Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
I've got to say, as a cameraman,
I am far more comfortable on that side of the light.
I'm never going to say to someone in front of my camera,
"Just act natural!" again,
what a ridiculous notion.
(Laughter)
But the reason I'm here is because six years ago,
I came across this story that I felt compelled to tell,
and that was a start of a journey,
one of the most challenging, yet rewarding journeys
that I've had in my life,
and I'm going to share a little bit of that with you today.
I want to start by taking you back 50 years
to an incredible event in the human history
when nations from all over the world gathered and signed an agreement
that set aside the entire continent of Antarctica
as a scientific preserve.
At the height of the Cold War,
those nations put aside historical grievances,
and had the courage, the foresight and the generosity
to gift the Great Southern Continent to future generations.
(Video)
Those that signed that agreement are no longer with us,
but their legacy lives on.
Welcome to the Ross Sea, Antarctica.
This is a remote corner of the Earth
that has won my heart and the very reason
why I'm sweating it out in front of you right now.
I took this shot from up on a bow of a Russian icebreaker,
and this was the start of the journey.
What began with a trip to the Ross Sea to film the wildlife
turned into the forming of a charitable trust,
and a growing international environmental movement.
Why?
Because that penguin and his mates need our help.
I'll just give some context.
The Ross Sea is as far south as you can go on the ocean,
it's 3,000 kilometers below New Zealand.
For most of the year, it's protected by the solid ring of ice,
but each summer that ice melts and expands,
and for a very short window of opportunity
vessels can enter the Ross Sea.
That's how I got there.
It all began with a knock at the door.
As a freelancer, you answer every knock at the door.
(Laughter)
But what was surprising about this one
was that behind that was another freelancer:
a Colorado nature photographer, John Weller.
What else was surprising
was that this guy, who lives, you know, a thousand or so miles from the coast,
wanted to talk about oceans.
He had just read a very obscure scientific paper
"Acquiring a 'base datum of normality' for a marine ecosystem:
The Ross Sea, Antarctica".
With that title, you knew
it wasn't going to end up on a bestseller list,
but it did pack plenty of punch.
The paper was written
by a veteran Antarctic ecologist Dr. Dave Ainley.
Dave had been going to the Ross Sea for 40 years to study the wildlife.
While his focus was on penguins,
as an ecologist,
he looks at the entire system and the interaction of the animals.
Very few people understood the Ross Sea better than Dave.
In that paper, he described the Ross Sea
as the last large intact ocean ecosystem on Earth.
He said it was a living laboratory, a place that could teach us
about the workings of all marine ecosystems,
but was now under the threat from commercial fishing.
So that night John asked me to join them, to go down to the Ross Sea,
and five months later, we were on board of that Russian icebreaker.
We set out from Lyttelton,
and it took us eight days to get to the last ocean.
The Ross Sea might be the coldest place on Earth,
but it was teeming with wildlife,
with many of the species found nowhere else on the planet.
I describe it as a searing giddy of Antarctica.
It's home to the southernmost mammal, the Weddell seal,
40% of the world's Adélie penguins,
25% of the world's emperor penguins,
a species of killer whale you'll find nowhere else on the planet,
and a seldom seen deep-dwelling fish, the Antarctic toothfish.
Very few people would go to the Ross Sea
without being touched by this natural beauty.
(Video) Dave Ainley: It's just a really moving experience
to be there and survive being there, and I'm just feeling the energy there.
It's a pretty amazing place.
PY: The animals of the Ross Sea live on the very edge of existence,
treading that fine line between life and death.
It's an extreme environment, but it is incredibly fragile.
(Video) Stacey Kim: It does have a profound impact on you
when you get to see an area like that.
It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly special.
PY: The Ross Sea is like the oceans used to be before humans walked the planet.
All the top predators are in place, and they are abundant.
They have fitted the shape of the food web.
Dave Ainley describes it as a column,
not the pyramid that you find in all the other oceans around the planet
that have been damaged and fished.
That is what makes this place a global treasure.
(Video) Grant Ballard: It's like these stories you hear
about old times and the American West
when the sky was darkened
by the number of birds flying over during migration.
