Published in the
Earth Island Journal | Spring 2015
Oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle is sometimes fondly referred to as
“Her Deepness.” She has set records for solo diving, lived in underwater
laboratories, and navigated dark corners of the oceans in small
submarines. In the course of her research and exploration, she has spent
more than 7,000 hours underwater marveling at the diversity of the
oceans.
photo Kip Evans
At 79, Earle has watched the oceans change radically in her
lifetime. She has had a front-row seat from which to view coral
bleaching. She has witnessed up-close the destructive power of
industrial fishing operations, and she has seen the global reach of
plastics pollution.
When not undersea, Earle spends much of her time advocating for the
conservation of our “life support system,” as she often refers to the
ocean. During the course of her 50-year career, she has worn many hats,
including chief scientist of NOAA, field researcher, nonprofit founder,
and National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence.
In the process,
Earle has contributed greatly to our growing understanding of ocean
ecosystems. “I wish we could go back 50 years armed with what we know
today,” she says. Despite witnessing the seas deteriorate before her
eyes, Earle doesn’t despair. Preserving the health of the oceans is a
challenge that inspires her to do more. After all, she says, “It’s just
going to get harder as time goes by.”
—Zoe Loftus-Farren
You’ve spent a long time studying the ocean, roughly
half a century, if I’m not mistaken. How has our understanding of the
ocean changed over the course of your career?
I think it is safe to say that more has been learned about the ocean
since the middle of the twentieth century, since the 1950s, when I first
began exploring the ocean. At the same time, more has been lost. There
has been more change, of a negative sort. I mean, the good news is we
know more, but we’ve also been witnessing an era of unprecedented loss,
destruction, change. And not changes for the good.
Good changes are that we now know better than ever before where the
mountains are; we have better maps. Although only about 10 percent of
the ocean has been mapped with the same degree of resolution that we
have for the land, or the moon, or Mars, or Jupiter. And much of the
ocean still really is not well mapped at all, as evidenced by the
inability to determine what the sea floor configuration is like where
that aircraft went down in the Indian Ocean. We had to map first, and
then look for where the airplane is, so little is know about that area.
At this point in time, what do you consider the most pressing marine issue?
Well, naturally you think about what we are putting into the ocean –
pollution issues, and ocean acidification as a consequence of excess
carbon dioxide that is entering the sea, as a consequence of burning
fossil fuels. We need carbon dioxide to power photosynthesis, but too
much of a good thing causes changes in planetary dynamics. That means,
among other things, that the ocean is becoming more acidic. That is bad
news, for everything, including the basic life support functions that we
take for granted.
We really don’t know what changing the chemistry of
the ocean will do, except that it certainly makes sense for us to hold
the planet steady in ways that have favored us throughout all of our
history, and the changes in the acidity of the ocean could signal some
really radical shifts in things such as carbon capture and oxygen
production and the many things we have heretofore relied on as more or
less stable.
And the plastics in the ocean – that’s new, since the middle of the
twentieth century. Plastics were a novelty when I was a kid, but now
they have become a plague in the ocean. They still serve us well in so
many respects. It’s not that all plastics are the problem, but single
use plastics where you use something once and throw it away. It’s a
really bad habit that we’ve gotten into that has to stop, not just
because of problems for the ocean. It isn’t just trash, not just the
unsightliness of it, or even the entanglement of animals that is the
problem. It’s is also the influence on the chemistry of the ocean there
too. Many toxins are introduced, toxins concentrated around bits and
pieces of floating plastic. Anyway, that’s one whole area of issues of
pollution under a broad category.
It is also what we are taking out of the ocean. Unprecedented levels
of ocean wildlife have been and are being extracted using technologies
that did not exist until close to World War II. The technologies and
materials have enabled us to find, capture, and market half way around
the world – distant places – whatever we have taken from the ocean.
To
look at whatever wildlife in the sea – whether it’s shrimp, or fish, or
crabs, or oysters or clams or whatever – they are treated as
commodities, in spite of new insight about the importance of life in the
sea just as life on the land. We need trees for more than board feet of
lumber, and fish are much more valuable alive than they are on a plate.
And yet, we are slow to respond to the evidence. Now 90 percent of many
of the big fish are gone. Tuna, swordfish, cod, even many of the small
ones like menhaden and anchovies, are at unprecedented low numbers,
owning to our capacity to extract on an industrial scale. There is
nothing like it in the history of the planet.
