173 | Sylvia Earle on the Oceans, the Planet, and People

It’s a well-worn cliché that oceans cover seventy percent of the surface of Earth, but we tend to give them secondary consideration when thinking about the environment. But climate change is wreaking havoc on the oceans, not to mention pollution and overfishing — 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited or depleted. Today’s guest, Sylvia Earle, is a well-known ocean scientist, a celebrated underwater explorer, and a tireless advocate for the world’s oceans. We talk about the current state of our oceans, what we know and have yet to learn about them, and what we can do individually and collectively to make things better.

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Sylvia Earle received her Ph.D. in phycology from Duke University. She is currently National Geographic’s Rosemary and Roger Enrico Chair for Ocean Exploration, as well as founder of Mission Blue, SEAlliance and Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. She formerly served as Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among her awards are the TED Prize, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Seattle Aquarium. She is the author of several books, the most recent of which is National Geographic Ocean: A Global Odyssey.

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0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. I’m sure that everyone listening, knows that the planet, the environment, the biosphere of the planet Earth on which we live, is in trouble. It has been suffering recently, in recent decades, largely due to activities caused by human beings such as ourselves. Climate change, is a very, very obvious example of this. Often when we think about climate change, we think of the atmosphere ’cause we breathe it right? And the weather, the temperatures that we get, in the world around us. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Even if overall, the temperature is going up, shifts in wind patterns and other climate features can make it colder or rainier or increase the number of fires or hurricanes or something like that, and guess what, the ocean is very, very involved in this. The ocean is a huge store of carbon dioxide, it’s a store of biomass that helps us process carbon dioxide, and of course the ocean also has a temperature, and that temperature is going to help regulate the temperature of the atmosphere. Not to mention the fact that there are ice sheets that are melting and therefore dumping into the ocean.

0:01:15.3 SC: Furthermore, it’s not just climate change that is affecting our oceans. We’re dumping garbage into the oceans, plastics, both big and small, we are fishing and taking life out of the ocean in incredible numbers. So nobody in the past few decades has been a more consistent and compelling voice for fixing and protecting our oceans than today’s guest, Sylvia Earle. Sylvia Earle obviously has an incredible resume. In the unlikely event that you are not familiar with her work, I encourage you to Google, or go to the show notes on Preposterousuniverse.com/podcast, and click on some of these links. For decades now, since she got her PhD and has become interested in both the scientific study of the oceans and life in the oceans, and also their preservations. So Sylvia spent weeks of her life [chuckle] on the ocean floor, either in pressure suits, or in underwater environments, she still holds a number of records for the longest dive, or walk under certain circumstances, and she served as an activist, she was for long… For a short time, I should say, she was the chief scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I should say a short time because she didn’t last very long, this was during the first George Bush administration, and she resigned because she realised that she could be a more effective advocate, as a private citizen than as a government official.

0:02:45.5 SC: And she’s still to this day… She’s been around for a while, and she’s as active as ever. She has a new organisation, Mission Blue, that is dedicated to protecting our oceans, because despite the fact that the oceans are most of the area of our globe, we might neglect them. We don’t think of them as much when we think about the environment and what we’re doing and what we’re doing, as you’ll hear, in this podcast, is pretty bad and pretty extensive, and it’s one of these conversations that if you’re not already plugged into what’s going on, it will make you stop and think. And think about what we are doing, both individually, and as a society, as governments, to protect our oceans, and there’s a chance, there still is, despite the fact that we’re doing these terrible, terrible things to our oceans, she is just this relentlessly optimistic person, and so she spins it as the new generation has an opportunity to do something amazing, namely to save our planet. And she encourages us to do that. The planet, both the blue part, as well as the green part. The oceans, as well as the land.

0:03:51.9 SC: So this is a call to action as well as a cautionary tale. If you want some more details, you can check out Sylvia’s new book, called National Geographic Ocean: A Global Odyssey. And as she discusses in the podcast, part of the impetus behind the book was taking advantage, as it were, of the pandemic, to sort of step back and think, not just keep diving into the ocean and doing science and doing advocacy, but really try to put the big picture together. And think about where we are and where we’re gonna go. With that, let’s go.

[music]

0:04:39.5 SC: Sylvia Earle, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:41.5 Sylvia Earle: It’s so great to be onboard.

0:04:43.5 SC: So, I really wanna get into these questions about the oceans and their ecology and their environment and the bad things that we’re doing to them and the good things we could try to do, but first I can’t get away without taking advantage of the fact that we have you here and you have a set of experiences that most of us don’t have. Could you just share a little bit about what it’s like on the ocean floor? You’ve spent time down there, and I think most of our listeners have not.

[laughter]

0:05:12.4 SE: Well, the ocean is actually not the bottom nor the top. It’s that part in between.

[laughter]

0:05:17.9 SC: Fair enough.

0:05:19.0 SE: It’s the wet part. And I have, I think, just begun to explore for myself, and all of us we’re just, I think, at the edge of the greatest era of exploring the blue part of the planet. And I wish I could take everybody [chuckle] out. Take the plunge, get in there. My mother actually waited until she was 81 before she put on a mask and looked at the ocean from the inside out, and if she were here, she would say, “Don’t wait until you’re 81, but if you are, it’s not too late. Dive in, go see for yourself. The…

0:06:13.1 SE: The joy of getting to see that the ocean is alive, it’s just full of the most wonderful creatures. You know in the land, it’s pretty exciting if you see a wild bird up close, the one that would come and look at you in the ocean, the wild things come and look at you all the time. [laughter] They’re curious and then they’re abundant. Fish go out of their way to… To come and see who is… Who are you? What are you doing down here? [laughter]

0:06:50.7 SC: Well, at the practical level, do you have any advice? Like literally, I’m listening to you and I have never done this, I’ve really never gone below swimming.

0:06:59.2 SE: You mean not yet.

0:07:00.0 SC: Not yet, exactly right. So what should I do if I wanted to just, without making too much of a lifetime commitment as you have done, to experience what it’s like there?