No one who is alive has seen this,
but in the Ross Sea you can still see these kinds of amazing natural events.
PY: When I was there,
I found that these penguin colonies were over 15,000 years old.
You think of the human history.
When we were hanging out in the caves, these colonies were here,
and the ancestors of these birds doing exactly the same:
trading rocks to build their nests,
although I don't think 'trading' is the right word.
So, Antarctic politics is almost as fascinating as the wildlife.
It's the only continent on Earth without a native human population,
so it has no sovereignty, no nation to give it a voice,
to fly the flag or protect it.
Instead, it has the Antarctic Treaty.
But as wonderful as that treaty was in protecting the land,
it missed out one crucial component, and that was the oceans around Antarctica.
And because it has no sovereignty,
those oceans became part of the high seas or the global commons.
So the most regulated continent on the planet was ironically surrounded
by some of the most unregulated waters.
That's why in 1996,
Dave Ainley looked out from Cape Cruiser
and saw something that he'd never seen before,
and that was a fishing vessel cruising the waters of McMurdo Sound.
He later discovered that they were there looking for Antarctic toothfish,
and that that vessel came from New Zealand.
Not surprisingly, in this ocean of Eden they found plenty of fish,
and as word spread about the untapped resource,
that fishery grew.
One boat turned into nearly 20 from 12 different nations,
and the fishery that developed plans to reduce Antarctic toothfish
by 50% over 35 years.
Every other ocean on Earth tells us
that when you take a top predator out of an ecosystem,
it'll have far-reaching consequences.
So what price do we put
on the last remaining intact ecosystem on Earth?
Is it worth 20 to 30 million that we make
selling toothfish to wealthy diners in New York and Asia?
The New Zealand government thought so, I didn't.
As a documentary maker, I'd spent a lot of time observing life.
(Video) DA: Hey, Dave!
PY: How are you? DA: Good.
PY: The lines were blurred now between observation and action.
So I got back together with Dave and John,
and together we decided to work to try and stop fishing in the Ross Sea,
and protect the entire ecosystem.
From our garages and home offices
came the birth of the Last Ocean campaign.
We were three novices armed with photos, film, and footage.
We knew where we wanted to go, we had no idea how to get there.
It was like getting in a car to Bluff in the far south
and hitting to Kaitaia in the far north.
We went west.
The first thing we did was we hit the mountains, our mountains
with cash-strapped governments,
our insatiable appetite for fish,
the march of the global economy, and the fishing industry
that had already had the taste of the bounty from the last ocean.
We'd picked a fight with a very formidable foe,
and there were many times when this campaign faulted.
But what kept me going were the very things, or the very reasons,
why I said yes to John in the first place.
The first was that before he arrived at my door,
I'd already been to Antarctica.
20 years before, I worked as an underwater ceramic technician.
OK, others called us dishwashers.
(Laughter)
Washing dishes, mopping floors 8 hours a day, 6 days a week,
but every minute of that mundane was worth it for that one day off
when you'd slip on the skis and slide out of town
into that great expanse that was Antarctica.
Even through the eyes of a dishwasher,
- and I had no idea I was going to be a cameraman at that stage -
the Ross Sea resonated.
It was a unique and beautiful space and place.
In a twist of fate, one of my adventures was
a couple of days out of town to a fishing hut with scientists
who were studying the Antarctic toothfish.
They were catching, tagging, and releasing the fish,
and they had just discovered this antifreeze
that stopped their blood from turning to ice
and allowed them to survive in the Ross Sea's subzero habitat.
20 five years later, that research is coming to a grinding halt.
Where they once caught 400 or 500 fish,
they now catch 3 or 4, if they are lucky.
The next reason why I said yes to John
was that after McMurdo I went to the States,
and to cut a long story short, I ended up working
on a family-run fishing boat out of Washington, in Alaska.
There, I experienced a very personal side of the fishing industry:
the pressure to fill holds, feed families.
But there are very few family-run fishing vessels anymore
that farm the fishing grounds.
Fishing is, by and large, a corporate business,
driven by shareholder profits.