So all that said, what we are putting in and what we are taking out
are really major problems. But, the number one problem that really
underlies the others is communications, lack of people, generally
speaking, knowing why the ocean matters, knowing what we’re doing to the
ocean, seeing the cause and effect relationship between the decline of
the ocean and the perils that presents to the future of human
civilization. So, until we make that connection, until people know why
they should care, and then affirmatively take action as a result of
knowing, we’re going to see a continued move in the direction of
decline.
Last year, President Obama expanded the Pacific
Remote Islands Marine National Monument, creating the largest marine
reserve in the world that is completely off limits to commercial
resource extraction, including commercial fishing. How far do you think
marine reserves will take us in terms of protecting the ocean?
Well, protected areas are vital. It’s like saying, ‘protect your
heart.’ What can you do? Well, you remove the stress if you can, you do
what you can to maintain your healthy life support system, your body. In
this case, the ocean
is our life support system, and to the
extent that we can take the pressure off, then we are benefiting the way
the world works, benefiting the present and the future of humankind.
But, so far, the part of the planet that is fully protected, including
the part that was recently protected by President Obama’s action, is
under three percent. In fact, it’s just barely creeping up on one
percent that is fully protected, that is, where even the fish are safe.
So suppose you said, ‘I’m only going to protect one percent of my heart.’ Is that enough? How much
is
enough? Well, I think we need to respect all of it. And, like the
doctor who is treating a sick patient, first do no harm with your
actions. Do everything you can to take care of the vital systems that
keep us alive.
That means looking at the ocean with new eyes, looking at
the fish with new eyes, looking at what we’re putting in the ocean,
with respect to dumping, whether it is garbage or sewage or whatever.
Treat is as if your life depends on it, because your life really
does depend on it.
And concerning President Obama’s action, that was a wonderful, positive move, cause for celebration. And people
have
been celebrating around the world. However, it would have been twice as
large. He originally, last June, proposed twice the size that
ultimately was given protection. The reason that it got derailed was
because of the tuna industry. These are not local fishermen who are just
trying to make a living feeding their families; this is the large,
industrial, factory-scale operations where fish are not feeding people
who need something important to eat. It is not supplying protein. It is
supplying bank accounts. Tuna today are just big business.
They’re
mining the ocean, clear-cutting the ocean of fish that are sold not,
again, for food security, but for corporate bank accounts. And when
people understand that, they should just say, ‘wait a minute, we want a
healthy ocean.’
Tuna are down to a tiny fraction of what they were when I began
exploring the ocean. Not just Bluefin tuna, the one that commands the
highest price, but tunas generally are so hammered, so sought after.
Again, not to feed families and communities, but to feed almost an
endless market for a high-end luxury taste for things like sushi and
sashimi.
Along those lines, I’ve read that you don’t eat fish.
No, I don’t.
I’m curious when you made that decision and what ultimately motivated you.
It’s all about knowing. I used to consume fish. You can come from a
seafood loving family, but now that I know, I can’t do what I used to
do. It’s all about, not just knowing fish as fish on their own terms,
but recognizing their much greater value in the oceans, and also their
desperate states right now. Fish are in serious trouble globally. The
populations that we’ve disrupted – we’ve disrupted whole ecosystems, and
whole cycles of nutrients in the ocean.
We are taking about nitrogen or phosphorous or the ability of the
ocean to capture and hold carbon, which has really become recognized,
for forests, as a vital contribution for holding the planet steady. What
is now coming to be recognized is blue carbon – the role of fish and
whales and other ocean wildlife, not just carbon-based units, but also
for carbon capturing and carbon sequestration. If you take 100 million
tons of ocean wildlife out of the sea every year, which we are – sharks,
tunas, and all of the other great cornucopia of life in the sea – you
are essentially, just as when you clear-cut a forest, you are releasing
the carbon. You are allowing it to be put back into the atmosphere as
carbon dioxide.
I know you have really spent a lot of time
underwater. What is your favorite thing about it, and how does this time
underwater inform your views of the ocean?
Well, being in the ocean is physically pleasurable, especially in the
warm clear water where you can just sort of melt into the water and
become a part of it, like a jellyfish (laughing). And it’s just glorious
to be weightless in the sea, and be able to do the kinds of things you
might dream about, like you can essentially fly in the ocean underwater;
and breathing underwater is such a pleasure; and with little
submarines, to be able to just glide along not just in areas where scuba
divers can go, but down thousands of feet beneath the surface,
something that, in a few decades, many more people will have the
capacity to do.
Just like in the early days of flying, very few people
in the twentieth century knew what it was like to be up in the sky, you
know, higher than you could jump or climb a mountain. But the technology
is rapidly advancing that makes personal exploration of the ocean into
the deep, dark, cold, unexplored parts much more accessible.