0:07:10.5 SE: Well, a good first way to take the plunge is, as my mother did, with a mask that fits so that it doesn’t leak, and if you wear glasses, there’s so many ways now to get an insert in a face mask that enables you to see as clearly under water as you do on the land. That’s, I think the number one priority get a good face mask and after that, flippers help. It enables, it enables you to swim faster, even in the swimming pool. [chuckle] And you could practice in the swimming pool and see. Wow, you can literally move with greater speed and dexterity if you have this… And again, it’s nice to get some that really are comfortable on your feet. And the snorkel, it takes a little used to, getting used to to have something in your mouth that you breathe through, like dolphins have a hole in the top of their head [laughter] that they breathe through when they come up to the surface. So something like that, you put a snorkel on so you can keep your face down and breathe through the snorkel that projects out of the water. It seems a little awkward at first, but it doesn’t take long. I actually went diving with Mr. Rogers in the Florida Keys.

[laughter]

0:08:38.3 SE: Mr. Rogers, the famous…

0:08:39.8 SC: Sure.

0:08:41.2 SE: Ambassador for all things in the world with children, and he did a good job of explaining to kids what the snorkel does and how easy it is and what a gift it is to be able to breathe as you’re cruising along on the surface. But then if you want to go to a little bit deeper and stay a little bit longer, just try scuba. There’re scuba shops all over the country, all over the world, that will take pleasure in introducing you to what it’s like to breathe on the bottom of a swimming pool. [laughter] in the ocean, and of course, there’s a lot more to see in the ocean than in a swimming pool.

0:09:25.5 SC: And at the other end of the technological spectrum, once we get to the scientific research, etcetera, like what is the state of the art for how we are exploring both the ocean and the ocean floor?

0:09:40.5 SE: Well, I love getting into a little submarine that enables people to go, well, presently, it’s possible, the technology that now exists to go to the deepest part of the ocean, which is… That is deep in the ocean as people fly high in the sky on a commercial aircraft, seven miles or 11 kilometres, and the idea that we now have the capacity to get anywhere in the ocean, at least for a while, hours, not weeks. But living under water is another tool that is available, I’ve stayed underwater in an underwater laboratory now on 10 different occasions, and literally, you can live under water for days or even weeks at a time, so you become part of the system, day or night, you can go out and visit with the creatures who live there.

0:10:45.0 SC: Are there ongoing underwater laboratories in operation right now?

0:10:51.1 SE: Well, back in the 1970s, when I first tried an underwater laboratory, there was the expectation that there would be a lot of them going forward actually, that dream has not come true, but there is Aquarius, the underwater laboratory that is down in the Florida Keys. Where Aquanauts can spend days or even weeks at a time, and astronauts actually train there to see and experience what weightlessness is like, it’s true in space, and of course, you can simulate that yourself with scuba, you can stand on one finger, you could be… [chuckle] [laughter] like a ballerina do back flips and not feel the least bit of stress in doing so.

0:11:48.5 SC: And is Aquarius mostly a scientific research institution?

0:11:53.8 SE: Well, you perhaps hear that chicken in the background, do you?

0:11:57.9 SC: I do hear chicken. That’s okay, that’s all a part of a colourful background [laughter] we’ll put up with that.

0:12:04.7 SE: Yeah, most of… I would say that all of my time under water has been useful scientifically because as a scientist, I’m always on full alert, I want just… I wanna know everything about everything, the way little kids wanna know everything about everything, [chuckle] and then to share the view and communicate not just with my fellow scientists, but with the rest of the world. But on the other hand, every dive is also a pleasure.

0:12:42.3 SC: Sure. [laughter]

0:12:45.3 SE: It’s not exactly recreational, but it certainly is fun.

0:12:49.6 SC: There’s clearly a analogy, at least, that you’ve already mentioned between space exploration and ocean exploration. As a cosmologist, in part of my day job, I’m much more familiar with the space side of things. So, is there a similar debate with ocean exploration as there is with space exploration about human-centred exploration versus robotic or sensors in the ocean? How much data are we collecting just through remote sensing rather than actually sending people down there?

0:13:23.1 SE: Well, I’m intrigued by these questions about, “Do we really need to have humans up in the sky? Do we really need to have humans down in the ocean?” I think the answer to that is a resounding, “But of course.” We need all of the ways and means available to us to experience and explore, whether it’s going up or going down. There are advantages to having robots that never get tired, although they do wear out. [chuckle] And they need maintenance, but they generally have longer endurance. And if you lose a robot, it’s kind of no big deal, it’s a dollar loss, but it’s not a human life loss. And the concern is always there whether we’re talking about astronauts or those who explore the ocean. But the difference between sending a camera and sending an instrument and actually being there yourself is huge that we under-rate perhaps our ability to be surprised and our ability to follow a hunch. You kind of see something out of the corner of your eye and you turn and go check it out.

0:14:52.3 SE: A programmed robot cannot do that and even with a remotely operated system where there is a human in the loop, who just happened to be up on the surface driving the vehicle just like the Mars Rover had human operators and observers looking through the camera eyes of the rover. And some of these rovers, whether it’s on other parts of the solar system or in the deep sea are pre-programmed or they have the sensory equipment to be able to operate on their own, many of them do have… Take commands from a human and bring information back live. That’s still not the same as actually being there. [chuckle] I sometimes make an analogy, “It’s one thing to be at a fine restaurant, dining, drinking the wine, having a conversation, whatever it is, it’s another to send a camera. [chuckle] Right now, we are communicating in a way that is great. This is almost, but not quite as good, as sitting across the table from you.

0:16:20.1 SC: I would like to be able to see your chicken and say, “Hi.” This is what I’m missing out with this technological…

0:16:25.9 SE: You’ll hear a very happy rooster here pretty soon. Okay? [chuckle]

0:16:29.0 SC: Okay. Good. So, maybe we can give the listeners a feeling for the, I guess, the ecology of what it’s like under the water because we have an intuition or an experience here on earth that there are forests, there are deserts, there are different kinds of climates and different kinds of terrains. How similar is it under the ocean? Is the ocean floor… Are there deserts where there’s nothing on the ocean floor? Or is there life everywhere there? Is there more aquatic life near the land and so forth?

