and stuff like that.
And this is a humpback whale.
They have the most complex sounds.
They're super beautiful.
They evolve.
I mean, it's quite magical.
But Aasha says whale songs are more than beautiful.
They help whales echolocate to find food and navigate their environment.
Their eyesight isn't very good and so their world really depends so heavily on their
abilities to hear.
And of course to communicate with each other like mothers probably reprimanding their babies.
But looking for mates, right?
Calling out, hate beautiful.
There's a response.
We have to talk to each other.
How else are we going to have more whales in our future?
Aasha grew to love whales even more when she finally had the chance to observe them up
close.
It all began with an encounter with six blue whales and a floating pile of whale poop off
the southeast coast of Sri Lanka and that's literally my really common.
Because Aasha says whale poop.
Yes, whale poop.
It's pretty spectacular.
Oh my goodness, it is the most beautiful animal poop ever.
Wait, what is so beautiful about whale poop?
It's bright red.
Literally, it's like brick red in color and that's because these whales feed on shrimp.
So one thing is it's really easy to find for researchers like myself who think whale poop
is the business.
But you know, it is like poop is a clue to the secret world, right?
Like it allows us to learn more about what they feed on.
But it's also incredibly important for our environment.
Here's Aasha de Vaz on the TED stage.
As whales dive to the depth to feed and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually
release these enormous fecal plumes.
This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the
depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phyta plankton that forms
the base of all marine food chains.
So really having more whales in the oceans pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem.
Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals.
As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that
have it to places that need it.
But what's really cool is that they're also really important after their death.
Whale carcasses provide a feast to some 400 odd species, including the eel-shaped slime-producing
hagfish.
Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tonnes of carbon, which is the
equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans
and therefore help to delay global warming.
So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses
from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographical distribution of these
whale falls.
And as a result, probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized
and dependent on these carcasses for their survival.
You know, I don't think I ever realized how important whales are to all the life cycles
that are taking place in the oceans.
And it sort of sounds like 200 years ago that was the ideal.
Like the ecosystems were thriving, whales are pooping, they're dying in exactly the right
places and life in the ocean is flourishing.
Then of course, we humans come along and we kind of screw everything up.
Yeah, so we basically reduced populations of whales down to maybe like 10 to 20% of pre-wailing
numbers, which is a huge blow because these are gigantic animals that as you can tell,
have many roles to play in the oceans.
And these things are so deeply interconnected that it's almost like a game of jenga.
You take a piece out and take another piece out and it starts to wobble and you take
that third piece out and all collapses because everything's so deeply intertwined.
So you think about that drastic impact that we had over those years of wailing and the
long-lasting impacts and we're still trying to recover from that.
Over centuries, humans have treated the ocean as a place of endless resources.
Now, between overfishing, carbon emissions, pollution and more, our oceans are in trouble,
but it's not too late.
And so today on the show, saving our seas, an SOS from the ocean.
From our small, individual actions to big community efforts, what we can all do to stop the
destruction of our underwater ecosystems.
And why conservation isn't just about saving marine life, but also saving our planet.
This isn't the first time that we've tried to save the ocean and the whales.
In the 70s, the Save the Whales movement became one of the most successful conservation campaigns
ever.
Save the whales.
We're funky miles in the world.
Mainstream culture fell in love with whales.
There were bumper stickers, t-shirts, flyers, petitions and even entire albums like Roger
Payne's songs of the humpback whale.
That concerted effort, those voices really made a difference because as a result, there
were, you know, it was a domino effect.
The International Whaling Commission moved forward and put down this moratorium to stop
whaling.
And so it was a time of change.
And the whales that are coming back today, that's all thanks to the work that was done,
you know, a few decades ago by people coming together and saying, this is not going to
work, we have to protect our whales.
Let's save the whales.
So the Save the Whales movement really worked for stopping commercial whaling worldwide.
But whales are still facing a lot of issues today.
First, ship strikes.
All across the world, we have these massive shipping highways transporting goods throughout
the world.
And these shipping lanes often overlap with really important areas for these whales, like
their feeding grounds, for example.
And so they can actually hit them and it can be lethal and these animals can die.
Another problem, fishing nets.
If they get entangled at depth, they can't come up to the surface to breed so they drown.
