[indistinct talking over radio]
[Sylvia Earle] Look at this.
It's an ocean full of whale sharks.
I can't even count the number of fins.
Are we awake or are we... [chuckles] are we still dreaming?
They've been living here for millions of years.
We're newcomers in their backyard.
I love being a part of their world.
They're completely innocent of anything humans do.
Since the oil spill, this group of whale sharks,
the largest ever witnessed in the Northern Gulf...
has not been seen there again.
Guess we'll put this little... beast inside.
There you go. Thank you.
In the last few years, I'm on the road... probably 300 days out of the lot.
And I give a lot of talks... some days just from dawn to dusk.
I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing... other than diving.
[Hugh Downs] Aren't you a radical about protecting the oceans?
If I seem like a radical, it may be because I see things that others do not.
I think if others had the opportunity to witness what I have seen in my lifetime,
what I see when I go diving
and the perspective that I've gained from thousands of hours underwater,
I would not seem like a radical at all.
[male newscaster] She has seen with her own eyes,
parts of this Earth few others could even imagine.
Sylvia Earle, this country's foremost oceanographer,
exploring depths thought impossible to reach.
[Hillary Clinton] It's a pleasure to introduce a scientist,
an engineer, a teacher and an explorer,
-Dr. Sylvia Alice Earle. -[applause]
[Earle] I can see in my mind's eye... a different world,
a world that's changed enormously just in my lifetime.
Sixty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean,
no one imagined that we could do anything to harm it.
It seemed at that time to be a sea of Eden.
But now, we're facing paradise lost.
And this is not, "Woe is me,"
this is just the reality of what's happening.
But it's also the reality, we have a chance to fix things.
[elevator bell dings]
[announcer] Please welcome Dr. Sylvia Earle.
[audience applauding]
[Fisher Stevens] On any given night,
Sylvia Earle can be found in Norwalk, Connecticut,
or Stockholm, Sweden, or Cape Town, South Africa.
[announcer] Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle.
[audience cheering]
[Stevens] In Beijing, Belfast, Davos or the Galapagos Islands.
[Earle] Think of the changes that have occurred
in the world in the lifetime of a 200-year-old orange roughy.
But they don't know why their world has changed.
[Stevens] And that's where I met her, at a sort of ocean summit.
I'm a big scuba diver. I love the oceans.
I love them more now that I've met Sylvia,
but, um, it's also people like... like you in this room
that can save the ocean.
The world's largest fishery was,
and still the largest fishery in the US,
is Alaskan pollock, and it's moving into the Arctic.
[Barbara Block] Bluefin are pursued wherever they go.
It's really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet.
If we fail to take care of the ocean... nothing else matters.
[cheering]
[laughing]
[Stevens] I've been diving for over half my life now...
but that is nothing compared to her.
She's been exploring the ocean since before I was born.
Sylvia, that turtle was a trip!
-And she came back here. -Yeah!
She went up, got a breath of air, came right back to that same place.
[Stevens] I spent one week with Sylvia and I was hooked.
-Gular flutter. -Gular flutter.
[Stevens] How could I have not known who she was before?
After the Galapagos trip,
I really didn't wanna leave Sylvia's world.
So I didn't.
[man] Is that her? [Stevens] Yeah, yeah. That's her.
That's her. There she is.
Thank you!
What a beautiful place.
[Stevens] What I didn't realize at the time...
was that this would be the beginning of a three-year odyssey...
a chance to see the ocean and the world through Sylvia's eyes.
[Stevens] Sylvia, the minute I met you, you became an example for me.
Like, seriously.
[Stevens] Just take me back to how you became so passionate
about the ocean.
[Earle] Well, it all started in New Jersey.
As a kid, I had complete freedom to go play in the woods,
to spend all day out, just fooling around.
On my own, often.
I mean, a lot of the time, just on my own.
♪ Left bank, I'm waiting for someone ♪
♪ Someone to be my friend ♪
My mother was known as the bird lady of the neighborhood.
People would bring injured squirrels, birds, frogs...
anything that needed help.
♪ Without you... ♪
My father, who was really so bright and so capable of fixing things.
When I was a little kid, I'd try to take things apart to see how they worked
and he always reminded me to save all the pieces, don't lose any,
and be sure you know how to put it back together again.
♪ I can't hold the sun ♪
We're losing a lot of the parts...
the loss of the diversity of life on Earth...
the bits and pieces have just disappeared...
and we don't know how to put things back together again once they're gone.
When I was 12, we picked up and moved to Florida.
At first, I was not particularly charmed, because I loved the other place so much.
But the Gulf of Mexico was this great blue body of water
that created almost this mythic place that lured my parents there.
Some kids play in the streets.
Some kids have a backyard
and my backyard was wet.
It was the Gulf of Mexico. It was glorious.
That's where I first fell in love with the ocean.
I could see it. I could hear it.
I could smell it. I could touch it.
I could splash around in it.
I loved when seaweed came ashore in huge amounts.
It was like going to the zoo.
I had fun finding these creatures... like little crabs.
You could take them and then gently put them back into the ocean,
and they'd scurry off.
It was just heaven for a kid... for me.
It will always be that way in my mind, it's just this paradise.
[female newscaster] Happening now, an explosion and fire
devastate a massive oil rig off the Louisiana coast.
[male newscaster 1] Last week's deadly oil rig blowout
remains unchecked tonight.
And it's raising fears of an environmental disaster in the making.
[male newscaster 2] As long as the oil is flowing down here in the Gulf,
this will simply keep growing and growing and growing,
and they have no idea where the end will be.
[Stevens] How'd you feel? What was your first reaction?
[Earle] It was shocking.
And it just got worse as the news unfolded.
Of course, the tragedy was the human lives lost.
Then this gush of oil wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop!
When I was a child living in Florida,
there was only one offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Today, there are more than 33,000 drill sites.
All of us... we are the beneficiaries of having burned through fossil fuels.
Coal, gas, oil.
But at what cost?
I really come to speak for the ocean.
We put billions into what takes us into the skies above...
and it's paying off handsomely.
We've neglected the ocean... and it's costing us dearly.