0:17:07.3 SE: Well, from the surface, the ocean looks pretty much the same today as it did throughout the whole previous history of the ocean, I suppose, but once you get under the surface, the one thing that strikes you is there’s life, life, there’s life everywhere from the surface to the greatest steps. And it’s only in fairly recent times that we’ve been able to verify the existence of life from the surface all the way down to the bottom, and even beneath the bottom of the ocean where water trickles down through cracks and crevices in the ocean floor. And microbes, little guys, live as much as a mile beneath the bottom of the ocean.

0:17:59.5 SC: Wow.

0:18:00.4 SE: Microbes, but they’re alive is part of what makes life… Makes earth, earth, have all of these amazing bacteria and algae as a part of the system, a very basic part of the life on earth. But of course, there are also big things in the ocean. The biggest creature that has ever lived as far as we know, blue whales. They’re ocean creatures adapted for life where their great bulk, their huge bodies, as much as 100 feet long, can be lifted… Well, buoyed up, is the right word, I guess, in the ocean, suspended in the sea. They’d have a hard time moving that much bulk on the land.

0:18:58.9 SC: Yeah. So if I were to take a boat just a 1000 miles in a random direction here in the Pacific Ocean and bring my little submarine and go all the way down to the bottom at a random spot on the Pacific Ocean floor, there would be life hanging out?

0:19:13.0 SE: Absolutely, Absolutely. Where there’s water, there’s likely to be life. There’s… There can be water without life, but there’s no life without water. And most diverse water, 97% of it is ocean. And the fact that everywhere we’ve looked in the ocean, there is microbial life, and if you look at a big chunk of ocean, you’ll see big chunks of life. [chuckle] And it’s not just rocks and water out there, it’s a living system. I think that’s the exciting thing that all these things are connected. We’re connected to it, as well. If we think that we’re not a part of the living ocean, just ask yourself. Well where does air come from? Where does water that falls as rain and sleet and snow, where does it come from? Well, it’s the water cycle. That most of it evaporates from the surface of the ocean into clouds and then falls back on land and sea. The oxygen cycle, where does it come from? Well, it has taken living systems, photosynthetic organisms, mostly in the ocean. Before there were trees and ferns and mosses on the land, there was life in the ocean.

0:20:44.6 SE: Again, the small things, the little guys that do the heavy lifting over many millions of years, and they continue right up to the present moment, generating oxygen, capturing carbon, really an important part, not only, of the oxygen cycle, that makes it possible for us to breathe and for large animals everywhere to exist, but also capturing carbon and generating food. We’re now able to link as never before the role of living organisms, of course on the land, but especially in the ocean, to climate, all of the carbon. [chuckle] Where is most of the carbon? Well, most is the Earth is… Most of the living part of the planet is ocean, in the carbon cycle, driven by photosynthesis, capturing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, converting it to sugar, converting it to food, it gets converted to zooplankton, food for them, that in turn become food for little fish, that become food for bigger fish, for whales and for some of us. And we’re all carbon-based units, too. When you think about Star Trek, find the carbon-based units, Scotty.

[laughter]

0:22:13.9 SC: So it’s…

0:22:16.2 SE: Looking for life in the universe.

0:22:20.2 SC: Yes. So the ocean plays a huge role in the carbon cycle. So I wanna get this right, ’cause again, I’m not a biologist, not an ecologist. It’s not the ocean water, it’s the life in the ocean that is converting carbon dioxide into oxygen? Is that true? Is that right?

0:22:39.2 SE: Carbon dioxide and water yields sugar…

0:22:43.7 SC: Yeah…

0:22:43.8 SE: And oxygen is a byproduct.

0:22:46.3 SC: Byproduct. Yeah, okay.

0:22:47.5 SE: It’s a simple photosynthesis formula that… I love it. The kids are learning this early in their education. But when you think in the history of humankind, the knowledge about what air is… That’s mostly nitrogen, about 80%, about 20% oxygen, and just enough carbon dioxide and other gases like helium and neon, a few things that are lurking in what we breathe, and owing to our actions, there’s a lot of other stuff there, too. [laughter] Like sweat. [laughter]

0:23:29.6 SE: And things you don’t wanna know about. That come back to haunt us. Even microplastics, nanoplastics, things that we have generated, which are great. These synthetic materials serve human kind very well, but when we throw them away, they don’t go away. They stick around like the fishing nets that were produced out of these new light materials back in the 1960s? When they get lost or discarded, they don’t go away. They’re still out there clogging the ocean, killing things. And when they do break down, they still don’t go away right down to the molecular level, and there’s little tiny fragments, nanoplastics, that are really too small to be seen, except with a microscope. They are light enough so that they get lofted into the atmosphere, and we do find it in the water we drink, we find them even in the air we breathe.

0:24:33.7 SC: What is it that in your mind, we don’t know about the oceans that is most important to know, like what are the big scientific agenda questions in learning more about the oceans?

0:24:43.7 SE: I think the most important discovery. Well, there are two things… [chuckle] The magnitude of our ignorance. We still are at the edge of the greatest era of exploration ever. But I think for a human standpoint, our existence is dependent on the existence, not just of the water in the ocean, but the fact that it’s a living system, it’s the living ocean that makes life on earth, land and sea, both possible. That includes us. No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us. And no blue, no green. [chuckle] So, I… One of the things that I really value about the terrible 2020 year of the pandemic, was a time when I was able to sort kick back and reflect on the questions of the sort that you’re asking, and to try to gather information. What do we really know? What don’t we know about the ocean?

0:25:59.6 SC: Right.