And as mammals, they do have to come to the surface to breed.
And if they get entangled at the surface, they can't dive down to the depths to feed so
then they can stop.
And finally, something we hardly ever think about in the ocean, sound pollution.
Now in areas where you have a heavy ship traffic, for example, what can happen, especially
with species like the blue whales, is that the sound that the vocalization that they create
is at the same frequency as noise created by the ship.
So it's like being at a cocktail party, for example.
Everyone's talking at the same time and you know someone said your name but you don't
know where that sound is coming from.
You know, it's just a murmur of sound.
And so for whales, if everything's at the same frequency, if I'm talking to you and
someone's also talking across us at the same volume, at the same frequency, then I can't
hear you.
So how do I find my mate?
But it also must be like pretty exhausting for these animals to have noise, constantly
bombarding them day in and day out.
Yeah, you know, I think it is incredibly stressful.
And I think a beautiful study that was actually done off the east coast of the US and they
were looking at stress hormones in whale poop samples, right?
And so when 9-11 happened, they looked at the samples and very surprisingly, they found
that the whales were less stress soon after 9-11.
Wow, exactly, right?
So they stopped the shipping in the Bay of Fundy for a short period of time.
Ship noise dropped and that was reflected in the stress levels of these whales, right?
So we don't think about that and stress is, you know, it's a silent killer, right?
Like, it can impact reproductive capabilities, it can affect mother calf pairs, right?
If there's too much noise, the mother calf maybe can't communicate.
What if they get separated, right?
There's a lot of knock on effects as a result as well.
Okay, so someone listening is like, all right, I get it.
The ocean is interconnected and whales, they affect so many other creatures and clearly
humans have a big impact too.
But what if that person listening is like, I don't even live near an ocean?
What can I possibly do?
Yeah, so, you know, I always tell people, you know, we obviously all roads lead to
Rome.
I always say all waterways lead to the ocean.
If you live anywhere, there's typically some water source, whether it's a tiny spring
or the water near tap or a big lake or a river, everything that goes in there washes out
into the ocean, right?
And so we are connected.
I think we can all make a difference.
I think we can all start to think about our individual lives, our individual capacities,
our consumer habits, right?
Like what plastics are we using, where are we dumping it?
But also just simple things like sharing the stories, right?
You know, we talk so much about the conservation issues which create apathy, right?
But I want people to talk about the conservation winds.
I want people to talk about that magic, about how beautiful, blue-weather poop is, right?
How amazing the sounds are and the fact that that's how they see their work.
I want people to remember that there's a lot of amazing things that happen out there
and that ocean does truly, truly keep us alive.
That's marine biologist Asha Divas.
You can find her full talk at TED.com.
On the show today, an SOS from the ocean.
I'm Manou Shzumarodi and you're listening to the TED radio hour from NPR.
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I'm a new summer Odie and today on the show, ways that we can help save our oceans and
the fish that swim in them.
We need to change our relationship with the ocean.
Our expectation that we will have heaps of fresh fish in the supermarket of whatever species
we desire every day of the year is completely out of sync with what nature can provide.
This is Ziana Elizabeth Johnson.
She's a marine biologist and also a policy analyst, a researcher, an inventor, a podcaster,
an expert and an expert to teach us how we can save the oceans.
And Iana says globally we have caught about 90% of large fish.
Tuna, salmon, shark, swordfish, they're all in trouble.
But what does that mean then for us when we go to the supermarket?
What else have we got here?
They've got sockeye salmon.
It does not specify.
Because knowing what's okay to buy can be confusing, even when you're trying your best.
Oh okay, so the snapper's rated yellow.
Some stores have a green, yellow and red color coded system.
And when you say some concerns are harm, what do you mean?
But can we be really sure that green is sustainable?
Wait a minute, they say they're rated but then it doesn't say what they are.
They're also terms like all natural or responsibly farmed.
There's branzini, farm raised and it says it's responsibly farmed.
And then there is sustainably caught.
I think that's good.
Sustainable does not have a legal definition.
Gotcha.
Responsibly and sustainably, these are not words that have clear standards or verification
processes or oversight.
Something like 20% of seafood is mislabeled in grocery stores.
And so when you say mislabel, do you mean like exaggerating the sustainability?
I mean, it's not even the species that they say it is.
