Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
I want to start by saying I grew up in New York City,
in a happy and stable family.
But every time we visited the country,
I realized that what I really loved was unpeopled places,
the wild world, nature and the sea.
I decided early
that a life lived close to nature and far from cities
was a more authentic life.
So when I left home and married,
I moved as far from cities as I could get.
And I now divide my time
between Vermont, New Zealand, and Gloucester, Massachusetts.
My research was always on hearing.
I started studying bats and then went on to owls,
and finally moths,
thereby going, as a friend of mine once put it,
"...from one fly-by-night organism to another."
It was clear to me, though, early on,
that the wild world was being savaged by civilization.
I began to try to figure out
what someone who only knew bioacoustics might do
to help reverse that,
and that's when I thought of whales.
It was the 1960s,
and they were being brought close to extinction
by the whaling industry,
their meat sold for pet food,
and their oil for margarine and cosmetics.
Having never even seen a whale,
I decided one morning,
that I was going to study them for the rest of my life
and spend that life trying to stop whaling.
I went from there, then, to Bermuda,
where I chartered a sailboat,
and behind it I towed a hydrophone,
which is a two-dollar word for an underwater microphone.
It was on my very first day at sea that -
well, I'm going to let you try to imagine it.
It was after midnight,
and we were out of sight of land -
I can't seem to change this.
There we go.
We were out of sight of land.
(Audio) (Whale singing)
The others were asleep below,
and I was on my watch,
alone,
leaning back in the cockpit,
steering with one foot,
and watching the mast sweeping across vast fields of stars.
I put on the headphones that were connected to the hydrophone,
and this is what I heard - the sounds of a humpback whale.
(Audio) (Whale singing)
And that is how my love affair with whales and the sea began.
Two years later, Scott McVay and I discovered
that the long, complicated progressions of sounds
that are made by humpback whales
are actually rhythmic, repeated sequences of sounds,
and therefore are properly called "songs."
The voice of a blue whale, a different species,
is so low, that you can't hear a recording of it
unless you speed that recording up.
So, here's the Mickey Mouse version of a blue whale's song,
two octaves higher than the whale sang it.
It's a lot like the true sound of your voice -
I mean, how untrue your voice would sound
if you sped it up four times too fast and played it back.
(Audio) (Whale sounds)
You get the idea of how really low this must be,
if that's two octaves too high.
(Audio) (Whale sounds)
I had noticed that no one ever seems to be interested in saving a species
unless they fall in love with it first.
Because whale songs are so alluring,
I had hoped that if enough people heard them,
they might rise in anger and force whaling to stop.
My first wife, Katy Payne,
discovered that humpback whales change their songs,
and even use rhyme in their songs,
probably as a mnemonic device.
I used this kind of information as well as playing whale songs
to encourage the world to fall in love with them.
It worked, in part,
and whaling did decline.
But I could see that something more menacing to whales was growing,
and that was pollution.
And it was threatening you and me, too.
About this time,
a friend of mine told me about having seen a mother
grab a bottle of insecticide from her two-year-old
and pour it down the sink.
When he said it was DDT,
I realized that pouring DDT down a sink
would probably increase, rather than decrease, the chances
that some of it might someday get into the body of that woman's child
or her grandchild.
And here's why:
DDT is one of the so-called Persistent Organic Pollutants -
the POPs.
They are poisons that humans still make,
and that are very damaging to wildlife.
Because the oceans are downhill from everything on land,
whatever can be moved by gravity or wind or water
ends up in the sea.
And that's where the DDT in the story that I had heard
would have ended up.
But when a poison reaches the sea,
it gets diluted down to harmless concentrations.
Or, in the words of the chemical companies,
"The solution to pollution is dilution."
However, what happens next is both entirely counterintuitive
and entirely insidious.
That's because plants and animals reconstitute poisons like POPs
that ended up in the sea,
and they feed them back to us at toxic levels in our favorite seafoods.
The ultimate revenge
that a swordfish or a marlin or a tuna or any predatory fish
gets to take on the person or the whale that eats it,
is to poison its killer
with the synthetic chemicals and toxic metals
that have built up in its body.
Industrial chemists have invented hundreds of POPs,
for use as insecticides, herbicides, plasticizers,
flame retardants, food and drink containers -
the list goes on and on.
They can remain in animals for decades -
a feature which makes them especially dangerous.