[Jackson] The thing that's impressive to me about Sylvia
is that she's not afraid to point fingers...
and say, "You know what you're doing, and it's wrong."
[James Cameron] You know, she's kind of the Joan of Arc of the oceans.
-[man] Go! -She's the one that's out in front
leading the charge in the fight to save the ocean.
And she's made it her life's purpose in the last couple of decades
to make sure everybody else understands what's going on and why it's important.
[Earle] It's life itself that the ocean is delivering.
This is a turning point.
If we continue business as usual, we're in real trouble.
[Carl Safina] Her passion for the ocean comes from the fact that...
like myself and like many of us who were young...
in a younger world around the ocean,
we saw a place that was more full of life.
[Earle] It was... [sighs] beyond frustrating.
It was agonizing.
[birds squawking]
Because I know what's in the Gulf of Mexico.
I just could flash back to times when I'd be diving in the Gulf of Mexico...
when it was a place...
[sighing] an underwater paradise.
And to know that it was vulnerable, that it could be right in the path of...
of this...
[sighs]
this avalanche.
It's just hard to express.
Your book, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One.
That's a bold statement. My fate and the ocean's are the same fate?
I don't live in the ocean.
I ain't got gills.
Why should I care about what happens in the ocean?
It's deep, it's dark, people drown in it
and it's full of sharks
-who want to eat us. -[audience laughing]
Or don't you watch Shark Week?
Yeah, I watch. But think of the world without an ocean.
You've got a planet a lot like Mars.
No convenient life support system.
Most of the oxygen that you breathe, that everybody breathes,
is generated by the ocean.
And it absorbs much of the carbon dioxide.
In a way, we're all sea creatures.
Every whale, dolphin, coral reef, whatever...
they obviously need the ocean, but so do we.
No ocean, no life.
No ocean, no us.
[Stevens] So were you that geeky girl in high school?
The science nerd?
[Earle] I suppose, in today's terminology, I would be regarded as a geek.
People sometimes have a hard time figuring out what they want to do.
I always wanted to be whatever it is that a scientist does,
I just didn't know what to call it.
There's a little library in Dunedin...
that I used to haunt.
I'd sit on the floor and that's where I first saw a book by William Beebe,
and became entranced with the idea of submarines.
His book, Half Mile Down, it was published in the '30s...
described how he and Otis Barton
crawled into this little steel ball with a tiny window in it,
and could look out and see what it was like a half-mile beneath the surface.
What it's like in the deep sea with these sparkling creatures
that illuminate the sea below where light penetrates.
So, I never got to meet William Beebe, but I regard him as a soul mate.
[crackling]
[bubbling]
Jacques Cousteau was able to vicariously, and sometimes directly,
get people in the water.
He got me in the water by inspiring me to say,
"That's so cool! I wanna go! I wanna see it!"
His Silent World made me want to see what he saw.
To meet fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter on a plate.
To actually go and witness this vast blue realm.
[Stevens] Before the 1950s, diving had been very risky and experimental...
until Cousteau invented the Aqua-Lung,
and became one of the first
to use a Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, SCUBA.
He showed how simple it could be to explore the sea.
[Earle] In the summer of 1953, I enrolled in a class in marine biology.
My major professor somehow managed
to get two of the very first scuba sets that were available.
♪ Come with me, my love ♪
♪ To the sea ♪
♪ The sea of love ♪
♪ I want to tell you ♪
♪ How much I love you ♪
It seemed so improbable. You can be underwater and breathe.
♪ Come with me ♪
Most of all, it was the gift of time.
Be able to actually stay and watch the creatures that were there.
And it made me want to always go deeper, stay longer.
[Stevens] Was there that moment, like in a movie,
if we were in a movie of Sylvia Earle's life, like you're--
-The "Ah-ha" moment? -[Stevens] Yeah, somebody puts...
You put the mask on and you're seeing, and you're, like,
"Oh, my God, this is what I wanna do with the rest of my life."
-Is that what happened? -I already knew. [laughing]
In the water, anyone can be a ballerina.
You can stand on one finger. You can do... back rolls.
You can look as if you are... the most graceful creature in the world.
And along the way you see all this... this galaxy of life.
You know, it's just exhilarating.
If I can do it... you can do it. I'm not Superwoman.
I'm not big and muscular.
My mother, at 81... put on a mask and flippers and took on the ocean.
And then she would tell people,
"If you are 81, don't wait any longer. Just do it."
[male anchor] Thousands of delighted visitors
are discovering the fun of a Florida Gulf Coast holiday.
[Earle] From the time I was a child, seeing Florida,
what I thought was just wonderful wilderness...
watching it change before my eyes.
[male anchor] The Tampa Bay area is one huge resort
with gleaming new hotels and motels.
[Earle] To watch Tampa Bay getting dredged,
taking what was a marsh and then putting a parking lot there,
putting a housing development there.
Watching the Weeki Wachee River as a witness,
this crystal river... that starts with a spring like a morning glory.
You look down, you see this blue throat that just seems to go into infinity,
and then it spills out into a river that goes off into the Gulf
in this water that's so clear it looks like there's no water there at all.
And then development along the edge, just clouding that amazing water.
The trees were starting to turn brown around the edge
and all the grass was dead.
It was...
that kind of experience, a witness.
I saw the before.
I saw the after influence of what we can do to the natural world.
[Jackson] The Gulf of Mexico is this extraordinarily wonderful,
productive, magnificent place
that had the misfortune of being right on top of a ton of oil,
and being the sewer for the people of the United States of America.
[Stevens] Call it the price of progress.
For six decades, big agriculture and industrial farming
have affected the Gulf of Mexico from hundreds of miles away.
[Jackson] A little less than a third of all the corn grown in the entire world
is grown in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota.
That productivity is due to
the application of humongous quantities of nitrogen fertilizer.
All that fertilizer runs off the land, makes it into the Mississippi River,
comes down the river...
fuels extraordinary population explosions of phytoplankton,
the stuff dies, it rots.
When something rots, it uses up oxygen,
and then anything that is alive, like crabs, little tiny fish,
they can't hightail it out of there, they die.
