Transcriber: Judith Matz Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
It's great to be here in Woodshole,
where, generally speaking, people care about the ocean.
But the first question to put forth is:
Why don't more people – why don't most people care about the sea?
It really is the big mystery of the ocean.
So I put this question once to Clare Boothe Luce, a brainy person
who is a statesman and a big thinker.
This is in Hawaii – and she just looked up
where the fluffy white clouds were drifting by and she said:
"That's really simple, my dear. Heaven is that way.
You know what's that way." (Laughter)
So maybe that is part of it, that we're always looking up,
getting in over your head is not a good idea.
Things like that.
But the biggest reason is ignorance.
People just take the ocean for granted.
They think that it's so big, so vast,
that there isn't much that we can do to harm it.
And even if we do: So what?
That at least until fairly recently has been the case.
People haven't cared about the ocean and what's beneath the surface
nearly as much as investing in what's up in the sky.
We have invested in what goes skyward and it's paid off handsomely,
but we've neglected the ocean, and it's costing us — dearly.
So, why should people care about the ocean?
Because it keeps us alive, is that good enough?
The ocean contributes most of the oxygen to the atmosphere,
grabs carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
shapes planetary chemistry,
it is the home for most of life on Earth,
it's where most of the water is.
There are a lot of good reasons why people should care about the ocean.
But okay, let's assume that you do care,
and you realize that the ocean is in trouble.
And the afterthought of that is,
"And therefore, so are we."
What can we do about it?
What can we as individuals,
what can we, as human civilization at this critical point in history, do,
to make a difference?
Well, in a way, that's primarily what I want to talk about today.
I fell in love with the ocean when I was a little kid.
I think part of it was inspired by reading William Beebe's book "Half Mile Down"
even before I read "Silent World", and was inspired later by Cousteau.
But reading about how William Beebe and Otis Barton,
back in the 1930s,
before I was born, they were diving in a little bathysphere
and seeing creatures that nobody else had seen alive ever before.
And it was a pretty gutsy thing to do when you think about it.
Otis Barton was the designer of this thing.
There they are, this is real footage of those two crazy characters.
This is a little recreation that the National Geographic cooked up,
just to get a feel for what it must have been like
to be lowered on a cable down,
as much as half a mile beneath the surface.
And then, as Beebe describes it in his writings, about how it's
"like diving in a galaxy of life,
but the moons, comets, and suns, and stars are living creatures."
Well, now, we lucky people who have come along at this point in time,
can, with a mask and flippers, just diving at night,
and with a suite of variations on the theme of submersibles
and remotely operated systems,
actually get glimpses of what it's like in the ocean.
To see bioluminescence, what Dr. Edith Widder says
is the most common form of communication on the planet — perhaps.
This flash and sparkle and glow of creatures that communicate with light!
Most of the life on Earth lives in the dark. What a concept!
Because most life on Earth, first of all, is in the ocean.
Below 1,000 ft or so, it's dark all of the time.
It's dark some of the time everywhere,
but in the deep sea, except for living light, it's dark all the time.
Not just in places like Washington, D. C. (Laughter)
Did I say that? Ohhh, I did say that.
Oh, well.
Life on Earth, there it is, in the sea.
I know many of you have taken the plunge.
My mother waited until she was 81 to put on a mask and flippers
and scolded me ever after "for not getting me there sooner".
So if you're 81, don't wait any longer.
If you aren't, then don't wait any longer!
There's more time.
This area where Beebe and Barton had that first glimpse of the deep
is also home, just the edge, of the Sargasso Sea,
an area that harbors a floating golden forest of light.
A life where some creatures are found there and nowhere else,
for others, it's a way station, like for turtles, for young tunas,
it's a place where eels migrate to spawn,
and I suppose that little eels spend a little bit of time sheltered,
in a way, by the floating mass of Sargassum weed
that provides in the open sea a safe haven.
Well, this is part, largely, of the high seas.
64% of the ocean surface, and depths below,
are in the areas beyond national jurisdiction.
And it's something really to think about.
What are the places on the planet where we have the least disturbance,
the least impact of human kind?
Well, the polar areas, for sure, although we're certainly impacting them
indirectly through the warming trend we just heard about,
but more than that, it's the inaccessibility of the polar regions and the deep sea
that have kept them largely intact.