So that, for me, is the real joy of going down into the ocean, and
meeting creatures, and observing the wondrous diversity of life on
earth. On the land, only about half of the many major divisions of life
occur over all the continents and islands put together, the terrestrial
parts. But even in a bucket of seawater you may find as many of these
major divisions of animal life, plus a nice dollop of photosynthetic
organisms as well.
Fifteen phyla would not be uncommon on a single chunk
of rock or in a single bucket of water taken from the ocean, if you
count the larval stages, which you naturally have to do. And it is about
the same number of phyla of animals, about 15, that occur on land. And
you have to more than double the number that occur in the ocean. About
half of the creatures that occur in the ocean occur only there, of the
major divisions.
Think of starfish and their relatives. There’s no
counterpart anywhere on the land or anywhere in fresh water. Or look at
the whole category of life that includes the jellyfishes and the corals.
Well, there are a very few freshwater jellyfishes, but they are such a
small number compared to the great, great majority that are out there in
the ocean. And so on down the list.
There are a handful of freshwater
sponges, but there are thousands, tens of thousands of marine species.
So the dominant diversity of life on earth, contrary to what some people
think, is not rainforests, as wonderfully diverse as they are. It’s the
ocean! It’s the ocean!
According to some studies, ocean diving can
compromise reef health. How do you balance the desire to experience
reefs and dive, with not wanting to harm them?
It’s pretty easy to not harm the ocean through diving. It’s so easy
to weight yourself and show respect for the creatures that are there.
And, if occasionally, a bit of coral is snapped off or whatever, that’s a
small price to pay for what an educated ambassador for the ocean can
contribute at this point in time. Divers are not the problem, unless
they’re armed with spear guns.
There is much more danger about fishing than there is diving.
Fishing is not, across the board, a really bad thing, but industrial
fishing, I think categorically should be stopped, because methods are so
destructive, and the amount of wildlife they take is so enormous, and
the capacity to alter the nature of the ocean, the nature of nature, the
nature of the way the world works, is so great.
Catching something for
dinner, like shooting a duck, it leaves a space. And if we’re gonna feed
seven billion people, we’re not going to do it with wild ducks, we’re
not going to do it with wild fish, we are going to do it by cultivating
carefully and efficiently the sources of calories that will provide us
with food security.
It is baffling to me that we have legal limits on some creatures
that are at such low levels. Every abalone counts, every tuna counts,
and why we insist on continuing to take, justified on the basis of food
or sport or whatever it is. The value left in the ocean is so much
greater, we need to just pull back and realize the reality of the time
we’re in.
Given that we are realizing what a big impact we are
having on the oceans, how do we translate that knowledge into action
and start protecting the ocean?
Well it’s starting already. In California, for example, there is a
network of small but really critically important fully protected areas
that some have justified on the basis of, ‘oh, we’ll get more fish if we
protect these areas, and there will be a spillover effect.’ You protect
fish so you can have more fish to kill; that’s the rationale.
For me,
we have to kind of reverse the logic, and say we need to have more fish,
so we can have more fish, so we can have more fish, because we need to
recover from centuries of extracting without knowing the limits.
Especially in recent decades, we have technologies that take whole
populations of squid, or entire schools of fish; trolls that are not
just destroying the targeted species, but are taking everything that is
just in the path of the net. It’s like using a bulldozer to catch
songbirds or squirrels – take the whole forest and throw the trees and
everything else away so that you can have a little bushel of wild birds.
What role do you think that regulation can play, both domestic and international, in safeguarding our ocean ecosystems?
Regulations are really critically important to rein in those who are
more concerned about their short-term gains than the benefits to society
as a whole. So you need governments, you need laws, not to govern the
behavior of the good guys, but to find a mechanism to enforce those who
misbehave.
If everybody were on board and saw the reason for taking care
of the ocean, there would not be a need to have laws about dumping, or
extracting fish or other wildlife, or to have protected areas. But we’ve
already learned on the land, if you don’t establish a park and defend
it, it only takes one or two people sometimes to break the faith of the
rest of the community.
It was a problem in the early days of national parks. People
complained to Theodore Roosevelt that it did no good to establish a park
because people would just go in and shoot the birds and the animals and
cut the trees, and there would be no way to enforce this.
Well two things happened. First, by having the legal framework,
there was authority then to move in and apprehend those who were
misbehaving. If there had been no designation, there would be nothing
you could enforce. It would still be a free-for-all. By specifically
delineating areas, then you have the authority to protect.