They die from no oxygen.
Boom, that's the dead zone.
[Earle] The Gulf of Mexico already hosts
one of the most notorious dead zones on the planet.
The Deepwater Horizon spill just made things a lot worse.
Around the world, hundreds of dead zones have formed just in the past few decades.
[Stevens] So let's be honest.
You're 18. You're very beautiful.
Aren't all your friends going off, getting married?
And did that ever-- No, you're like work, all about work?
I'm not abnormal.
Of course I enjoyed dating boys and so on.
But I wasn't interested in anybody
who wasn't interested in what I was interested in.
It's just very self-centered, I suppose, but I just...
Football-schmootball. I mean [scoffs] "Who cares about that?" I thought.
I was attracted to the nerdy types, I suppose,
who loved talking about the stars, about space, about animals,
or about diving.
[Stevens] So, you had this sort of perfect, idyllic life
with this man you loved.
[Earle] Jack Taylor and I got married in 1957.
His first job was as a park ranger,
and we moved from national park to national park.
It was just a glorious couple of years.
And he wanted to get his doctorate and I wanted to get mine.
Then Elizabeth came along. [chuckles]
This is such ancient history. Good heavens.
[loud rumbling]
The '60s, the '70s in all of history
really stands out as a time of exceptional discovery.
[Cousteau] This is the first time an undersea boat
has ever had an undersea base.
[Cameron] We were exploring the ocean aggressively for the first time,
and we were trying to go to the moon.
[man over radio] Roger, the EVA is progressing beautifully.
[Cameron] So it didn't matter which direction you were going.
It was all great
because either way you were going to a new and alien world.
[Earle] As a young scientist, this spirit of exploration was all around,
and I wanted to be a part of it.
And then came this opportunity
to go on the International Indian Ocean Expedition in 1964.
The other side of the world on a boat.
But it'd mean being away from home for six weeks.
And my children were four and two, Elizabeth and Richie.
I had never been west of the Mississippi...
never been out of the country before then.
And then I really went out of the country.
Met the boat in Mombasa.
I was interviewed.
It was my first real experience with the press.
They wanted to know, "Why are you here?"
And somebody let it be known that I was the only woman... and all these guys.
And the headline the next day, Mombasa Daily Times...
[Earle reading]
-[Stevens] You did say seven-zero men? -Seven-zero.
Oh, yeah. Big boat.
[male anchor] United States participation in the biological program
began by converting the former presidential yacht, Williamsburg,
to an oceanographic ship.
[Earle] The purpose of the expedition back in 1964 was... to explore.
"To explore." What a concept.
It was to document the nature of what lived in the ocean.
No one had been to the Seychelles diving.
No one had been to Aldabra diving before.
No one had been to a little island called Fungu Kizimkazi.
It was really amazing.
I think the biggest discovery
that we made in the International Indian Ocean Expedition...
was the magnitude of how much we didn't know.
[male anchor] During this cruise, a total of 16,000 pounds of fish,
200 pounds of shrimp, nearly a ton of swimming crabs were caught.
[Earle] The sea at the time... seemed...
endless in its capacity to yield whatever we wanted to take from it.
And whatever we wanted to put into it, it was okay.
You'd dump things in the ocean, deep-six things.
It was the way to get rid of something.
It didn't clutter up our backyard, our land, so it went into the ocean.
Our aquatic backyard.
I have yet to take a dive, even in the deepest dive I've ever made,
and not see tangible evidence of our presence...
to see trash, junk on the bottom of the ocean,
two and a half miles down.
Things collect there and just continue to gather.
So at the surface and even raining down to the great depths below...
our signature is there.
[Stevens] It's not just dumping waste and garbage.
[man on radio] Three, two, one...
[explosions]
[Stevens] Between 1950 and 1998,
there have been more than a hundred nuclear test blasts.
Either underwater or on remote islands in the middle of our oceans.
[Earle] 1964, when another opportunity came
to go on the same ship, but in a different ocean,
the southeastern Pacific,
I... had to say yes.
[Stevens] What about the kids? Were you worried about them?
[Earle] Well, for me, life has always been a balancing act, if you will.
But it was particularly true at that time.
I think, for me, the stress was being apart from family,
and of course as a mom with kids... but certainly with my husband as well.
And maybe it was inevitable.
We did come apart.
[Cameron] You don't think about it as, "Well, I'm gonna be an explorer."
You just... You become curious and you start to follow a path.
Then pretty soon that path is leading you away...
from all the other well-trod paths.
Then you start saying, "Why am I doing this?
I'm risking every relationship I ever had."
And then you start asking this question that has no logical answer to it...
other than the fact that there's something deeply woven
in the fiber of our being as human beings,
that we just have to know what's over the hill,
or around the corner or beyond the edge of the lights.
[Earle] 1964, I was in graduate school...
and working on a dissertation.
Gathering seaweeds from the Gulf of Mexico.
I had a lab at home.
I began assembling records of what kinds of plants live in the sea.
I came to understand the beauty and the history and the importance
of these marine seaweeds.
And I haven't looked back. I mean, they are the anchor.
[Stevens] Can I ask you a question?
When you say, "study seaweed,"
what does that mean, studying seaweed, exactly?
[chuckling]
What does that mean? Like you pick up seaweed, you study it...
[Earle] Yeah, and it's like going to a place
that no one has ever looked at what lives there before.
So you're an explorer basically.
You wanna find out who lives there,
how many of what kind of creatures are there.
Do they have names yet?
And if not... let's find a name, let's make up a name.
I spent years gathering seaweeds.
Ultimately, I gave my plant collection to the Smithsonian.
There are about 20,000 specimens of mine that have come to the Smithsonian.
There's another big batch at the Farlow Herbarium in Harvard.
This is one of my favorites. I did my dissertation on the brown algae.
-[Stevens] Brown algae. -Brown algae.
This goes back to 1955. Were you born then?
-[Stevens] Uh, I was not born, thank you. -[Earle laughing]
Here's another one. This is 1966. That's down in Sarasota.
-This is the Gulf then. -This is Gulf of Mexico, right.