And it's a challenge for our time, thinking about,
What can we do do stabilize the way the world works?
To try to protect the natural systems that keep us alive?
That's what we really must focus on
if we are to succeed in leaving the place at least as good as we found it.
So, back to the Arctic.
The Arctic — the Arctic Ocean.
It is a big body of mostly frozen water, surrounded by mostly frozen land.
The polar seas, areas that until fairly recently
have just been regarded as so remote, so inaccessible,
that they pretty much have taken care of themselves.
It's on our watch that the fate of these areas
and thus the fate, the direction of the world will be determined.
What we do and what we fail to do
will have a magnified impact on everything that follows.
Can you imagine if a spacecraft went off to Europa,
one of the moons of Jupiter, and came back with some evidence of life.
Some real, tangible evidence that there's life elsewhere in the universe.
At least in our Solar System.
And here, we've got bowhead whales!
They can live to be as much as 200 years, we think.
Fellow vertebrates that have a recipe for life
that exceeds our life span by two times, as far as we know.
What about the little guys
that have been around for hundreds of millions of years?
What their future will be will largely be determined
by our actions in the next few years.
Microbes will likely persist one way or the other,
no matter what we do or don't do.
But our challenge, the challenge of our time,
is to so manage ourselves
that we have a planet that works on our behalf.
We, being self-centered creatures that we are, life will go on,
but will there be birds diving as they do today
in search of food in the High Arctic?
Will there be a planet that actually favors not just walruses, but humans?
I had a call in August of 2007.
It was from Anatoly Sagalevich,
who's the designer of the MIR submersibles in Russia.
The conversation was something like this —
It wasn't a conversation, it was actually just a message,
I missed the call.
"Sylvia! I'm calling you from the North Pole."
We had talked about going there together
because until 2007, the real North Pole has never been accessed.
But there he was. He said:
"We missed you."
And I could hear clinking of glasses in the background,
clearly, it was vodka — in celebration. (Laughter)
He said, "This is a great accomplishment for science.
We have reached the North Pole! But it was our accomplishment!"
Russia planted a titanium flag in the heart of the Arctic,
at the real North Pole, where it was thought that in 1909,
the real North Pole had been reached with Robert Peary and Matthew Henson,
and of course it was at the top.
But — how much of the ocean has yet to be explored?
It isn't just under the ice in the Arctic.
It's most of the world.
About 5% is all that has been seen, let alone explored or mapped.
Now we have the capacity though, to map, to explore,
to take measurements and see the reduction of ice in the High Arctic.
Good news for shipping, bad news for polar bears,
for the people of the Arctic,
whose lives depend on keeping the place pretty much the way it is now.
For the people of the world to maintain the stability of the planet
that's working pretty well to our advantage, as it is now.
What can we do to stabilize things
so that we do have a planet that works in our favor?
That works in the favor of creatures who, as far as we know,
like human beings, have no other place to go.
Earth is it.
If we fail to take care of this planet —
I mean, it's a dream to perhaps go to other planets to set up housekeeping,
but all things considered, if we don't make a way for ourselves here,
this is it.
Let's look at the other end of the Earth.
I hope, no, sorry, can we go back? Will you help me go back, please? There we go.
I can drive submarines... (Laughter)
Not so sure about this.
Just a glimpse, just to reinforce that Earth is bipolar. (Laughter)
[We] have this glorious effect of ice at both ends
that does shape climate and weather, drives the currents,
makes Earth a hospitable place for us.
Well, of course, ice ages have come, ice ages have gone,
Earth has been very different in times past,
and we have come along during this very special time
when humankind has truly prospered.
We can do things that no other creature on Earth can do.
We have the ability to go high in the sky and look down and see what's going on.
Whales are brainy, they're smart.
Elephants are known to be intelligent.
Cats, dogs, horses, but ...
We're the only ones who can put ourselves in perspective,
do something about our actions
that will have a magnified impact on everything else.
In some ways, we are the planet's worst nightmare,
considering how we have affected the way the world works.
But we're also the best hope. And that's cause for excitement.
Exhilaration, even.
That for the first time, in all of human history,
in all of Earth history, there is a creature — that would be us —
with the power to know, to gather information,
to store information over thousands of years.