0:26:01.5 SE: And incorporate that in a series of sea stories, if you will, the story of the ocean in a book that is just coming out this year. For me, although largely, of course the pandemic was terrible, and for me, [chuckle] travelling the world and diving, much of the time exploring, I had to just give it up for a while. When I dived into… [laughter] Into the history of life on earth. And I hadn’t taken time for decades to just kick back and think, wonder and try to put it all together in ways that… Actually until right about now, we couldn’t do what is now possible to connect the dots to see how one thing relates to another and really try to answer that question. So why should we care about the ocean? What does the ocean ever done for me? It keeps you alive. That’s a starter. “Thank you, ocean”.

[laughter]

0:27:16.9 SC: Yes, but then what don’t we know? What are we… Are there big like… So again, if I talk about space or Physics, I can say, well, we have this particle accelerator or this spacecraft going to Europa to look for life, what are the big science projects that will hopefully teach us new things about the ocean in the years to come?

0:27:41.6 SE: Looking for life in the ocean, is a big one. There was a 10-year project called the Census of Marine Life from 2000-2010. Where scientists, thousands of scientists from around the world made a point of trying to look at museum records, of old whaling logs, scientific notebooks that’s gathering dust on the shelf, try to mine all the bits and pieces of knowledge that we’re sitting about and pull it together to know something about what we have known, and what was known about the ocean in times past, and then at the same time to deploy ships to explore the current state of the ocean and further to imagine the future of life in the ocean. And to try to answer that question, what don’t we know? And I think the answer to that is just about everything. We were just scratching the surface, literally, so that while, that 10-year effort really was a giant step in terms of getting to know more about our neighbours who lives in the ocean, and what do they mean? What do they do? I think that the fact that we have found more species of animals, mostly insects on the land than in the ocean, there are only about 15 major divisions of animal life that occur on the land. When you think or most people when they think animals, they focus on vertebrates.

0:29:27.4 SC: Yeah, sure.

0:29:28.2 SE: You think cats and dogs and horses, and sometimes you remember to include people with vertebrates, and we have fish are vertebrates and frogs and lizards and stuff. But the great majority of life even on the land are creatures with no backbones, the invertebrates, spiders and earthworms and snails and of course, all those insects. But in the ocean, all of the major divisions of animal life on the order of nearly 35 categories of life, they are distinctive enough that they get a distinctive statuses of phylum of animals, and the phylum that includes vertebrates also includes a few other kinds of almost vertebrates animals called Chordates, the beginnings of backbones, but when you think that most of life on Earth doesn’t have a backbone. In terms of sheer volume, let alone diversity, so there are whole categories of life, like nearly all categories of life are in the ocean, only about half have some representation on the land, we know no starfish on the land or in fresh water, but there are lots of them in the ocean, not just sea stars, but they’re relatives, again, they’re divisions within divisions. But the diversity of life in the sea is just staggering. And the abundance too is where… We do think that’s where the water is 97% of earth’s water. And where there’s water, there’s likely to be life, and we’re the odd ones, we live out of the water, most of lives on earth lives in the water…

0:31:31.5 SC: And you’ve already mentioned the nano plastics, but how is this changing in recent decades, and mostly due to human activity? How is the set of living beings and the whole ecosystem under the water being altered by our activities?

0:31:48.7 SE: Well, it’s a question that is front and centre of the minds of scientists right now, and many of them who are really trying to figure out. Okay, so now we know we have “plasticised” the earth one way or the other, so much plastic in the ocean and related synthetic materials, that have been a boon to human kind, you think of all the ways that we use plastics and buttons in our computer systems, plastic bags, plastic cups, you name it, it’s hard to move anywhere without encountering one or many of these synthetic materials, but they don’t go away that’s part of their usefulness, that they’re durable and they’re relative to many other substances they’re… They’re considered to be inexpensive, but they’re not when you put the real cost of their existence on the balance sheet, what do we do with them once they’ve escaped into the ocean? Because we’ve put them there.

0:32:55.5 SE: There’s a cost to recovering them, there’s a cost that we’re just beginning to try to factor in, what are they doing to us? It’s one thing to get entangled in plastic, hundreds of thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of seabirds, turtles, dolphins, whales, seals, sea lions, otters, and of course, fish and this great spectrum of invertebrate life gets tangled and killed by the debris, just sheer physical entanglement and also a turtle eats a plastic bag, it’s not very good for it, and whales are coming ashore stuffed with, in some cases, hundreds of pounds of plastic that they maybe not deliberately, but incidentally taken in, when they eat a fish that’s tangled in plastic, that plastic goes inside the whale. So that’s one example. Another concern is chemically, what might be happening to the creatures who engulf the nano plastics or the microplastics or the big chunks of plastic, sometimes the big chunks displace enough of the space in the stomach of a creature that they literally starve because they can’t get enough space on their stomachs to hold no nutritious food.

0:34:46.6 SC: Yeah.

0:34:46.6 SE: Their stomach is greatly diminished in size, the capacity because of all the plastic. True with baby birds, seabirds with their parents, stuff them with things like well, bits of plastic, cigarette lighters and tooth brushes and toy soldiers that have floated into the ocean, I mean I’m not making this up. There are places where seabirds nest all over the world, where the little birds hatch and the parents go out to sea and they pick up things that look nutritious and bring them back and feed them to their babies, and the babies get so stuffed with bits of plastic that there’s no room for food, and they simply die, and their feather you see little piles of fluffy feathers where a baby seabird has consumed so much plastic that you see feathers surrounded by piles of this plastic stuff. But we don’t have a real answer yet about the impact on human health, to inhaling or engulfing nano plastics or microplastics that now appear in the air, in water, in the coffee you drink, in the beer, whatever it is, wherever there’s water, it’s a scary thought, but the actual impact is simply a question mark. I mean I think it’s probably safe to say that if you have a choice, you’d rather not be taking in these bits of material that don’t exist in nature, but now exist in us.

0:36:40.7 SC: Yeah, and what about the just impact of overfishing or other sort of commercial farming of the sea kinds of things, I mean my vague impression is that we’ve killed off a lot of the stocks of fish and shellfish and so forth, but what is the situation there?