Galapagos.
Oh, I have so many amazing things from the Galapagos.
Now this is... Ha!
Oh, gosh.
I'd like to go back and see if these things are still there.
I first got to see the Galapagos Islands in 1966.
I was one of 12 scientists on this big ship that enabled us to dive
for the first time
in places that no one had been to underwater before.
It was an enchanted kingdom... underwater.
It was the sharkiest place I'd ever seen.
Look over the side, it looked like somebody had taken
a box of those wooden matches and just dropped them on the bottom,
and every match was a shark.
You could dive down among them. Sharks just [imitating whooshing]
like this, serenely going around you...
not paying any attention to you.
But at the time, people thought sharks were the enemy.
The only good shark is a dead shark.
[narrator 1] Shark, tiger of the sea.
Of all sea terrors, the shark is the meanest, the most crafty...
[narrator 2] Uh-oh. That flashing white belly,
that's no tuna, that's a shark.
Our rights to the fish are being disputed by those savages of the ocean, the shark.
[Earle] But, in fact, that wasn't the real problem.
Sharks were never after humans. Man or woman.
We're not on their menu.
But in today's world, millions of us are taking bites out of sharks.
[Jackson] What's really tragic about it is they don't even bother to keep the shark.
They just take the fins and throw the shark back in the water...
essentially to die.
It's tens of millions of shark fins
that are harvested every year
for soup, principally in China.
It essentially created an enormous hole in the ecosystem
and the way the ecosystem works.
[Stevens] Shark finning is one of the most barbaric examples
of what we're doing to the ocean.
But it's not just what's happening to the sharks that matter.
The bottom of the ocean's food chain,
plankton, as well as plants like algae and seaweed,
generate more than half the oxygen we breathe.
[Earle] In the Galapagos Islands, there are some species that...
that are missing.
And there are new things that have come in that didn't exist before.
If you don't have a record...
you might speculate, you might guess...
-Right. -...but this is evidence.
-This is hard evidence. -Beautiful evidence, too.
[Earle] Brings back such great memories.
[Stevens] What was your second husband's name?
[Earle] Giles Mead.
[Stevens] Okay, so how did you meet Giles?
[Earle] I met Giles Mead at a scientific meeting about fish.
There is a society called the Association of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.
[Stevens] That's a little weird, Sylvia. [Earle laughing] I know.
They have annual meetings
and whoop it up and talk about fish and snakes and lizards and things.
We met at this meeting and just began talking...
and we continued talking...
and we were still talking at 5:00 in the morning.
And we agreed that we should continue the conversation. [laughs]
Got married in Harvard Chapel in December of '66.
[Stevens] Did he have kids, too?
[Earle] Yes, he actually had three children.
And then, in 1968, my younger daughter, Gale, was born.
So we had his and hers and ours.
-[Stevens] Wow. The Brady Bunch. -[laughing]
[male anchor] The most ambitious project yet in ocean research
has just started here in the sheltered bay of a beautiful West Indian island.
Called Tektite II, it's the underwater base for a research project
being run by a group of American universities
with United States government backing.
[Earle] When I was at Harvard in 1969, I saw a notice on the bulletin board.
"How would you like, as a scientist, to spend two weeks living underwater,
down in the Virgin Islands?" That was... the pitch.
I'd already been diving a lot, more than a thousand hours,
published a number of things, and it didn't occur to me
that women need not apply.
And Jim Miller, head of the program, who had to finally make the call, said,
"Well, half the fish are female, half the dolphins, half the whales.
I guess we can put up with a few women."
[male anchor] Now a team of divers will attempt to live for two weeks
as quiet residents on the sea floor.
Ironically, these aquanauts
are not men with extraordinary physical endurance and stamina,
but five young and attractive women.
The world's first real live mermaids.
Their leader is a renowned scientist, Dr. Sylvia Earle,
a marine botanist and an experienced diver.
And so they settle down with all the comforts of home...
TV, refrigerators, and wall-to-wall carpeting.
[Earle] You're warm and dry while you're inside,
but you slip through a hole in the floor and you're in the water.
And we could be in the water 10 to 12 hours a day.
I felt like a kid in a candy store except that... everything was living.
You're outside with the creatures
and you just get to know them as individuals.
You actually see this group of five angelfish
that are always there first thing in the morning...
and they have different attitudes, different personalities.
That's, I think, what has given me
a different perspective than most probably have.
Not just about the ocean, but about the creatures who live there.
I went into the Tektite project
as an ivory tower scientist, not really in the public eye.
But Tektite changed everything.
I... [sighs]
had to get out of my shell.
We had a parade down the streets of Chicago.
Mayor Daley gave us the keys to the city.
[male host] On To Tell The Truth, pick out the real Sylvia Earle.
Sylvia Earle is number two.
♪ American woman ♪
♪ Stay away from me ♪
♪ American woman ♪
♪ Listen what I say ♪
[Jackson] Sylvia Earle was a pioneer...
invading the flannel shirt, bearded oceanographer image.
[Cameron] There was a real sense that women simply couldn't do this.
Well, they couldn't pick up the tanks!
"You can't pick up that equipment.
Here, let me help you with your gear, little lady."
She really broke through the barriers.
And for that, every woman scientist, for example, should be very grateful.
[male anchor] Months later in California,
Tektite II, the Virgin Islands and Greater Lameshur Bay
are just memories as Dr. Earle, wife and mother,
plays with her daughter Elizabeth, 10, and her son Richie, 8.
For Dr. Earle and her husband, Dr. Giles Mead,
Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History,
Tektite II is a significant milestone in reaching...
[Stevens] So you became sort of famous after this.
I mean, you became a bit of a public face for science.
And it was also great 'cause you were not only smart,
but you were beautiful and you made that okay.
Well, never occurred to me that it wasn't okay.
What was tricky, let's say, difficult, if anything,
was... trying to be a good mom, trying to be a good wife,
trying to be good Mrs. Museum, Mrs. Giles Mead,
trying to be presentable at black tie parties,
trying to be good hostess, trying to be good scientist.
It was... it was a tricky time.