Ooh.
You mislabel seafood for profit.
So you label it as whatever will get you the highest price or whatever you have a quota
for and it varies depending on the species up to like 40 or even 50% for things like
snapper and sea bass.
And like if it's not even the right species like are the other labels correct.
So if the consumer does, you know, do your dandas to do your research and pick things
that are sustainable, there's still a big chance that you would get it wrong through
really no fault of your own.
But like why is that? Why make it so hard for the consumer?
The supply chain is so opaque and there are so many steps in it and we really often
don't know where our seafood is coming from and about 80% of the seafood that we eat in
the US is imported.
80% it's coming from all over the world and also about one in four of the fish that we
eat here were actually caught in the US and probably sent overseas to Asia or other places
to be processed and then re-imported.
It's not really what we think about when we think about commodities trading or important
export but it really is.
And Diana says to keep up this complicated supply chain, industrial fishing vessels have
to hunt fish by the thousands.
There are these massive fishing vessels that have like full processing factories on board
often they're staying at sea for months if not years.
Often the labor conditions are abysmal and often fishing with nets the size of multiple
football fields or lines with hundreds if not thousands of hooks on them.
So we're talking about like a massive industry not like acute fishing trip.
That means using pretty sophisticated tools to track down the dwindling fish populations.
You have sonar, you have helicopters and spotter planes because we've overfished to such
an extent that we have to use the most advanced technology we have available to us in order
to find the fish.
And the shrimp industry uses some of the most harmful methods.
Shrimp is the most popular seafood in the United States and it's one of the least sustainable.
Often like 10% or less of what they catch is shrimp and the rest is thrown back dead.
And it's not just wild caught shrimp.
Farm shrimp often destroys mangroves and other coastal habitats usually in Southeast Asia
which makes those areas more prone to storms.
They use a lot of pesticides and antibiotics.
Worker exploitation is a huge problem.
So I would say if you're looking for just like a few things to cut out, give up shrimp
unless you know that it's like you know trap caught pink shrimp from Oregon because those
fisheries are sustainable and like really deliberate.
Okay.
So for most shrimp, farmed and wild are both bad so maybe just don't need it.
But for other fish is farmed better than wild.
I mean the answer is unfortunately it depends.
We need to think about the farmed fish.
What are they eating?
We're catching wild fish, small ones to feed to farmed fish that would be bigger ones.
Eating farmed carnivorous fish doesn't really make sense.
Right?
Like if we think about agriculture on land, would we farm lions?
Would we think that that is sustainable?
Like that is essentially what we're doing when we think about farming tuna or salmon.
These are magnificent fish which are quite high up the food chain.
Okay.
So then Iana, what would be your ideal shopping trip?
Like you devoid the shrimp, wild or farmed, you would avoid the bigger fish.
But then what would you eat?
I think the first thing I should say is as opposed to choosing fish from anywhere in the
world where you have no idea eating U.S. caught or locally caught seafood is a really good
start.
I personally support Iliamna fish company, this indigenous Alaskan family that fishes for
salmon in Bristol Bay, which is sustainable.
Eating lower on the food chain is another really important thing, right?
Instead of eating these top predators like tunas, we could be eating sardines and anchovies
that will be more sustainable.
Eating farmed shellfish, eating farmed seaweed, that is something you can feel comfortable
eating as much as you want.
So you know, enjoy.
I think it would be best for me to buy the small stuff, right?
Like anchovies.
I love anchovies and sardines.
They're a little too stinky for me, but if I want to stop eating like tuna steak, I
got to find something else that's delicious.
Iana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist.
You can find all her talks at TED.com.
Please check out her podcast, How to Save a Planet.
On the show today, an SOS from the ocean.
And Iana's recommendations are mainly for people living in developed, wealthier countries.
Not for island and coastal nations that depend on the ocean for their food and their livelihoods.
Like Madagascar.
Madagascas, the epicenter of global biodiversity.
It's one of the hottest of the hot global biodiversity, hot spots.
It's vast.
There are very few roads.
This is Alistair Harris.
He's a marine biologist who spent most of his career on the southern coast of the country.
And when there are no roads, of course, people are really, really dependent on natural resources
for food, for income, for identity.