And especially in the last few centuries,
and more particularly in the past few decades,
the ability to gather, to learn about our fellow creatures — like the penguins —
to value them, to want to know more about how they live and what they do
and how our lives relate to theirs,
how we can perhaps do what it takes on our watch
to secure an enduring future for all of what has been referred to as
the nuts, the bolts, the cogs, the wheels that hold the world together.
Otto Leopold's comment about the diversity of life.
All of this matters.
We are the only ones who can sort of figure out why it matters,
and why taking care of everything from the plankton to the polychaetes
to the pachiderms, to whatever it is, these are all parts,
the living systems that keep us alive.
It's only about now that we've been able to put enough of the pieces together
to appreciate that our lives are dependent not just on water,
not just on the fact that Earth exists at a certain distance from the sun
and all the other things that make this place special,
but because of life on Earth.
We have the capacity to unravel the ecosystems
that shape the chemistry of the planet that keeps us alive.
Or we have the power, through knowing, that we need to protect
the land and the sea and the creatures who live there.
Early in the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt and his colleagues
got the bright idea that we really have to protect nature.
And owing to having a president in office at just the right time,
much of this country was established as National Parks,
during a critical phase when they were really under great pressure
for exploitation.
Much as today, the ocean is under great pressure for exploitation.
For commercial fishing, for mining, for oil and gas extraction ...
For shipping across the surface without really understanding
what the consequences of some of the actions
that we're doing to the oceans may be doing back to us.
Well, it's now changing, in terms of our ability to know
this blue speck in the universe.
For the first time, we have the technology to hold the world in our hands,
to be able to fly around, to look at places like the Gulf of Mexico.
One little speck there in the Northern Gulf,
called the Flower Garden Banks,
a little bit of that has been protected for a few years.
In the Bahamas, there are places.
It looks like the Bahamian government
is thinking boldly about what it can do in its own exclusive economics
and to actually protect the fish.
Or go off the Patagonian shelf where there's an area
that penguins love, squid love,
on the shore, on the land, well-known for its beautiful ecosystems there,
but it's currently at risk, as is most of the world,
a fraction of one percent of the ocean has any form of protection
for the fish and other creatures that live there.
About 1%, if you put it all together.
The Northwest Hawaiian Islands, the new Chagos Archipelago,
marine reserve, half a million square kilometers,
established by the UK earlier this year,
all of this together amounts to about 1% of the ocean.
Managed areas and fully protected areas together.
It's really not quite enough if you ask Barry, the Napoleon wrasse, in Australia,
if you listen closely, he'll tell you that the ocean is in trouble.
But you can do something about it!
On Google Earth, you can fly around,
you can actually meet Barry the Napoleon wrasse,
and hear his message.
He speaks with an Australian accent
but it's a message that the world should listen to.
You can fly, now, vicariously,
and I hope someday we can have Hertz rent-a-sub and fly actually
anywhere in the ocean we want to go,
including to the deepest place, where, 51 years ago,
once, and nevermore, people went to the deepest place,
the Mariana Trench.
It's not good enough that it was once, and nevermore.
We have presently a handful of submersibles
that can go to about half the ocean's depth.
Russia has three, Japan has one,
France has one sub that can go to 6000 m,
China is building a 7000 m sub, India is getting into the game,
we got out of the game when the Sea Cliff was retired in 1998.
The Alvin — blessed Alvin — workhorse of submersibles,
that take people and not just cameras and sensors to the deep sea,
but take people down, is in the process of getting renovated
and will go to about 6000 m, deeper than it has in the past,
but not quite deep enough!
We need to go to full ocean depth
and now it's taking private initiative with Jim Cameron and Richard Branson
and why not others jumping in to do what it takes,
to get us to the deepest place in the sea.
Why? Because we need to understand this ocean from the inside out.
Top to bottom.
Why do we need to take care of the ocean?
Because the ocean takes care of us.
And never before have we known as much as we now do,
and never again will we have as good a chance to take care of it.
My wish with TED was
to encourage people to use their powers, whatever they are,
to ignite public support, to explore,
to understand the ocean, to engage,
to protect the blue heart of the planet with a network of protected areas.
We're only this far toward the goal
of taking care of the real hope spot that would be Earth itself.
An idea worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)