But, I mean, it's life. It's life.
[Stevens] And so... so you're in LA, and how did it end with Giles?
[Earle] Expedition to the Comoro Islands in 1975.
A team was put together,
and Giles and I were to be a part of this team.
We had our tickets, the bags were packed...
and he said something had come up, that he would meet me there, "Go ahead."
Time for his plane to arrive...
and the plane arrived, but he wasn't on it.
I figured, "Well, he must've been delayed somehow."
And... he was delayed. He didn't come at all.
[Jackson] Being married to... a very famous scientist,
who never understood the glass ceiling
until, all of a sudden, she was better than everybody where she worked.
That's really hard, you know?
[Earle] I felt the pain from time to time.
Wanting to do things that were tough for me to do as a woman...
because I was a woman, and not because I was a scientist.
You can think of a thousand excuses why you can't do something.
The trick is... to not let that get in the way of making things happen.
[Liz Taylor] Numerous people have told me that she's no June Cleaver.
Yeah, she's not sort of the typical mom.
You don't really expect that
your mom's gonna come home with a five-gallon bucket of algae
and recruit you out into the garage to start laying it out
and show you the right way to label it and, you know, these sorts of things.
Those aren't typical, so, you know...
But it's what we always did.
As a kid, we were constantly being yanked out of school mid-semester,
and we'd travel with her kind of all over the place,
wherever she would happen to go.
We were able to get a broader education that way,
even though it wasn't as traditional as... as most.
[Earle] When I came to the Caribbean as part of the Tektite mission in 1970,
the reefs here were full of life.
Today... those reefs are gone.
It's happening all over the world.
About half the corals are gone, globally,
from where they were just a few decades ago.
The ocean is dying.
[Stephen Colbert] You're saying that the oceans are in crisis.
[Earle] Yes.
How so? What's-- If they're so big, if they're so huge...
'Cause they're the biggest thing on Earth, right? The oceans?
We used to think there's nothing that we could do
that could harm the ocean.
And we tried, right?
-We tried pretty hard to harm the ocean. -[audience laughing]
And it was frustrating us, so we upped the ante a little bit.
[Jackson] There needs to be a real rethinking.
Unless we just decide that
nature is gonna be a museum in a few small places...
what we really have to address is the problem of us.
[Safina] The biggest threat is there are far too many people
and our appetites are out of control.
Not just our appetites for food,
our appetite for wood, our appetites for fossil fuels.
[Earle] The biggest problem is releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
that drives these great climate change events.
Starting in 1980, we began to actually measure
the amount of ice deliberately correlated with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
It tracks. It tracks like this.
The warming trends, CO2 in the atmosphere, the melting in polar ice.
[Cameron] There's this cognitive link
that people just aren't making about the role of ocean in climate.
They don't understand the ocean is this great regulator of temperature,
of the movement of heat around the planet.
[Earle] What we're doing to the ocean, what we're doing to the planet as a whole,
comes back to us in bigger storms,
more powerful storms, more frequent storms.
Nobody wants that to happen.
And if we don't want that to happen...
we will make the connection between what we're doing to the living ocean
and how that affects the predictability... of our future.
[Stevens] Our relentless pursuit for oil and gas,
for energy, continues to wreak havoc on our oceans.
But ironically, it's these same industries
that have led to breakthroughs in underwater exploration.
[male anchor] There is a new tool in the sea.
It moves with the ponderous rhythms of a mechanical monster.
But actually, it is a new vehicle...
a personal submersible.
It can withstand water pressure to 2,000 feet.
Normally, a diver making a six-hour dive to that depth
would spend 20 days in decompression.
A diver using JIM for six hours at 2,000 feet
can surface, open the hatch and walk away.
But now a new use for the JIM suit is to be tested.
Dr. Sylvia Earle is a marine biologist.
[Earle] Great.
[male anchor] Her question...
"Can scientists use the JIM suit for dives beyond 1,000 feet?"
If successful...
she will be the first woman to walk the sea floor beyond 1,000 feet.
[Mike deGruy] I've known Sylvia probably 30-some-odd years.
I think I first met Sylvia in Hawaii when she was diving in the JIM suit.
I was working with Maui divers at the time,
and so I just kind of hung around and helped out where I could.
[man] Ready? [Earle] Yes.
[man] Let me close you up.
[deGruy] The JIM suit was mounted on the front of a little sub,
and the idea was that the sub and Sylvia would descend together,
with the sub being the safety mechanism
in case something went wrong with Sylvia in the JIM suit.
[man 1 over radio] Holokai, Holokai. We're neutrally buoyant.
Sylvia is secured and the divers are backing us off the LRT.
[man 2 over radio] We are at 100 feet and going down.
-[man 1] All systems go. -[feedback]
[Earle over radio] Roger that.
[man 1] Coming up on 1,150, Sylvia. How's your systems?
[Earle] Systems fine. I'll give you a check.
I see it! Oh! It's the bottom!
[Cameron] It's that thing that explorers love to do,
which is to just get as far away from humanity as they can.
In a way, ironically,
it puts you more in touch with your own humanity.
Looking at a landscape
that hasn't changed in billions of years...
you just feel the sense that your lights only go so far,
everything out beyond the lights is unexplored,
it's still unobserved.
So there's this almost egoless sense of... of humility
before the vastness of the unknown.
[Earle] I had this great opportunity for two-and-a-half hours
to walk around and explore the ocean 1,250 feet down.
I asked them to turn off the lights so we could have a completely dark ocean.
Except it wasn't completely dark.
It was amazing.
The astronauts on the moon, the first time,
they could just look at each other.
I was surrounded by creatures.
Fish swimming by with little lights down the side.
And there were thousands of sparkles and flashes everywhere.
It was-- I mean, I was... just like a little kid.
[Earle chuckles]
[Stevens] And that must have been-- Was that scary?
No.
The scary part is always getting on the highway... [chuckles]
...to drive to your submarine.
We say we want to go to the moon, and 10 years later, we're on the moon.
Why can't we say now,
"I wanna walk around at 37,800 feet,
the bottom of the ocean, seven miles down"?