The Verzu people of southern Madagascar believe that they came from the union of a mermaid
called Ampelamaninisa and an aficionment.
And that accounts for their knowledge of the tides and the seas and why they're such
staggeringly good fishermen.
Malagasy seafarers will sail vessels with no lights, no sounders, no engines, no GPS.
They'll navigate the most complex barrier and fringing reef systems with hostile swells
and incredibly dangerous tides.
Blindfolded almost except for the stars at night time.
So when we talk about helping fishermen and women, often it's not a question of finding
something else to do.
Fishing is what they do.
Fishing is how they define themselves as their identity.
Over the years, threats like industrial fishing and climate change jeopardize that identity.
Reefs once teaming with marine life were on the verge of collapsing.
So in 1998, Alistair Harris arrived, an eager young marine biologist with a big idea to save
both the reefs and traditional fishing practices.
Alistair continues his story from the TED stage.
I first landed on the island of Madagascar two decades ago on a mission to document its marine
natural history.
I was mesmerized by the coral reefs I explored and certain I knew how to protect them because
science provided all the answers.
Clothes, areas of the reef.
Permanently, coastal fishers simply needed to fish less.
I approached elders in the village of Andavodok and recommended that they close off the
healthiest and most diverse coral reefs to all forms of fishing, to form a refuge,
to help stocks recover because as the science tells us after five or so years, fish populations
inside those refuges would be much bigger.
Männishing the fished areas outside, making everybody better off.
That conversation didn't go so well.
We were laughed out of the room.
Were you literally laughed out of the room?
It was considered love.
Yeah, of course it was utterly naive and it bore no account of the economic reality that
they faced, which is fishing from one day to the next or what those people would do
while we're waiting for those stocks to recover.
Okay, so here you come, Englishman, going to the elders of these fishing communities
with your grand plans.
And just to be clear, what exactly were you suggesting?
Well we know that when we safeguard and set aside certain areas of ocean, perhaps 10,
20, 30% of the ocean within what we call a refuge in marine reserve, a protected area,
amazing things can happen.
The life that's closed off within that reserve will grow, it will reproduce, it will eventually
start to throw out much bigger fish, juveniles, larvae into the more fished areas outside
and help regenerate those areas as well as rebuild those fisheries.
So my initial idea was to work with communities to zone off areas of these reefs as these permanent
marine reserves.
Of course, the hubris involved in this.
The hubris involved in a 20-year-old, going to Madagascar with a view to doing something
about coral reef conservation, beggars belief, I appreciate that.
So they didn't go for the idea because you didn't really consider their day-to-day reality,
like even if it was a great idea, they have to feed their families like today, right?
Did their situation surprise you?
The scale of it was very shocking to me.
And seeing children in fishing communities go hungry at the same time is for an industrial
boats of fishing with impunity offshore, and this is going on around coasts like Madagascar
and low-income tropical coastal developing states year in, year out.
OK, so you have this initial setback, a bit of humiliation, but then you come up with
a new idea.
Well, not exactly a new idea, really more a new framing, right?
Absolutely.
That initial rejection taught me that conservation is at its core a journey in listening,
deeply, to understand the pressures and realities that communities face through their dependence
on nature.
This idea grew into an organization that brought a new approach to ocean conservation by
working to rebuild fisheries with coastal communities.
Then, as now, the work started by listening and what we learned astonished us.
Back in the dry south of Madagascar, we learned that one species was immensely important
for villages, this remarkable octopus.
The de-octopus octopus, cyanare, it's called, a hugely charismatic species, but it's a very
lucrative fishery, particularly for women in these coastal communities.
And it grows exponentially once it's settled on the coral reef.
And so we went back with another proposal, which was how about we just start with maybe
10% of the fishing ground, but only for one species and only for six months.
We think you're going to see some pretty explosive results.
The community thought so too, opting to close a small area of reef to octopus fishing
temporarily, using a custom-resocial code, invoking blessings from the ancestors to prevent
poaching.
When that reef re-opened to fishing six months later, none of us were prepared for what
happened next.
Catches, sword, with men and women landing more and bigger octopus than anyone had seen
for years.
Neighboring villages saw the fishing boom and dropped their own closures, spreading the
model virally along hundreds of miles of coastline when we ran the numbers.