0:37:02.4 SE: That’s one of the things that I dived into, into my year of deep thinking, and trying to articulate it in a positive way for the National Geographic book it’s “Ocean: A Global Odyssey,” where the first part is literally about the story of the ocean, how did it come to be? And how did life in the ocean come to be? How did we come to be? But then transitioning to our role, the role of the ocean and climate, the role of ocean as a source of food and products, the way we used to look at whales as pounds of meat and barrels of oil.

0:37:53.6 SC: Yeah.

0:37:54.0 SE: But we’ve shifted and I’ve been a witness to the shift. I served for a while when I was Chief Scientist at NOAA, I served on the International Whaling Commission before the agreement came into place to put a moratorium on the commercial extraction killing of whales, and now I’ve witnessed this change. The whales were just… I mean whalers were the heroes and whales were the product of something that people value, for money and the source of food, now we look at them as societies, as treasured fellow creatures with families with personality, with language. We think of them with a… In a totally different way now that we know what we know that we could not know before.

0:38:51.4 SC: And have the… These efforts been successful?

0:38:53.5 SE: There are more whales today…

0:38:54.1 SC: Have these efforts been successful? Are the whale populations recovering from that over-fishing?

0:39:00.4 SE: Some of the whale populations are recovering, like the gray whales in California and Mexico going up to Canada, they have significantly rebounded from where they were at the low point when it was thought, with a few hundred of them remaining, that they might just disappear. But they have come back so that they’re now thousands, not hundreds.

0:39:27.6 SC: That’s something. Yeah.

0:39:28.6 SE: They’re now… The biggest threat now is not that we spear them or harpoon them, but rather that we are taking their food. And there’s some skinny whales out there because we were competing with them for food. And also because they get tangled in the junk that we throw into the ocean and poisoning the ocean too. That the ocean chemistry is changing because of what we’re putting in and what we’re taking out, so it’s not as… The ocean is not as safe for them or for other marine life today, as it has been in times past. But I think the good news is we can see the cause and effect. We can see that there are fewer sharks in the ocean now by a lot, from the time when I was a child when people who were afraid of sharks, and they used to warn me when I started diving in the ocean. “Watch out, there are man eaters out there.” And then I thought I don’t qualify, so [laughter]

0:40:37.9 SC: You’re safe.

0:40:38.0 SE: I don’t have to worry. [laughter] But whales have to worry, sharks have to worry now because we eat them, we kill them. The ratio of how many sharks actually eat humans or take a bite out of us… Rarely does a shark actually consume a human. A few people like I don’t know, three or four, maybe six a year, get nibbled on by a shark. But then you think how many millions of sharks are taken for us to nibble on them, to turn them into soup, to turn them into shark steak or even… Which really baffles me, people kill sharks for the fun of it, ’cause there are tournaments to see how many sharks you can kill. In the process, they’re really killing the ocean ’cause the ocean really needs sharks to be in place.

0:41:33.6 SC: Well, and what about just like tuna and salmon and other common food fishing, have we brought that overfishing under control? Or is it still getting worse?

0:41:44.4 SE: No. Oh my goodness, no. 90% of the sharks are gone in some cases, like the oceanic whitetip and the shortfin mako, they’re down to half of 1% of what they were when I was a kid. We’re really good at killing them, and that’s disrupted not just the food chains of the ecology of the ocean, but the chemistry of the ocean, the carbon cycle is disrupted too. Because carbon is part of that cycle, nutrients are given back by every living creature, every animal gives nutrients back, whether it’s a whale or a shark or a tuna. And when we take so many of them out of the ocean, we alter the chemistry of the ocean, and that ultimately comes around to the oxygen that’s generated, the carbon that’s captured. But more than that, the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has turned to carbonic acid in the ocean. The atmosphere is one putting excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere driving the warming of the planet, that’s one category of whoa. But the other is excess carbon oxide in the ocean is turning the ocean more acidic.

0:43:02.1 SC: Acidic, right?

0:43:02.9 SE: Again, changing the chemistry. So, although it’s obvious that our impact by the direct killing of ocean wildlife, tunas, swordfish, crabs, lobster, shrimp, cod, you name it, anything in the ocean. Any animal there is a wild animal. And we have reduced their populations, the ones that appear in our supermarkets and restaurants dramatically in a matter of decades. So that the numbers for bluefin tuna in the Pacific we’re down to about 3% of what was there in 1970. In the Atlantic, it’s a little better, perhaps maybe 10% of the bluefins in terms of their numbers as compared to what was there in 1970. I remarked on this when I was at NOAA as the chief scientist, because that was only 20 years into 1990. And I said in 20 years, we were able to reduce the population by about 90% in the Atlantic. And my comment was, what are we trying to do? Exterminate them? Because we’re doing a good job, only 10% left. And that’s when they started calling me the sturgeon girl.

[laughter]

0:44:36.4 SE: But somebody has to speak for the fish, because most people don’t know. They see an animal in the supermarket, they figure that somebody’s looking out for their numbers and that it’s got to be alright if it’s in a restaurant. But the fact is, we have habits, customs and laws in place governing our behaviour toward the ocean as it was. It doesn’t really necessarily fit the ocean as it is today. So much has changed so fast that it’s a different ocean today than what it was when I was a child. In some ways it’s good, we’ve got more whales, we’ve got more sea turtles because we started protecting them. But in almost every other thing that you look at, coral reefs are only about half remaining, mangroves, seagrasses, populations of oysters that once were so abundant in New York, and then they’re just big bay the Gulf of Mexico. They’re just a tiny fraction remaining San Francisco Bay for lots of reasons not just because we love to eat them, but because we’ve altered the nature of the ocean itself. It’s not as friendly a place for life as we knew it and experienced it when I was a kid.

0:46:11.8 SC: Well, in terms of the fish, you know, especially tuna, swordfish, etcetera, what would you recommend that our policy be either individually or as nations in the world? It sounds from what you’re saying, that you would hope that we should pretty dramatically change our habits when it comes to eating seafood.

0:46:33.6 SE: I say give them a break. [chuckle] It’s a choice.

0:46:37.0 SC: Yeah.