And, "Let's do it."
The JIM suit really fired in me...
the desire to do something to make it easier,
not just for me, but for everyone, to gain access to the sea
because only 5% of the ocean, even today, has been seen.
Let alone mapped and explored.
And I began talking with an engineer who was associated with that project...
and we got into a lively discussion about those claws on the JIM suit
and I didn't realize he had actually designed them.
I was so critical.
I insulted him.
"Oh, I thought I had a good manipulator
and she says it's a stupid piece of machinery."
And he went back to England where he lived,
and what he came back with was absolutely magnificent.
His name... Graham Hawkes, written... with such dexterity and finesse
that he could have used the manipulator arm
to sign a check that would've cleared the bank.
I was... I was hooked.
[male anchor] It was on this project that she met her husband, Graham Hawkes.
He is an engineer and inventor who defected from the aerospace field
when he realized that the last frontier was not space... but the deep ocean.
What I remember was Sylvia saying,
"Why can't we go to the bottom of the ocean?"
I'd spent, I think, five years getting from 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet,
and here is Sylvia saying, "I wanna go to 37,000 feet."
[Earle] When Graham Hawkes and I first began collaborating,
we wanted to go to the deepest sea.
Well, I wanted to go anyway.
And then, I'm thinking...
"Lady, I can tell you all the reasons why we can't do it."
And in the end, I knocked those reasons down in my mind,
and I kind of thought maybe we could.
So Sylvia inspired me.
That was the way that worked.
[Earle] One thing led to another,
and a system called the Deep Rover was born.
And it's a beautiful system
that I've had the joy of taking to full 1,000 meters,
its full rated depth... and a little bit more.
And until James Cameron came along with his system
that went all the way booming down to seven miles, 11 kilometers,
we had the deepest solo dives that anyone had achieved.
[Stevens] You and Graham didn't have any children, did you?
We had submarines.
Ten years later, parted ways...
but our interest in actually accessing the sea
and developing new technologies...
I mean, it burned brightly in both of us.
[Stevens] Sylvia started designing her own submarines.
A company she founded
designed the manipulator arm that was on the Deepsea Challenger,
the sub that James Cameron used for his record-setting dive.
Are you a little disappointed that Jim didn't take you with him?
[Earle] Of course I wanted to go...
but, alas, it's a one-person system. [laughing]
The arm is right here. Here's your arm.
I love the fact that we have better lights than...
[Cameron] Sylvia was ready to volunteer.
She said, "Fine, put me through pilot training."
And the thing is, she's... you know... she's not but this high.
So she's actually a better... a better deep aquanaut than I am.
You know, she's more physically adapted, and she pointed that out frequently.
"You know, I would be better in that sub than you." [laughs]
Tonight, I'd like to introduce you to someone
who is way up at the top of my most admired list.
She is Dr. Sylvia Earle.
In 1990, Sylvia Earle received a presidential appointment
that, for her, was the culmination of a life's work.
She became the chief scientist for NOAA,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA oversees the nation's coastal waters and fisheries.
[Earle] I loved the opportunity to be at NOAA as the chief scientist.
I learned things there
that I... that I couldn't know... from being a private citizen.
I had a chance to see things
that have changed my perception... of what's actually going on.
-[gunfire] -[explosions]
I was right in the thick of the big Persian Gulf oil spill.
I went over to the Persian Gulf on nine different occasions
to try to make recommendations.
[female anchor] Sylvia Earle is just back from assessing
the environmental damage from the Gulf War.
The environment really was shattered, air, land and sea. Of course, the...
[Jackson] You know, it's very rare
that you would have someone who is a great scientist
who would also be...
a successful administrator of an organization like that
because you need to be able to kick political ass, have influence,
and control the unruly bureaucracy of people
who come from God only knows how many administrations,
who think they know the truth, and they're gonna outlast you.
And so they're just gonna stonewall.
[Earle] I went to one meeting of the fisheries council
and... and I was never allowed to go again. [laughing]
A document came across my desk saying that in 20 years
bluefin tuna populations in the North Atlantic
had declined by 90%.
I found that shocking.
And so, when I went to this fisheries meeting
[chuckling] as Chief Scientist,
I raised the issue. What are we doing to the tuna?
Because if we're trying to exterminate them,
we're doing a great job.
We have to stop killing them.
Well, that wasn't a popular view.
That's when they started calling me The Sturgeon General.
I wasn't really permitted to speak about the things that I knew the most about.
I feel that I must resign, and as a private citizen,
do what I can do with more flexibility, more freedom.
Well... Much as I value the experience... it was stifling.
I never deliberately said anything as Chief Scientist that I didn't believe,
but I was asked not to speak on occasions because they knew what I would say.
On the outside, you're free to go to places
that I couldn't go... as a government official.
I can be free to speak my mind.
Not long after I left NOAA, I was in the Tokyo fish market.
There's no place on the planet
where more fish are brought from more places in the world
than in Tokyo.
Tons and tons of ocean wildlife extracted and consumed
just... year after year after year after year.
It's hard to imagine that the ocean can continue.
And then I saw rows and rows and rows... of tuna.
There must be a thousand fish here or more.
[man] Giant bluefin. [Earle] Yeah.
[Earle] Oh...
Many of the tuna I saw back then were just babies.
They hadn't even reached a point where they could start to reproduce.
And that was in the 1990s.
It's gotten so much worse.
If you go to Tsukiji today...
the bluefin tuna being bought for restaurants all over the world
are even smaller and younger.
We're fishing them to the very edge of extinction.
[Colbert] But I don't have to stop eating fish, do I?
Well, I have. [laughing]
-You've stopped eating fish? -I have, because--
'Cause you've been down there under the ocean
and you've seen them do the dirty business, and you--
-I know too much. -That probably turns your stomach on it.
But... I...
We eat a lot of fish. Fish is supposed to be the healthy food.
-That's the-- -I mean, how else am I supposed to
-get my mercury? -[all laughing]
If we... if we went off of the major fish that we eat in the oceans,
what... what should we eat? I mean, should we be eating--
We can't eat the cows, right?