The other
thing is that the attitudes of people have changed. So even outside
parks, there tends to be greater respect once people know why it
matters. For example, take the bird watching community. They really
value songbirds because they’re beautiful, they add much to their life,
they make life more interesting. So they protect them, not just because
they are in a protected area, but because they value them.
We need
overarching guidelines about protecting species migration routes and all
of that, but we also need that ethic, caring, and we certainly need an
ocean ethic to really underpin all the rest. If everyone respected the
real value of taking care of the ocean, we wouldn’t need a law. But it’s
helpful to have a law for those who tend to misbehave no matter what.
Do you think there is still time to stop and even reverse the damage we have done?
Well, we have to do the best we can in the circumstances that we have
available to us. I wish we could go back 50 years armed with what we
now know. But the best we can do is take what we’ve got, and realize
that it’s not gonna get better. That, in fact, the sooner we exercise
our power to protect what remains of the systems that keep us alive, the
better it will be. It’s just going to get harder as time goes by.
So, I said ten years ago that the next 10 years will be the most
important in the next 10,000 years for doing what it takes to ensure an
enduring place for humankind in the future. And here we are 10 years
later, and we haven’t achieved that magic place where we know that what
we’re doing now will be okay. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. If
anything, we’ve upped the amount of effort going into killing ocean
wildlife, and now we know about problems that were not considered
important 10 years ago, like ocean acidification. We are seeing an
ever-increasing avalanche of plastics in the ocean. We are seeing a heap
of indifference.
But at the same time there is a growing awareness, which is the best
way to counter indifference. People who know might care. They can’t
care if they don’t know. They might not care even if they
do
know, but they can’t if they don’t know what the issues are. So I’ll say
it again: The next 10 years will be the most important in the next
10,000 years in terms of shaping a future where humans can have a hope
for an enduring place within the natural systems that keep us alive.
Better if we had had the knowledge of today applied 10 years ago, or 20,
or 50, but you know, you deal with what you’ve got. It’s going to get
harder. The sooner we act to protect as much of the natural fabric of
life, the watersheds, the areas that are still in pretty good shape,
whether they’re on the land or in the ocean, we can help restore animate
systems, largely by taking the pressure off.
photo by Kip EvansSylvia Earle has spent more than 7,000 hours underwater.
Like Chesapeake Bay. Stop killing menhaden. Stop taking the oysters.
Just give the clams, and the crabs, a break. Just stop. Just stop.
What’s hard about that? Just cold turkey. Just stop killing them. And
watch what happens. Give them five years. Give them 10 years.
There are
plenty of things that people can eat without eating the things that
maintain the healthy ocean systems that people seem to care about so
very much. The finest and best use of the ocean is not what we can take
from it to eat. It’s our existence that we take from the ocean that is
the highest and most important thing. And now that we can see it, it
ought to be like ‘oh, now I understand, now I’ll go this way instead of
that way, because if I continue what I’m doing, the problems are going
to get worse.’
And we are at that point in history where, as never
before, we’ve got knowledge available that did not exist even five years
ago, and the ability to communicate in ways that didn’t exist until
quite recently. So I consider this a sweet spot in time. We’re right at
this crossroads, and I’m not alone in observing the urgency of taking
the knowledge we have and applying it to ensure that we can do the best
we can with it.
And if anybody thinks that we can escape to another planet, you
should really get serious about looking at what it takes to send people
to the moon or Mars, and imagine relocating seven billion people
anywhere else other than here on earth.
We have a planet – truly it is a
miracle. You look at all the unfriendly options out there in the sky,
galaxies of other places, but none with a built-in life support system
that is exactly right for humankind. So first priority should be to keep
the world safe for our children.
This is not just about guns and wars
and things, this is about making it possible to continue breathing. Do
you like to breath? Listen up if you’d like to have water that magically
falls from the sky. Listen up if you want to have a planet that works
in your favor. Take care of the ocean. Get smart. Get educated. Get
knowledgeable. Use your power, whoever you are.
We are so close to the edge on so many fronts. In one way, at one
time, you might say ‘humph, it’s so depressing.’ And on the other hand
you might say, ‘This is so exciting, this is exhilarating. I can make a
difference. What I do or don’t do can have an impact on the world.’ And
we aren’t making this up. It is the truth. What you do or don’t do has
an impact on the world. So be positive, make a difference.
If you had one thought, or one lesson, that you could instill in people about the ocean, what would that be?
Take care of the ocean as if your life depends on it, because it does.
Zoe Loftus-Farren is an Earth Island Journal contributing editor. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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