0:46:37.5 SE: We don’t really need… I try hard to think who on the planet really needs to eat ocean wildlife for sustenance because they don’t have many choices. Well there are communities, they’re island countries, where they’re… It’s not just a choice, it’s their existence, their food sources. It’s like bushmeat. There are people on the land who really rely on wildlife for sustenance. And in most cases, those who are in that category have had a peaceful relationship with nature over a very long period of time. They take but they don’t take so much that the population that they rely on for sustenance collapses. Well that’s not the state for most of the world and that’s not the rationale for most of what is taken from the ocean. It’s more about offering a choice, a luxury choice to people who have… For whom Orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, many things that we take from the ocean, wild things from the ocean are either new on their menu or in any case, they’re not a need, it’s a choice. And usually it’s a luxury choice. The cost of choosing fish today is truly a luxury choice. So I… The basic… Getting to the heart of the problem is that we regard wild things as free things, just there’s zero accounting base. When you calculate the worth of wild animals, they are only valuable once you’ve captured them and taken them to market.

0:48:43.9 SE: Then you can put a price tag on them. But swimming in the ocean, they’re not only free for the taking, there’s no cost except getting there and extracting them, there is cost to that, but curiously tax payers, whether they know it or not, are subsidising the extravagant capturing of wildlife from the ocean. And there’s a cost that we’re just beginning to account for too, and that’s called by-catch. That in order to have shrimp on your plate or tuna in your sushi or in your salad, there are many tons of other creatures who are caught in the process and are simply discarded using bottom trawls, those big nets that scrapes the ocean floor for those who live not only close to the bottom but… And that’s shrimp, they’re bottom dwellers, halibut, flounder, they’re bottom dwellers and many others as well, are captured in this way where you take everything. It’s like a dragging a net across New York City or San Francisco. You take up everything and you shake out the few things that you want the pedestrians may be, and all the rest is just thrown away, spilled, lost. It’s like bulldozing a forest to get the song birds. And we condone that. We have been doing this now for decades.

0:50:17.2 SE: And we’re paying the cost. The ocean is seriously disrupted just from this one form of capturing ocean low life, that not only is bad for the creatures they catch, but for this whole ecosystem that gets destroyed in the process. And we don’t account for the loss. It’s all considered to be the cost of doing business at no cost. [chuckle] So all of us are paying because we have an ocean that we need for our existence. Our health, our security is being torn apart because we simply haven’t understood the real consequences. We thought the ocean was too big to fail no matter what we took out of it or however we took what we took. I mean consider what we did during the 1950s and beyond to test nuclear devices in the ocean, blowing up whole chunks of ocean with all of the creatures who live there in some of the most beautiful and productive coral reefs on the planet were simply vaporised. Well, we can, in a way, justify it as well, it’s war and it’s security. Well, okay, we didn’t know then as much as we do now about what real security means.

0:51:49.4 SE: If we disrupt the systems on this little blue speck in the universe that’s pretty unfriendly, except for here, we’re in trouble, and we have disrupted the systems that maintain Earth as a habitable place, in a universe that’s not very friendly. But we can see it, we know it, we can measure it, and we also know what to do, to turn things from decline, that I’m but a witness to and people have been saying now through decades and we have the alarm bells ringing and flashing and we’ve got climate issues, we’ve got warming issues, we’ve got pollution issues, we’ve got a diminishing population of tuna and swordfish and all the other creatures we extract from the sea. But what is the solution? Well, the great positive thing is, now we know. We know what to do. We need to make better choices about what we eat, how we treat the ocean, and to use this remarkable time in history of human kind, to apply what we now know that we could not know, not so long ago. That’s the super power of knowing, that leads to understanding and shifting in a way that will make us safe. We need a planet that really works in our favour, and we’ve had it through all my life. But when I think about my kids, my grandkids, or everybody’s grandkids.

0:53:41.9 SE: If we continue the current trajectory of decline, their future looks pretty perilous. But we’ve got this little window right now. This is the sweet spot in time, because we’re armed with knowing cause and effect. There are smart whales, there are smart birds, fellow primates. I’ve met some pretty smart fish, but they cannot know what today’s kids and grown-ups too know, what Earth looks like from space. To see that everything connects. We can’t get away with doing bad behaviour anywhere without it affecting, now we know everywhere. So that fires in Australia affect me here in California and vice versa. Fires in California affect the whole planet, because everything connects and good behaviour connects too. So that when we protect, with a national park, protect a water system, protect the fly ways of birds, go from not just one part of a country but across boundaries into other countries, working together, birds are safer now than they were at some points in times past, because we value them and we’re taking measures to protect them, and we’re beginning to understand that the same is true with fish.

0:55:18.0 SE: That we can’t feed ourselves with wild birds, songbirds, we’d soon run out of groceries if we all had to just eat songbirds, but we’re running out of fish too, why? Because we’ve taken so many so fast. With industrial technologies that enable us to extract wildlife on this huge scale and it affects the nature of life in the ocean, it affects the chemistry of the ocean. It affects us, and of course, people who one way or the other will take life from the ocean to eat, but we need to think about how much, how fast and what methods are being used, and even with aquaculture, we’ve gotta get much smarter about how we do that. Raising carnivores really doesn’t make any sense. You’ve got a big fish like a salmon, what does it eat? It eats other fish that eat other fish that eat other fish, and you get down to plants ultimately. So cows are taking a big bite out of the ecosystem, even though they eat plants, but at least it’s sunlight, plant, cow. Sunlight, plant, chicken. Sunlight, plant, sheep. Sunlight… All the animals we raise to eat are grazers by nature. Most of the animals we take from the ocean, the wild animals and even those that are being cultivated are largely carnivores, and salmon is the number one example. Catfish? Better choice.

0:56:59.4 SE: They eat plants and they grow fast, unlike a tuna that takes many years just to mature and can live 30, 40, 50 years. So we’re eating these old fish that have accumulated whatever we’ve put in the ocean. So the older they are, the bigger the fish, and the greater the likelihood they’ve got stuff in them, that you probably don’t want in you, and they’re more valuable in the ocean doing their thing like wolves and lions and tigers, than on our plates. We have so many choices about what we can eat.