We can't eat the pigs 'cause those industrial farms hurt us, too.
What's left? Invertebrates? You know?
We're gonna have to give them a new name just to make us eat them, you know?
The way we called Patagonian toothfish Chilean sea bass to get us to eat that.
Orange roughy, the... what scientists call them, "slimeheads."
-Slimeheads? -Mmm-hmm.
So we changed the name to "orange roughy"
-and then we started eating them? -That's right.
Why don't we start calling...
why don't we start calling earthworms Appalachian yard trout?
[all laughing]
-And then we'll just... -I like it. I like it a lot.
...we'll start eating those and it'll be all fine.
[male anchor] Fishing is one of the more important occupations along the coast.
Strangely enough... the most important catch
is not primarily a food fish... but the fabulous menhaden.
An important marine industry has been developed
based on the valuable oil extracted from the menhaden.
[Jackson] Most people have never heard of menhaden.
Menhaden used to be unbelievably abundant
to the point that you just couldn't see through
the schools of billions of fish.
And now these guys come in
and they suck up with their vacuum cleaner vast amounts of menhaden.
For what? For chicken feed.
So that we can eat chicken that tastes like fish.
[Earle] We're so good at killing menhaden,
so good at turning them into fishmeal and fish oil.
[Stevens] My doctor tells me, "Take Omega-3 pills.
They're very good for you."
So what do I do?
[Earle] We don't have to kill fish to get the omega oils
that we really value and that are good for us.
We can get them from the plants that the fish eat.
Fish don't make those oils anyway.
[Jackson] You know, menhaden are really quite extraordinary fish.
What they in fact act as is the... the kidneys of the ocean.
They're cleaning up the water of excess phytoplankton and detritus.
And then on top of that,
they are the base of the food chain for bluefish and striped bass
and all of these fish that are incredibly valuable, incredibly tasty.
And as menhaden have disappeared, so have these very valuable fish.
Once the menhaden are gone,
the Chesapeake Bay will not be the same intact ecosystem.
[Stevens] This is the face of industrial fishing in the Chesapeake Bay.
Fleets of boats, spotter planes, and huge nets
that capture entire schools of fish in a matter of minutes.
[man 1] Get 'em in there!
[man 2] Get in there! All the way in there!
[man 1] You guys come on this side! [man 2] Let's get... let's get in there.
[man 3] Back away! It's dangerous! Go away! Get out of there!
[woman] Here we go. [Stevens] Got it?
[Earle] I've looked at any number of charts, graphs... numbers on a page.
I've seen lots of photographs of industrial fishing operations.
But to actually be in the water with the fish...
[bubbling]
It was surreal...
to see those little fish captured
in a way that is unlike anything in the history of the planet
until we came along.
[scoffs]
For a moment... I felt as if...
a piece of me was being ripped out of the ocean as well.
[Jackson] Overfishing, it's an amazing phenomenon.
Who would've ever thought that people would be able
to fish so efficiently and so effectively and so strongly
that we would reduce the stocks of these species that were present
by the billions
to the point of obliteration or near-obliteration?
But we have done it systematically with enormous success.
We've done it to Atlantic tuna.
We've done it to sharks.
We've done it to cod.
We've done it to halibut...
to anchovies, to herring, to sardines.
We've done it to...
just about every damn thing you would ever wanna eat.
[Earle] Good job, Bryce.
We have this idea, we humans,
that the ocean is so big, so vast, so resilient,
it doesn't matter what we do to it.
That was... that was crazy.
[Earle] Our ignorance
is really the biggest problem that we now face.
We now can learn from the past...
and as never before,
do something about it before it's too late.
[Stevens] Sylvia has a wish for the planet...
what she calls her Mission Blue.
And it's really very simple.
Protect the ocean in the same way we now protect the land.
[Earle] In 1872, the United States began establishing a system of parks...
that some say is the best idea America ever had.
About 12% of the land around the world is now protected,
but only a fraction of 1% of the ocean is fully protected globally.
[Stevens] How did you come up with the idea for Hope Spots?
[Earle] On the land,
people have recognized places that are in good shape,
but they're under threat as hot spots.
Hot spots.
And I said, "Well,
we need to do the same thing, of course, for the ocean...
but why don't we call them Hope Spots?"
Because, if we take action, recovery,
we're at least making them better than they otherwise would be...
Cause for hope.
[deGruy] She's just asking people
to do everything in their power to preserve large portions of the ocean.
Not pin pricks, but large portions of the ocean.
That's a reasonable wish.
The biggest thing we've done to change the oceans to date...
is kill things that live there.
And if you can say, "In this place, we're not going to do that,"
that's really worth doing.
[Jackson] You know, the Hope Spots can't just be pretty places.
The Hope Spots have to be places where the potential is identified,
the threats are identified...
and some kind of concrete action is taken.
[Stevens] This is Cabo Pulmo, Mexico.
For more than a century, it was a thriving fishing village...
and then the tourists came...
and then the sport fishermen...
and then the industrial fleet with their long lines and nets.
By the 1980s, so much had been taken from the surrounding water...
that nothing was left.
In 1997, the people who live here took the ocean back.
Together they created a Hope Spot 70 square kilometers around,
making it completely off limits to fishing and dumping and drilling.
[Jackson] Okay, come on, come on, come on. [laughs]
[Stevens] Since the protected zone was established,
Cabo Pulmo has replaced fishing with ecotourism
-and the community is thriving. -[laughing]
Well, how is it possible that this is our first dive together?
-I don't know, but it's true. -It is true.
It is absolutely true.
[indistinct]
[Earle] The idea of protecting the ocean to bring back the fish
is an idea whose time has come...
and it's beginning to work all over the world.
A Hope Spot is a place that gives you cause for hope.
It's a big chunk of the planet... or it can be a relatively small place.
Like Cabo Pulmo...
where... conscious efforts have shown that
if you make an investment... care for a place...
it can recover and be a symbol for hope.
[man] Bueno?
[Jackson] Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
[laughing]
I think I wanna be a jack.
-[Jackson] You what? -I think I want to be a jack.