We saw that these communities, among the poorest on Earth, had found a way to double their
money in a matter of months by fishing less.
One closure became three closures and then five.
Fast forward and we've seen hundreds and hundreds along thousands of kilometers of coastline.
We've studied the impacts of these closures and they've led to really important and significant
increases in catches, more and larger animals that mean higher incomes for these communities.
So it's been a real fisheries management success entirely from the bottom up and it's
gone to about a dozen countries now.
So these closures then, is this the way forward for conservation in these fishing communities?
Well, that in and of itself is not necessarily a conservation effort.
That's just focusing on those target fisheries.
But I guess you could liken it to a catalyst that has enabled us to then revisit those first
conversations about, well, how about we close off those areas now that we know what can
happen?
So is it kind of like bridging the needs and the rights of the local people with the desires
of the scientists and conservationists?
That's a really good question.
I guess we're trying to address what we might call conservation's people problem.
So the world I work in has an ugly history of conflict and human rights abuses which
have often set people and conservation against one another.
Now of course that's really not okay but it's also a massive paradox because fishermen
and women and conservationists really want the same thing, a healthy and diverse ocean.
The real magic went beyond profit.
Leaders from Andavodok joined force with two dozen neighbouring communities to establish
a vast conservation area along dozens of miles of coastline.
They outlawed fishing with poison and mosquito nets and set aside permanent refuges around
threatened coral reefs and mangroves including to my astonishment those same sites that I'd
flagged just two years earlier when my evangelism for marine protection was so roundly rejected
they created a community-led protected area, a democratic system for local marine governance
that was totally unimaginable just a few years earlier.
And they didn't stop there.
Within five years they'd secured legal rights from the state to manage over 200 square miles
of ocean eliminating destructive industrial trawlers from the waters.
So I guess to go back to your original hope Alistair when you first arrived in southern
Madagascar in addition to better fishing.
Are the reefs also healing?
We've helped those fishermen monitor those sites with scuba and every year the reefs are
getting healthier, the resident biomass that sheer quantity of fish in the water has got
greater and it's become a really important scientific reference site that's demonstrating
the power of locally-led marine conservation not just for fisheries but now also for
that broader objective of ecosystem conservation.
But we've got to a place that we could never have got to had we not put the interest
of those communities first.
That's Alistair Harris, he's a marine biologist and the executive director of Blue Ventures.
You can learn more at blueventures.org and you can watch his full talk at TED.com.
On the show today, an SOS from the ocean.
I'm Anouche Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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I'm Anush Zomarody and we want to end our series on the ocean with a look back at how
much our understanding about oceans has changed over the last century through the eyes of
a legend.
It's a three-year-old knocked over by a wave and life in the ocean has held my attention
ever since.
This is Oceanographer Sylvia Earl.
I'm a National Geographic Explorer and founder of Mission Blue.
Now, Dr. Earl, can I call you Sylvia or should I call you your deepness as you have been
referred to over the years?
You can call me whatever you like.
I've been called a lot of things over the years.
Sylvia is 85 years old now and what we've learned over the past six decades or so about
our oceans is in part thanks to her.
I remember a day when I was able to go in the ocean with someone who knows as much as
anybody in the world about what's underwater in our world.
Her name is Sylvia Earl.
As a scholar, she went on scientific expeditions all over the globe.
She was usually the only woman on board a team documenting sea life, some of which is
now extinct.
In the 60s, space travel was all the rage, but Sylvia got people excited about exploring
the mysteries of the deepest oceans.
In the 1970s, she lived in an underwater lab studying coral reefs.
Now a team of divers will attempt to live for two weeks while leading an all-female team,
shocking, I know.
Ironically, these aquanauts are not men, but five young and attractive women, the world's
first real life mermaids.
Then in 1979, there is a new tool in the sea.
Sylvia helped design and test a special pressurized underwater suit.
If successful, she will be the first woman to walk the sea floor beyond 1000 feet.
She set that record.
Then later, let Noah, the government agency tasked with protecting the ocean.
In 1990, Sylvia Earl received a presidential appointment that for her was the culmination
of a life's work.
Sylvia received numerous titles and honorary degrees, including the million dollar
Ted Prize in 2009.
In short, Sylvia Earl is a pioneer who has no plans to stop advocating on behalf of the
ocean or stop exploring.