0:57:41.0 SC: I remember visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium and they handed out these little cards which basically recommend, “Please don’t eat these, please do eat these,” but I guess I always thought of that in terms of how endangered the species were, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms of where they are in the food chain, which is what you’re suggesting.

0:58:01.4 SE: Well, that’s one of the bigger missions of these guides about better choices, failure to acknowledge the age, the investment that goes into making even a little fish, because a chicken that’s been around for less than a year and goes to market, has consumed about two pounds of plants. A tuna that gets big enough to go to market, has consumed… When you go through the food chain, fish that have eaten fish, how many tons of phytoplankton at the bottom of the food chain, capturing sunlight, turning it into food, goes in ultimately to making a tuna? We’re talking thousands of pounds of plants for one pound of tuna. For a cow, it’s about 20 pounds of photo-synthesisers to make a pound of cow, about two pounds for a pound of chicken, but any wild fish, but especially the big old carnivores, the top carnivores that we especially like to eat, whether it’s a cod, or a swordfish or a 50-year-old halibut, think about an animal that has escaped all of the things in the ocean that have enabled it to get to be a 50-year-old halibut, a big old fish that then gets sliced and diced to become a little piece of meat on your plate, and you just eat it casually. If you do eat halibut, or tuna or swordfish or cod, do so with great respect, because it’s taking a huge bite out of the ocean, and we aren’t properly accounting for the cost no matter how much you pay for that, wondrous seafood.

0:59:56.8 SC: No that is… It’s a very good perspective, I think. The whole top of the food chain kind of thing, I do wanna give us a chance to just say a little bit about climate change, and I think probably most people listening agree that climate change is real, it’s largely caused by anthropogenic activities, and presumably it’s bad for the oceans. But maybe less appreciated is the sort of feedback element going on, right? That climate change affects the oceans, and the oceans affect climate change. I remember hearing very recently worries that the gulf stream might be disappearing entirely because of climate change, it’s a very unpredictable system. Is there anything that you think that we should know that maybe we don’t? About the relationship of climate change and the oceans?

1:00:47.9 SE: Well, again, I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to kick back and thoughtfully look at what we now know, and I’m not alone in doing this. Scientists around the world who are addressing climate, are for the first time able to gather the information that’s been accumulating now, for decades, that are enabling us to see what we couldn’t see before. Connecting the dots, looking at patterns, cause and effect. One thing seems really obvious now, that maybe wasn’t so obvious when concerns about changing climate first began to make headlines, and that is, we’re talking about a living system. Whether it’s trees capturing carbon and sequestering carbon or phytoplankton in the ocean, that is doing the same thing, capturing carbon dioxide, generating food, releasing oxygen, but sequestering carbon, when carbon… Whether it’s in the roots of a rainforest tree or a tree in your backyard, you’re sequestering carbon into the soil. Mangroves are champion carbon sequesters, with their roots in the ocean and not only generating oxygen, keeping the carbon in place.

1:02:35.9 SE: Now, think about this, the hundreds of millions of tons of carbon-based units, we call squid and shrimp, and tuna and swordfish and all the other creatures that we extract from the ocean, that carbon goes back to the atmosphere. Similarly, when you clear cut or burn a forest, what happens to the carbon? Into the atmosphere. That’s bad, but what’s worse is that the natural carbon capturing systems, that have shaped earth into a habitable place for life as we know it, are destroyed or diminished or corrupted one way or the other, and that has not really been acknowledged so much in the past. More with trees, than with the ocean, but now blue carbon is making headlines, if you will. The International Monetary Fund commissioned a study, that was reported to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, about the value… The carbon capturing and sequestration value of whales to be on the order of a trillion dollars.

1:03:55.3 SC: Pretty good. That’s real money.

1:03:57.6 SE: Just thinking about their other values, I mean we love whales, we love their songs, we love their… All these intangibles, but then there’s whale watching and then there’s this and that. What’s the value of a live whale compared to a dead whale? Well, dead whale, puts carbon back into the atmosphere. Live whale, holds it in place and ultimately goes to the bottom of the ocean. That’s how it has worked long before humans were around, that the cycle, scientists tend to follow the carbon…

1:04:35.0 SE: If you really wanna understand climate, economists follow the money, but scientists follow the carbon, follow the water, follow this… But look at how the system functions. And in Scotland, the Climate Conference that’s forthcoming in October, for the first time, and instead of just being acknowledged a little bit, in Paris was the first time that the ocean as a component of climate was acknowledged at all, before it’s all about the atmosphere, it’s all about the land. But think of this, now we know, because it seems obvious, the ocean drives climate, moves cold water, warm water, around the planet, shapes the planet’s climate. Without the ocean there would be no climate, effectively. And we’ve just haven’t thought about it, now we are thinking about it. And now we’re acknowledging not just rocks and water, not just the heat holding capacity of the ocean, and not just ocean currents moving around; but the living ocean, the carbon in the ocean as a principal driver of the cycle of life of the climate.

1:06:00.5 SE: When you think, if Earth did not… It had rocks and water, but it had no life, would be a really inhospitable place [chuckle] It’s the living complicated interacting systems in the land and in the sea, in the soil, in the fabric of life itself, that we fit into this as a piece of it. And now we’ve become a dominantly influential piece because of our capacity to alter the nature of nature. And knowing this means, “Oh, this is what we have to do, to heal the harm. Here’s how we repair what we’ve done to damage the network of life.” We know that planting trees, not just any old trees, the right trees, the native trees, in the right places, in the right way, at the right time, we convey a positive difference… Make a positive… We plant native plants instead of a lawn. In those areas, if you have a yard, think about what you can do to restore insects and birds and life on the land, the carbon cycle, by being a good steward of that little piece of land. And you can do your part or a community, work with your neighbours, work with those to plan use of the land in a way that’s water-friendly, instead of paving over streams and putting them in culverts because it’s efficient.