Because they never existed until humans made them,
there's not been enough time for animals and plants
to evolve ways to get rid of them.
And lacking a way to break them down,
animals are forced to store them into their own bodies
and pass them up the food chain to whoever kills and eats them.
In food chains, the loveliest species are the single-celled plants
and their tiny predators.
But it is those plants that absorb the poisons
and pass them, intact,
to the grazer who eats them, who passes them, intact,
to whatever predator eats the grazer, who passes them, intact,
to whatever larger predator eats it,
and so on, up the food chain,
to some apex predator like a whale or a person.
And that makes the apex predators
the most heavily polluted animals in the whole food chain.
Each predator in a food chain ends up
with about 10 times as much predator in its cells
as are in the cells of the animals that it ate.
So, an apex predator who lives at the top of a six-link chain
has concentrations of poisons in its cells
that are 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times10 times 10 times -
that's a million times -
the concentration of the poisons in each plant cell
at the bottom of that food chain.
This process is called biomagnification.
The most dangerous POPs
are the endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the EDCs.
They mimic hormones that control our bodies' most vital functions,
thereby degrading immune systems,
interfering with normal development,
deforming reproductive organs,
and causing major behavioral abnormalities.
POPS and EDCs poison all vertebrates,
but they pose a special threat to mammals.
That's because, when the mother mammal nurses her infant,
what she actually is doing is passing her accumulated poisons to it,
dissolved in the fats of her milk.
When her daughters mature and reproduce, they pass on to their infants
a double dose - the poisons that they got from their mother,
and whatever they have gotten in their food as they grew up and matured.
Thus, each new generation of mammals is more contaminated than the last -
a process which,
unless we find alternatives to these contaminants,
may well bring marine mammals, like whales, dolphins, seals,
sea lions, walruses, sea otters and polar bears to extinction.
Back in 1987,
no one had measured how polluted life was in the oceans worldwide.
I worried that no problem ever receives attention
until you know how bad it is,
so I set my institute, Ocean Alliance, the task of creating a study
to show how polluted ocean life was.
By 2000, we had funds for a 5-year global research expedition,
a circumnavigation in our research vessel, Odyssey.
By August of 2005, we had completed that trip
and brought back 955 skin samples from sperm whales,
obtained without significant damage to the whale,
by using a biopsy dart.
It was the first worldwide sample set from a single species,
in which the same protocol was used to collect every sample.
We chose sperm whales because they, like we, are apex predators,
meaning that what is happening to the whales
is happening to us.
We gave our unique sample set to a marine toxicologist,
John Wise, at the University of Southern Maine, to analyze,
and together wrote up a report, which you can find on our website.
I was toying with the idea of summarizing that report in this talk,
but I thought better of depressing you good people that much.
Suffice it to say, in all ocean areas, sperm whales are contaminated.
We didn't find one whale, anywhere, that was without pollution.
When Dr. Wise measured the toxic metals in whale biopsies,
he found that they were polluted with all the usual suspects:
mercury, led, aluminum, silver, and so on.
But the big surprise was chromium,
a major carcinogen in human beings.
The lowest concentration of it that we found in any sperm whale
was twice as high as the concentration
that kills 90% of sperm whale skin cells grown in culture.
The highest was 54 times higher than that.
We found those whales in the Central Pacific,
as far from continental land masses as it's possible to get on this planet,
and nowhere near rivers polluted with industrial waste
in the runoff from big agriculture.
These whales were as badly contaminated with chromium
as humans who have worked for 20 years or more in chromium industries,
and died from the lung cancer they contracted from that exposure.
No research by others has shown as strong a connection
between ocean health and marine mammal health.
It demonstrates what many people had suspected -
that the contaminants humans are releasing to the world's oceans
can be found in wildlife that lives in the most remote areas of the planet.
Our current work is a study now in its fourth year
by John Wise and Ocean Alliance CEO, Iain Kerr.
They are measuring the effects on whales and other Gulf of Mexico wildlife
from oil released in the BP oil spill,
plus the dispersant chemicals that BP used to sink it out of sight.
Like most environmental organizations,
Ocean Alliance has spent its energies uncovering the problems
that humans create.
We did so in hopes that people would be moved enough to repair them.
But bad news seems to inspire more despair than repair,
and we realized we could bring greater value to our work
by looking for solutions to the ocean pollution
that we had documented.