-[Jackson] You wanna be a jack? -[both laughing]
[Earle] Every place, even the small places, make a difference.
But we need to scale up. We need to think big.
[Stevens] Sylvia has invited me to join her on a mission to Australia...
already home to one of the largest Hope Spots in the world.
She's here to campaign for one that's even bigger.
Whilst we were running this campaign, the Global Census of Marine Life came out,
and it showed that Australia had more marine diversity,
more marine species than any other country in the world.
Like, 95% are just found there and nowhere else on the planet.
[Zethoven] Yeah, I was gonna say that.
-That's amazing! -Yeah.
[Stevens] Sylvia wanted to take me to a place
she'd been before in the Coral Sea...
more than 100 miles out into the open ocean.
[groans]
[indistinct talking]
[Earle] Australia is a leader in terms of establishing protection for the sea,
starting in the mid-1970s with the establishment
of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority...
and more recently, a designation of the Coral Sea,
a large area that basically hugs the Great Barrier Reef.
My first glimpse of the Coral Sea underwater
was in the 1970s.
It was really pristine,
in the sense that little fishing had taken place there at that time.
[Stevens] There are still large areas of the Coral Sea
that are untouched and unspoiled.
But making it a no catch, no dump zone
is the kind of insurance that is needed to keep it that way.
-Looks beautiful though, huh? -Sure does.
You can kind of tell why nobody's out here.
It's so far.
[seagulls calling]
[Stevens] We've come out all this way and all we find are ruins.
The place Sylvia remembered so vividly is gone.
[Earle] I am driven by what I know...
by the reality...
as a scientist looking... at the evidence...
that my species, the world I know, the world I love,
is in trouble.
People I know and love... may not realize how much trouble we're in.
-So that's the Coral Sea, huh? -Yeah.
-Lot of dead coral, though. -Yeah.
-Still not many fish. -[Earle] No.
Not one shark. Not even one.
[Stevens] Not one shark. [Groark] No barracuda.
We were hoping for the schooling barracuda here.
No fish. I mean...
You... you were expecting more, right?
Oh, heavens yes. Hoping for it.
Just never thought, way out here, we'd have no fish.
No.
Do you think it was bleaching and just the world of...
The world is changing.
Half the coral reefs around the world are gone.
So we're lucky to see what we did see.
Wow.
[Earle] Coral reef is like a city.
It's not just the buildings.
New York needs its taxi drivers.
It needs its doctors.
It needs the teachers.
It needs all the pieces that make the system function.
The corals need the fish.
The fish need the coral.
You take the fish away, the corals die.
You take the corals away, the fish die.
We can do things to the ocean. We will do things.
But first we ought to think about
how can we use the ocean and not use it up.
[Stevens] So, Syl, the corals just didn't look good or they... they were--
[Earle] No, the living stuff was mostly young.
Nothing old that...
Well, the reef... the reef here were big.
Coral's what you expect to see in the Coral Sea.
And we're in the middle of nowhere.
-That's what's so-- -I know this is... [chuckles]
-We're in the middle of everywhere? -Middle of everywhere.
-Okay. -[Stevens] Okay.
-Thanks, Sylvia. -[Earle] Yeah.
[Stevens] Sylvia, I honestly have never met anyone like you.
Your energy, your tenacity, your passion...
It's... It's inspiring.
Do you ever have that moment where you say to yourself,
"I'm not gonna do it today. I'm gonna just take the day off"?
[Earle] If you saw a child
falling out of a 10-story window,
and you have the ability to reach out and catch him,
you do everything you can to position yourself to catch him.
You don't take a break and say,
"Oh... while the child is falling out of the sky,
I'm gonna go over..."
No, you're there 24/7.
You're there every... with every ounce of what you've got.
You want to save that child.
♪ Looking up from underneath ♪
♪ Fractured moonlight on the sea ♪
♪ Reflections still look the same to me ♪
♪ As before I went under ♪
♪ And it's peaceful in the deep ♪
♪ Cathedral where you cannot breathe ♪
♪ No need to pray, no need to speak ♪
♪ Now I am under all ♪
[Cameron] We're not out of the game yet.
We could still win this thing if we were able to turn it around.
We've just got to get out there
and make the public aware of what's happening
and make them care about what's happening.
We've got to really rewire
the way human beings look at our relationship to nature.
♪ And the arms of the ocean ♪
♪ Are carrying me ♪
♪ And all this devotion ♪
♪ Was rushing out of me ♪
♪ In the crushes of heaven ♪
♪ For a sinner like me ♪
♪ But the arms of the ocean delivered me ♪
[deGruy] In the same way that humans have the ability
to consciously shift the balance of the Earth, which we've done,
we also have the capacity and capability of stopping it.
We can shift it. We have to.
It just... It has to happen.
What we have on Earth is all we'll ever have.
We need to remember that.
[Safina] The sad fact of it is that...
the ocean could be empty and it would still look the same.
It's a very hard thing to convey what's happening,
how it will affect you personally.
And so as the ocean is being emptied, and as the ocean is dying,
the surface looks the same, the waves look the same.
[Earle] If I could be born anywhere in time,
it would be now.
It would be now because this is the time, as never before, that we know.
We understand what we didn't know 50 years ago.
If we wait another 50 years... opportunities we now have will be gone.
This is the moment.
Our decisions, our actions will shape everything that follows.
♪ How much do I love you? ♪
♪ I'll tell you no lie ♪
♪ How deep is the ocean? ♪
♪ How high is the sky? ♪
♪ How many times a day ♪
♪ Do I think of you? ♪
♪ How many roses ♪
♪ Are sprinkled, sprinkled with dew? ♪
♪ How far would I travel ♪
♪ To be where you are? ♪
♪ How far is the journey ♪
♪ From here to a star? ♪
♪ And if I ever lost you ♪
♪ How much would I cry? ♪
♪ How deep is the ocean? ♪
♪ How high is the sky? ♪
♪ And if I ever lost you ♪
♪ How much would I cry? ♪
♪ How deep is the ocean? ♪
♪ How high ♪
♪ Is the sky? ♪
♪ How high is the sky? ♪