1:07:48.5 SE: Think about the cost of what you’re losing in the process. Working with nature seems like such a simple but beautiful idea. Understand where have we caused a problem? How can we be a solution? And you can do it one person at a time, or a community, or a country. Thinking about the commitment that countries are making all over the world now, including this country, to embrace the natural systems, land and sea, to protect at least 30% in the next 10 years, at least 30%. And to have respect for literally the whole earth system, because that’s what keeps us alive. Astronauts, they care about their life support system, I do, when I get down on a submarine, I wanna be careful of the air, and the water, whatever food I’ve got. Well, on a planetary scale, this is the first time, lucky us, we have the super power of understanding what nobody could see when I was a kid. And the kids of today, have got this gift of knowledge that is being handed over to them, and of course, we’re handing them some big problems too.

1:09:07.9 SC: Well, yes [chuckle]

1:09:08.6 SE: We’ve also got solutions. If I were a kid, I’d say, “Yes, this is my time, this is the best time ever, ’cause I know what to do. Let me at it.”

1:09:20.1 SC: I always like to sort of…

1:09:21.0 SE: We need to give them all the help we can.

1:09:22.0 SC: To wrap up the podcast on an optimistic note. And you do this instinctively, so I don’t even have to nudge you in that direction, this is also very optimistic things you just said. But let me just give you the opportunity to elaborate a little bit on something you mentioned very quickly there, this idea of protected areas under the sea. Is this something… Well, number one, how does that work? The sea is all like… The water just sort of flows into other areas of the water, so is it even feasible to protect areas of the sea? And number two, is it something we’re doing or should be doing? Is it something we should be agitating for?

1:09:57.4 SE: The national park idea got under way early in the 20th century. And late in the 20th century, the idea of doing something comparable in the ocean took place first in Australia with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to protect that amazing coral reef that borders the east coast of Australia. And in the United States, about the same time a little place was protected around a shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, the monitor as a historic monument or protected area, but also in the Florida Keys. And since then, around the world, the nations have scaled up significantly the concept of protection in areas under their jurisdiction within the exclusive economic zones. The countries have the ability to govern out 200 nautical miles. So this country, United States, is twice as big if you count… Than what most people think of it, if you count the blue part. And some countries, little island countries are 10, 20, 100 times bigger than the land mass, but it’s under their jurisdiction. So, all of that is… We’re seeing some real progress, not enough, but the goal is 30% by 2030, right now, it’s about 3%.

1:11:29.8 SE: Going back 20 years, it was 0%. So… [chuckle]

1:11:33.3 SC: That’d be a huge change.

1:11:34.8 SE: Well, almost… It was very, so almost couldn’t measure it in the greater scheme of the ocean, but… If you count some of the areas that have some form of protection, like our marine sanctuaries… And places around the world that are managed, but you can still commercially fish and do a lot of other stuff, they’re not really protected, but they’re moving in the right direction, maybe close to 10% of the ocean has some form of protection. But the goal by 2030 is full protection… For 30% of the land and the ocean… It’s our bank account, it’s our insurance policy against the natural ups and downs that will take place no matter what humans do. I mean, it’s… It seems like the smartest investment we could possibly make, and the more… Some are… And among them are aiming for at least half of the world to protect our life support system.

1:12:37.4 SC: Yeah.

1:12:37.8 SE: It doesn’t mean we can trash the rest and get away with it, half of your heart, do you want just half of your heart function? [laughter] You really wanna, really protect all of it. [laughter] One way or the other? Of course, we will use nature, all creatures do. We’ll divert the water for our purposes… We’ve already clear cut so much of the land, we ought to be re-using those places and restoring what we can to better health including our own backyards. That’s a good place to start for people… Look around what’s within your personal scope, you too can plant a tree. [chuckle] You can… Lawns are… We come to think of them as beautiful, like a rag out on your outside of your house, but think about what wild flowers would look like?

1:13:33.4 SC: Right.

1:13:34.0 SE: Natives. Think about what a vegetable garden would look like. It’s good for you in terms of what you eat, what… And good for… Good for the land, good for the air, think of [chuckle] generating oxygen and capturing carbon, and then you consume some of it yourself and I get just so excited about the things that we know we can do to make the world a better place. Nobody can do it all. But everybody can do something. So it all starts with that individual you see in the mirror…

1:14:11.8 SC: Yeah. It’s a very good message.

1:14:13.4 SE: If you aren’t willing to step up, Why would you expect others? [chuckle]

1:14:16.4 SC: It reminds me very much of…

1:14:17.6 SE: To carry the weight?

1:14:17.9 SC: Of a podcast I did a couple of years ago with Joe Walston, who was a conservationist, and he had a very optimistic message that he’s on land by… On the sea, but he thinks that if we put enough people into cities and protect enough of the land outside the cities, we can actually live in a happy equilibrium, but he stressed the point that there is a race. We have to get to the happy place before we destroy things to an irreparable, irrecoverable point. And it sounds like the same thing is true for the ocean, so I think that’s a good call to action for everyone out there listening.

1:14:54.7 SE: Right, so I say celebrate, if you had to choose a time in all of history it would be fun to go back hundreds or thousands of years ago [laughter] or maybe to zoom forward to see what it all turns out to be, but I think this is… This is the best choice. You, we all of us together are at a pivotal time…

1:15:21.1 SC: Right.

1:15:21.4 SE: With what we do or fail to do, but I hope it’s in a positive way, because we know that it makes a difference, we know we’ve seen the evidence. When we embrace nature with care, we get positive results. We get more whales, we get more trees, we have a better quality of air, we can restore better quality to the water that we didn’t know the harm we are capable of inflicting in the past, but there’s no excuse today. Now we know. And we should celebrate that. It really is our super power.

1:16:01.4 SC: I think it’s a…

1:16:02.1 SE: And it can save us.

1:16:04.1 SC: It can, and it is a super power and it’s a very good message, so I can’t think of any place to wrap up than that, so Sylvia Earle, thanks very, very much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:16:13.1 SE: Well, thank you for having me onboard.[/accordion-item][/accordion]