Hello, It's Chris Anderson here, and you're about to hear a talk from the legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle. She gave this talk 10 years ago when we awarded her the Ted Prize to support her mission to conserve the ocean. The talk is super informative, super inspiring. So Sylvia is now 83 it was an amazing treat to sit down with her for an extended conversation. For my podcast, the Ted interview. We discuss her lifelong love affair with the ocean and how something so vast and so or inspiring became so endangered and what we can still do to save it. So after hearing this talk, do come check out the Ted interview on Spotify apple podcasts or wherever you listen.

50 years ago, when I began exploring the ocean, no one not Jacques Perrin, not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or what we took out of it. It seemed at that time to be a Sea of Eden, but now we know, and we're now facing paradise lost. I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us. And to consider why it matters that in 50 years we've lost. Actually, we've taken. We've eaten more than 90% of the big fish in the sea. Why, you should care that nearly half of the car reefs have disappeared? Why a mysterious depletion of oxygen and large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying, but it really should concern you. It does concern you as well.

I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls tomorrow's child, asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time. I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health. And in so doing, secure hope for humankind, Hills to the ocean means health for us, for me as a scientist. It all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba. It's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter. Okay, I actually love diving at night. You see a lot of fish then you don't see in the daytime Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970 when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time. At the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon. In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal Submersible called Jim six miles offshore in 1250 feet down.

It's one of my favorite bathing suits, and since then I've used about 30 kinds of submarines, and I've even started three companies and the nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to Design and Build Systems to access the deep sea. I led a five year National Geographic expedition, the Sustainable Seas expeditions using these little subs. They're so simple to drive that even a scientist could do it, and I'm living proof. Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air, food, water temperature, all the things you need to stay alive in space who are under the sea, I heard. Astronaut Jo Ellan explained how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system. And then he pointed to this and he said, Life support system way need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it. The poet Auden said thousands have lived without love,

none without water. 97% of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine er's without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system. I gave a talk not so long ago with the World Bank and I should this amazing image of Earth And I said, There it is, the World Bank, That's where all the assets are. We've been drawing them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them. Tim Wirth says the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. With every drop of water you drink every breath you take,

you're connected to the sea. No matter where on earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. The ocean drives climate and weather stabilizes. Temperature shapes Earth's chemistry. Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land, and the sea is rain, sleet and snow and provides home for about 97% of life in the world. Maybe in the universe. No water, no life, no blue, no green.

Yet we have this idea. We humans that the earth, all of it, the oceans, the skies are so vast, so resilient. It doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 10,000 years ago and maybe even 1000 years ago. But in the last 100 especially the last 50 we've drawn down the assets, the air of the water, the wildlife that make our lives possible, new technologies, air helping us to understand the nature of nature, the nature of what's happening, showing us our impact on the earth. I mean,

first you have to know that you've got a problem. And fortunately in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. And with knowing comes caring with caring. There's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us. But first we have to know. Three years ago I met John Hanke, who's the head of Google Earth, and I told him how much I love being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously. But I asked him, Where you gonna finish it? You did a great job with the land, the dirt. What about the water? Since then, I've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers with the way our Marine with a National Geographic,

with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world, ones that we could enlist to put the ocean in Google Earth. And as of just this week last Monday, Google Earth is now whole. Consider this starting right here at the convention center, we confined the nearby aquarium. We can look at where we're sitting and then cruise up the coast to the big Aquarium, the ocean and California's four national marine sanctuaries and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets we can flit over to Hawaii and see the rial Hawaiian Islands, not just the little bit that pokes through the surface, but also what's below to see. Wait a minute. We can go splash shrooms right there, Uh, under the ocean and sea. What the We'll see. We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands.

We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales. These are gentle giants that I've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater. There's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale. We can pick up and fly to the deepest place seven miles down the Mariana Trench, where only two people have ever been. Imagine that it's only seven miles, but only two people have been there 49 years ago. One way trips are easy. We need new deep diving submarines. How about some X prizes for ocean exploration, whom we need to see deep trenches, the undersea mountains and understand life in the deep sea? We can now go to the Arctic. Just 10 years ago, I stood on the ice at the North Pole. An ice free Arctic ocean may happen in this century That's bad news for the polar bears.

