>>Sylvia Earle: Ten years ago, I made a remark at some conference that the next ten years
would be the most important in the next 10,000 years.
And here we are ten years later and I still say that.
The next ten years will be the most important in the next 10,000 years.
It just gets harder all the time to do what we must do in order to secure for ourselves
an enduring place within the natural systems that keep us alive.
We never knew until recently that we, humans, could put at risk all that we care about by
what we're doing to the natural systems that keep us alive.
And I put front and center, most importantly, the ocean.
I'm so pleased that this conference began with remarks by Larry Summers, a genius looking
at numbers, predicting future trends, acting to -- and showing how we can act to avoid
catastrophic consequences.
At least he could see it.
There are people here who can see as I think I as a witness to a number of decades can
see the trends.
It doesn't take a genius to look at the numbers and to be inspired to take action to avoid
the catastrophic consequences that we now face.
We just passed the 400 parts per million mark of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We're now looking at acidification of the ocean, something that is measurable.
Rising temperature, measurable.
The loss of ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic, measurable.
The loss of fish, squid, creatures in the sea, measurable.
On the order of 90% of the sharks are already gone.
Some would say, great, we don't have to worry when we jump in the ocean anymore but we do
have to worry because we need sharks, as we heard yesterday.
Sharks and humans are a part of the system that we all share.
90%, since I was a kid, loss of swordfish, sharks, tunas.
What are we thinking eating wildlife from the sea?
We don't anymore at least consume songbirds, although we used to.
Buffalo, we used to.
Wild things on the land, we once did to feed ourselves.
And we're now doing it to the ocean, taking wildlife at a truly unsustainable level.
It's not just the loss of fish.
It is the loss of coral reefs.
About half have either declined or in a state of loss.
The good news is we've got half the coral reefs, we've got 10% of the sharks.
We aren't over the top yet with CO2 in the atmosphere, but this is that moment in time.
With so many engineers in the audience, you'll appreciate the term "sweet spot."
We are at that sweet spot in history.
As never before, could we know what we now know?
I mean, our parents didn't know, our grandparents didn't know that the world is not too big
to fail.
The ocean is not so large, so infinite, so resilient that we cannot alter its nature.
We have altered its nature.
But we haven't yet lost the opportunity to turn things around.
So, as a witness, just a week or so ago, Don Walsh and I were in China sharing the stage
at an audience about this large talking about the future of ocean exploration.
I was in China for the first time in 1973, 40 years ago.
Imagine the world as it was in '73.
We were just beginning to put into place laws about clean air, clean water protecting the
ocean, protecting whales, protecting ourselves.
So 40 years before that, in 1933, in the early part -- late 1920s and early 1930s, William
Beebe and Otis Barton, an engineer and a scientist, teamed up to start for the first time exploration
of the ocean using submersibles.
And I want to take you there with a little video re-creation in part of what it was like
to dive off the waters of Bermuda and see what humans witnessed for the first time half
a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.
From the surface, the ocean looks pretty much the same everywhere you go, from wherever
you look.
But today as compared to the way the ocean was when Beebe and Barton first glimpsed it
in the 1930s, it was a very different ocean.
Still, when you dive into the ocean today -- and I've had an opportunity to use something
like 30-plus variations on the theme of little submarines to explore the ocean, to see what
most people have yet to see except vicariously thanks to film that now exists.
But I personally was inspired as a kid reading about the adventures of Beebe and his explanation
of what it was like to be in this liquid realm with all these living lights, these small
creatures, flashing, sparkling and glowing with their own bioluminescence.
To see that the ocean is not just rocks and water, it is a living system.
It is like a minestrone but all the little things out there are alive.
Every spoonful of water has literally millions of bacteria.
Thank goodness it does.
It is a living system.
It is not just a matter of physics.
It is a matter of life in the ocean.
That maintains a planet that works in our favor.
It is only now that we, after decades of exploring with new ways of accessing the sea and communicating
what we find that we're able to understand that we're all sea creatures.
Just like any shark, like any jellyfish, like any whale, we must have the ocean in order
to survive.
Take away the ocean and what have you got?
You've got a planet a lot like Mars, not a very hospitable place for the likes of us.
The atmosphere there is mostly CO2.
The atmosphere here has just enough CO2 to maintain the integrity of the systems that
keep us alive; that is, photosynthesis, phrase B, that green things exist because without
them we would not exist.
They generate oxygen, take up carbon.
And more than half of the heavy lifting of generating oxygen and taking up carbon happens
in the ocean.
Why does the ocean matter?
Well, if you like to live, if you like to breathe, you will care about the ocean.
I gave a talk at TED in 2009 and I made a wish that we would use the powers that we
have to inform the world about the state of the ocean, that we need to protect the ocean
with networks of hope spots, areas large enough to save, restore, and protect the blue heart
of the planet, the ocean.
And one man came up after my talk and he said, "I think I get it!
If we fail to take care of the ocean, nothing else matters.
If we fail to take care of the systems that keep us alive, there is no economy, there
is no health, there is no security if we don't breathe, if we don't have a planet that works."
This is the time, as never before, because now we know what we could not know.
When I was a kid, when Beebe began exploring the ocean, it was unknown, so let's go to
another place that is just beginning to be understood, to the Arctic.
To the Arctic.
Where in 2007, for the first time, explorers went to the real North Pole in a submarine.
That's not up here on the top at the ice where Admiral Peary went early in the 20th century,
but under the ice, 15,000 feet down.
Could we have that video, please?
I want to share the view of what it's like to be in a place that humans could not access
before our time, on our watch.
This is the moment of knowing.
If you don't know, you can't care.
A lot of people know a lot about what's happening to the state of the world, and they don't
care, even though they do know.
But knowing is the key.
Which is why I love the fact that on Google Earth there now is an ocean.
You can dive into the sea.
In fact, this little video, you can find on Google Earth in the ocean layer, and to see
the creatures that live there, listen to their songs, and imagine what their future, what
our future will be in the next 40 years.
40 years from now, 50 years, 500, whatever it is, what we do now has a magnified impact
on everything.
The hope is, with the human mind, that we will creatively come up with solutions.
The human spirit that goes beyond just the facts and figures, crunching numbers, but
the willingness to act, the resilience of nature really does give us cause for hope.
But there is no hope for some creatures already lost.
The fabric of life has been ripped and shredded not just on the land, but in the sea as well.
We need to take care of the natural world as if our lives depend on it, because they
do.
Come on!
It's just a fact.
And here we are at this critical point in history when another really important cause
for hope is that we have kids coming along who don't know they can't fail, don't know
that there is not a future for them.
They are armed with hope, armed with knowledge that did not exist before the present time,
and now with a means to convey that knowledge in ways that are unprecedented.
This is that moment in time.
The sweet spot.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]