And by the way, the consequences of that pollution are enormous,
because more than a billion people depend on seafood
as their principal source of animal protein.
As it becomes too toxic to eat safely
and humanity loses access to seafood,
the stress that that causes
can be expected to shorten millions of human lives.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that,
because pollution of seafood affects so many people,
it is the most serious health threat humanity faces.
And yet, it's not on the radar of any government.
We haven't even started to think rationally about such chemicals.
Is it not strange
that we make chemicals for agricultural use which,
unless you are wearing a full Hazmat suit and the right respirator masks,
are illegal to handle,
but these same chemicals are intended for spraying onto your food?
Far less than 1% of the over 100,000 chemicals humans make
have ever been tested for their effects on human health,
and fewer still, for their effects on wildlife.
In the face of such reckless business practices,
there seems to be no hope
of ridding the environment of this problem,
or stopping the molecules at their source.
But we could invent less toxic new ones.
With that in mind, I set out to find someone
who could design benign molecules to replace the poisonous ones.
And I met John Warner, co-founder of an entirely new field of chemistry
called "green chemistry,"
in which biomimicry has become one of the guiding principles
when synthesizing new molecules.
John is also founder and president
of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.
This remarkable man
is one of the most productive people of his generation.
Winner of a presidential medal for the teaching of science,
publisher of over 200 patents, papers and books,
and winner of innumerable other honors.
For sheer inventiveness, John Warner is chemistry's Thomas Edison.
As we talked, I discovered that John Warner has,
stirring around in his mind, about 60 technologies
that he wants the time and the place to create,
each of which would supplant a chemical technology
that's now causing problems.
So, Ocean Alliance is giving John Warner his own wing
in our new headquarters in Gloucester, Massachusetts,
a place to do his creative work making new technologies.
When he invents something new here,
he will assign the job of developing an industrial procedure
that can exploit it
to his Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.
And that will help clear the decks for John to start creating
his next new technology.
We're forming a three-way institutional collaboration
between John at the Warner Babcock Institute,
innovative educator Amy Cannon, the Executive Director
of the Warner Babcock Institute's affiliate, Beyond Benign,
and my organization, Ocean Alliance.
Ocean Alliance will identify pollutions that cause problems to sea life;
John will invent, sometimes in response to what we've discovered;
and Amy Cannon and Beyond Benign will create innovative ways
to make what's happening in Gloucester known to a wider world,
focusing always on increasing society's understanding
of the transformative potential of green chemistry
for restoring ocean health.
Beyond Benign and Ocean Alliance
will also work with the youth of Gloucester,
who are dispirited by the decline in fishing
and want to help restore the productivity and health of their local waters.
Gloucester's local waters, of course, are the Grand Banks -
once the most productive fishery on the planet,
and now just a shadow of its former self.
I've studied species of baleen whales,
led more than 100 expeditions to every ocean,
and have lived and worked in remote sites in Patagonia,
Alaska, Sri Lanka, the Central Pacific, New Zealand,
the Arctic and the Antarctic,
where I always respect the dress code of the locals.
(Laughter)
Though it may surprise you,
field research like mine costs significantly less than what it costs
to support most laboratory scientists.
Modest funding would allow many others to affect the world in similar ways.
But how about immodest funding?
Suppose the $70 billion annual subsidy
that our government pays each year to Big Oil - the world's fattest cats,
now making the biggest profits in human history - suppose, I say,
that we spent that money on conservation.
It would pay the full costs of 70,000 organizations the size of mine -
organizations that could then place at least 300,000 people
in remote areas around the world,
studying local endangered species, natural environments,
the conflicts with local peoples,
and all the while, organizing citizens and governments
to save the species and habitats
that will otherwise be thrown under the wheels of progress.
Is that not something worth fighting for?
Think of it this way:
Because the stakes are now so high - higher than they have ever been -
our present predicament is, actually,
the most singular opportunity for greatness
ever offered to any generation
in any civilization.
If we seize that opportunity,
our descendants will judge us
the most far-seeing and generous of ancestors.
If we do not, they will judge us
as the most short-sighted and selfish of ancestors.
The only thing in life over which we have exclusive control
is our thoughts.
It is we alone who get to choose what we think about
and to act upon in our free time, however brief that may be.
I know how I will use whatever time I have left,
and I hope you'll join me.
Thank you.
(Applause)