It's bad news for us, too. Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming, it's also changing ocean chemistry, making the sea more acidic. That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen producing plankton. Also bad news for us. We're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic, another trash into the sea. Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets gear that continues to kill were clogging the ocean, poisoning the planet's circulatory system. And we're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife. All carbon based units barbarically were killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle. The nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle,

the water cycle, our life support system incredibly were still killing bluefin tuna, truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead. All of these parts are part of our life support system. We kill using long lines with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more. Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers, taking everything in their path. Using Google Earth, you can witness trawlers in China the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, shaking the foundation of our life support system, leaving plumes of death in their path. The next time you dine on sushi or sashimi or swordfish, steak or shrimp cocktail or whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean, think of the real cost. For every pound that goes to market,

more than £10 even £100 may be thrown away is by catch. This is the consequence of not knowing, but there are limits to what we can take out of the sea in my lifetime. Imagine, 90% of the big fish have been killed. Most of the turtles, sharks, tunas and whales are way down in numbers. But there is good news. 10% of the big fish still remain. There's still some blue whales. There's still some krill in Antarctica. There, a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay, half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet.

There's still time, but not a lot to turn things around. But business as usual means that in 50 years there may be no coral reefs and no commercial fishing because the fish will simply be gone. Imagine the ocean without fish. Imagine what that means to our life support system. Natural systems on the land are in big trouble, too, but the problems are more obvious, and some actions are being taken to protect trees, watersheds and wildlife. In 18 72 with Yellowstone National Park, the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had. About 12% of the land around the world is now protected, safeguarding biodiversity, providing a carbon sink, generating oxygen protecting watersheds.

And in 1972 this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea National Marine Sanctuaries. It's another great idea. The good news is that they're now more than 4000 places in the sea around the world, have some kind of protection, and you can find them on Google Earth. The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them. In the last three years, for example, the US protected 340,000 square miles of ocean his national monuments, but it only increased from 0.6 of 1% 2.8 of 1% of the ocean protected globally. Protected areas do rebound, but it takes a long time to restore 50 year old rockfish or monkfish sharks or sea bass or 200 year old orange roughy. We don't consume 200 year old cows or chickens. Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life or the census of marine life will live not just as a list, a photograph or a paragraph with scientists around the world. I've been looking at the 99% of the ocean that is open to fishing and mining and drilling and dumping.

And whatever the search out, hope spots and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future such as the Arctic. We have one chance right now to get it right, or the Antarctic, where the continent is protected. But the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill, whales and fish. Sargasso Sea's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows. 97% of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected, but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing. It's true, too. In Argentina, on the Patagonian shelf, now in serious trouble, the high seas were whales,

tunas and dolphins travel, the largest, least protected ecosystem on earth, filled with luminous creatures living in dark waters that average two miles deep, a flesh sparkle and glow with her own living light. There's still places in the CIA's Pristina's. I knew as a child the next 10 years, maybe the most important in the next 10,000 years. The best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life to cope with climate change. We need new ways to generate power. We need new ways, better ways to cope with poverty, wars and disease. We need many things to keep and maintain. The world is a better place, but nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean.

Our fate in the ocean are one we need to do for the ocean. What Al Gore did for the skies above a global plan of action with a World conservation union, the AII CNN is underway to protect biodiversity, to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change on the high seas and in coastal areas. Wherever we can identify critical places, new technologies are needed to map, photograph and explore than 95% of the ocean that we have yet to see. The goal is to protect biodiversity, provides stability and resilience. We need deep diving subs new technologies to explore the ocean. We need maybe an expedition, a Ted at sea that could help figure out next steps. And so I suppose you want to know what he wishes. I wish you would use all means at your disposal. Films, expeditions,

the Web, New submarines. A campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas. Hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10%. Some say 30%. You decide how much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is. A fraction of 1%. It's not enough. My wish is a big wish. But if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world and help ensure the survival of what actually is, As it turns out, my favorite species that would be us for the Children of today for tomorrow's Child has never again.

Now is the time. Thank you for more Ted talks, go to ted dot com.