I'm still breathing.
I'm still diving.
Come on.
Are you still going in submarines?
Why not?
Like getting into a car for heaven's sake, it's just...
Sylvia, tell me about how you first got so curious about the ocean and marine life you grew
up in Florida, right?
You spent a lot of time exploring the beach.
For me, it was an adventure every day after school to be able to get out and wait in
these sea grasses and see sea urchins to find little sea horses about half the length
of my little finger.
They're pygmy sea horses, they're known as.
And I saw creatures like sea hairs that used to crawl around in those meadows and a
scallop.
You could walk out and see these blue-eyed scallops just pulsing around when they are jet-repelled
when they close their...the two halves of their shells.
They would just be such an exciting adventure occasionally to find a little octopus who's
such a joy.
And it sounds like you let that joy and all the questions that you had about these creatures,
you let them kind of propel you academically because you knew you wanted to be a scientist.
I just kept making choices along the way that would lead me in that direction.
All the science classes I could take, but not all the classes had answers.
I had to go see for myself and find books that would answer some of the questions, but
the books weren't always enough.
I asked questions the books couldn't answer.
Well, so you stuck with it and you ended up getting your PhD in botany, specifically
aquatic plants and algae.
And I love the story about how in 1964 you jumped at an invitation to work on a scientific
expedition to the Indian Ocean and you were the only woman on the boat.
The headline in the Mumbasa Daily Times that next day came out, Sylvia sales away with
70 men, but she expects no problems.
And actually the only problem that any of us really had was here we are in a little
boat on the surface of the ocean and our job, our goal was to explore the ocean.
How do you do that from the top of the ocean is beneath you?
Well, we were lucky.
We had some of the first scuba tanks in an air compressor on board and we were the first
to actually using scuba to explore some of these legendary places like on the beach.
And Dabra, parts of the seashells, little islands that were not populated by humans and
we went in the water and the fish were seeing humans probably for the first time face-to-face
the way fish see fish.
So you were one of the first humans to ever go scuba diving.
You were also one of the first humans to live in an underwater habitat.
You have spent hours at the bottom of the ocean during your lifetime.
How did all that time down there change you, do you think?
So I have a chance to live underwater 10 times now in various underwater laboratories
and to use more than 30 different kinds of submarines, thousands of hours seeing the
ocean from the inside out and realizing this is not just rocks and water.
This is alive.
It's a soup like a minestrone, but all the little pieces are alive.
And then to realize that most people haven't had the depth and breadth of experience that
comes with thousands of hours.
And I think we're right at the time of transition now that there are millions of divers all over
the world who are now being able to go repeatedly back to the same areas and to be able to document
the same individuals and to see what occurred to me was just natural, it's the way it is.
But you say that you remember when actually you were pretty young that you realized you saw
that something bad was happening to nature, that marine life was thriving.
And then it started disappearing and you saw it happen.
Being a child in Florida, when my parents moved there in 1948 and witnessing the changes
in the coastline, the marshes that I first discovered finding horseshoe crab eggs, these
tiny little creatures prospering in really clear water and going out on a dock at night
and seeing these bioluminescent creatures just flashing and glowing and witnessing the
change that the waters became not beautiful, clear and blue, but muddy.
That was powerful incentive to say why are we doing this?
Well, it's progress.
People need a place to live and people love the waterfront and there's not enough waterfront.
So building these finger fill areas to magnify the amount of land along the coast, putting
causeways out to the islands blocking the flow of water, disturbing the sea grass beds,
digging them up and then they were gone.
They were gone.
So it was, I think, my experience as a witness, not reading about it, not looking at images,
but watching it happen, feeling empathy for the creatures in the sea as I got to know
them and I watched them disappear.
I can only imagine that you had that memory in mind when you decided to transition from
doing research to policy.
So in 1990, you were asked to become the chief scientist at a US agency, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
Like why go work for the government?
What was your thinking?
What did you want to accomplish?
What really convinced me that yes, I should be the chief scientist of NOAA was within NOAA
is a small, promising agency called the National Marine Sanctuary Program, the counterpart
of national parks that are actually housed in the Department of Interior.
There are some marine protected areas in the National Park System, but most of the idea
of ocean protection was embodied within this small, growing organization.