And there are no longer enough fish in the sea to fill all the holds.
In another twist of fate,
it was on that boat, that I first saw a video camera.
It was 25 years ago.
Whether or not it was to escape the tedium of bating or not,
but I developed a passion for filming,
and 20 years later, in a major career move,
I ended up as a freelance cameraman.
I've had the privilege of shooting on every continent,
from Serengeti to Siberia,
from the slopes of Everest to the underwater canyons of Kaikoura.
Without a doubt,
the Ross Sea is one of the very special places on this planet.
Now, there's a map created from data
gathered in a world-wide study that puts it in perspective.
This global study launched by the UN in 2001
combines the information from researchers all over the world.
The areas in red,
rivers and fisheries that had reached their maximum potential in the 1960s.
This is the same map from 1995.
For thousands of years,
we thought of the oceans as this infinite, absolute resource,
but industrial fishing has changed that.
At the time, we didn't know, but now we do,
and the evidence is clear that the world's oceans are in trouble.
The simple fact is: there is now
only one undamaged ocean ecosystem left on Earth,
and that is the Ross Sea, Antarctica.
Those are the reasons why I boarded on this project,
why I set up the trust, and got into this campaign,
and made this documentary.
There were many times on that journey, 6-year journey, that I had graved out
or had a sense that we were pushed to well beyond our means.
During those times,
I would think of the time that I was a dishwasher and a fisherman,
and think of the Ross Sea and the wildlife,
and every bone in my body said,
"We have got to protect these last untouched places."
And there is a glimmer of hope, thank goodness,
because, you know, we needed a glimmer of hope.
But the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources,
CCAMLR,
- this is its headquarters in Hobart -
now manages the waters around Antarctica.
They've made a commitment to establish a network of marine protected areas
around Antarctica by 2012, that's this year.
The Ross Sea has been identified as one of those areas.
People know that the Ross Sea is the jewel in Antarctica's crown.
New Zealand, in about a month, will be one of 25 nations
that is going to go and decide the faith of the Ross Sea.
I showed you my favourite shot before,
this is my favourite place in the Ross Sea.
It's Cape Washington emperor penguin colony.
When we were there, we saw this incredible ritual playing out.
After raising their chicks all summer, these adults just upped and left.
Left alone, these juveniles slowly formed into groups
and then, guided by nothing but pure instinct,
they began their march towards the ocean.
The challenge they face is how to survive
in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
Humans were never part of it.
Now that we are, we face our greatest challenge,
and that is how do we walk in these pristine places
without doing damage.
There was a moment in time, in the mid-'90s,
when New Zealand could have said,
"No, the Ross Sea is not open for business."
Instead, we introduced fishing in the Ross Sea to the world,
and we now have this fishery operating
in one of the most precious pieces of ocean on the planet.
A fishery that's going to reduce the top predator by 50%.
It will, without doubt, destroy the natural balance
of the Ross Sea ecosystem.
Fishing will make a profit on a day,
and it may make a profit in a few months to come,
but fishing diminishes the real value of the Ross Sea.
The capital of that place lies in its natural assets
that have taken all preceding history to develop,
and in the pristine qualities of the ecosystem.
In a world that's full of second-hand fishing grounds,
shouldn't we be capitalizing
on the point of difference on the Ross Sea?
We should be sharing and celebrating this place.
There are far better ways to profit than pulling fish out of the ecosystem:
education, science, research, tourism.
Phasing out commercial fishing for New Zealand would be a bold move,
but we know that bold moves pay off.
When we made New Zealand nuclear-free,
the world applauded the courage of this conservation-minded country,
and we've been reaping rewards of this clean, green image ever since.
Next month at CCAMLR, we have one unprecedented opportunity
to do something very special in the Ross Sea:
to show the same generosity, and courage, and spirit
that those people who signed the Antarctic Treaty
showed us 50 years before.
This has been my journey.
If you're interested in the Ross Sea,
please go to our website www.lastocean.org,
look at the film, spread the word.
This is an issue that's unfolding right now.
And remember, once it's broke, we'll never be able to put it back.
Thank you.
(Applause)