So I thought this is an opportunity to begin to develop the ethic of caring for the
ocean in the same way that a hundred years ago, you know, we began looking at the land
and the need for protection.
You ended up being kind of a controversial figure there.
You got oceans probably in the headlines more than any other government official.
I believe it was you who called attention to the fact that what was it that the blue fin
tuna was nearly extinct?
Why were you so conscious?
Why did people take issue with you?
All the things you're saying seem hardly controversial.
What was the tension that was going on in the 90s then?
It wasn't just the 90s, it's still there. The habit of thinking that the ocean is too
big to fail and we're still taking life in the ocean for granted.
We still think that we have the capacity to take fish on a scale that we currently are
and continue to do it forever, sustainable extraction of ocean wildlife, tuna, swordfish,
cod, shrimp, what we collectively regard as seafood.
And if we just think of it as sea life that keeps us alive, we might make a transition
from just looking at what lives in the ocean as something to eat or something to grind
up for oil or products to think of them as individuals as part of the social structure
of the ocean, we have made a transition with birds.
We have made a transition with whales.
There isn't such a large constituency of people who care about tuna and grouper for their
own sake.
And you're right, I got into trouble when I was at NOAA because I attended a fisheries
council meeting and I heard that in the Atlantic, the bluefin tuna populations were down by
90 percent and I had the audacity to stand up and ask the question.
So we only have 10 percent left from their numbers in the 1970s, a decline of 90 percent
in 20 years from 1970 to 1990.
I said, what are we trying to do exterminate them because if we are, we're doing a great
job.
We only have 10 percent left to go.
What are we waiting for?
Let's go get them.
I mean, that's when they started calling me the sturgeon general.
Okay, so fast forward another decade and in 2009, you won the TED prize and you founded
an organization called Mission Blue.
My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world and
help us through it.
You said in your TED talk at the time, like you laid out a lot of what we've been discussing,
but you said at the end of it that there is good news because 10 percent of the big fish
remain, that there's time but not a lot of time to turn things around.
So it's been, you know, about a dozen years since you gave your talk, since you founded
Mission Blue, tell me about how things have gone in those last 12 years.
What have you been able to achieve with your organization and what haven't you?
I think one of the most important trends is the awareness and willingness to embrace
places and to recognize that protecting nature and natural systems have benefits back
to us in terms not just of a better health, not just because they're beautiful.
It's not even a choice anymore.
It's necessary for our existence.
We have to realize we're a part of nature.
We can see the connection between trees and climate.
We can see connection between the forests and the ocean, the phytoplankton, capturing
carbon, generating oxygen, maintaining a planet that works in our favor.
This is common sense.
You take care of your personal health because you want to live a long time and you want
to be happy.
You want to be healthy.
But we can't be happier, healthy if we don't take care of our life support system, the
planet.
So Mission Blue really has its core to protect the ocean with the network of hope spots.
It's protected areas large enough to save and restore the health of the planet.
We now have 140 places around the world with champions for hope spots and communities
gathering information about places that are not always in great condition.
Some of them are.
They start out either with some form of protection or in beautiful, healthy condition and the
ideas to keep them that way and tell stories about what a good, healthy system looks like.
But there are also places like San Francisco Bay, not particularly in great shape as compared
to what it was 500 years ago.
But with care, it can improve.
The 21st century humans are the poise to be the heroes for all time because we're armed
with the superpower of knowing that we have to change our attitude about the world that
keeps us alive.
We can't just continue mining and taking and taking.
We have to be aware of the consequences.
It's legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle.
You can see her full talk at TED.com.
Thank you so much for listening to our show today.
To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to TED.NPR.org.
And to see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app.
And if you have been enjoying the show, we'd be so grateful if you left a review on Apple
Podcasts.
This episode was produced by Katie Montellione, Fiona Garen, Matthew Cloutier and Christina
Calla.
It was edited by Sana's Meshkanpur.
Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motasham,
James De LaHousie, JC Howard and Janet Ujong Lee.
Our audio engineer is Daniel Schuchin.
Our intern is Harrison Vijay Joy.
Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablui, our partners at TED, our Chris Anderson,
Colin Helms, Anna Fielin, Michelle Quint and Micah Eams.
I'm Manouche Summerodi and you've been listening to the TED radio hour from NPR.
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