Translator: Khanh Linh Nguyen Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm a cartoonist. I draw the comic strip "Sherman's Lagoon."
It appears daily,
in several hundred papers around the world.
It's set underwater
and all the characters are ocean creatures.
There's a shark name Sherman, a sea turtle,
a hermit crab, and a few other characters to round out the cast.
They all live in a tropical lagoon in the South Pacific.
I became fascinated with the ocean when I was boy.
I wanted to know it more not as a scientist
but as a storyteller and a visual artist.
Here was this world
full of crazy landscapes and probable characters,
Like tiny crabs the size of a grain of rice,
or enormous whales the size of a city block.
It seemed like a world that was ready-made for cartoons.
In the course of drawing a strip over the years,
I've learned a lot of ocean science,
and I've tried to use some of that in the comic strip.
For example, my sea turtle character is a green sea turtle.
And in the comic strip, every year, he goes to a place
in the South Atlantic Ocean called Ascension Island.
Real green sea turtles do this,
and scientists are still not quite sure how they pull it off.
How do they find this tiny island in the middle of this vast ocean?
My lead character is a great white shark name Sherman.
Great white sharks have this ability to detect electromagnetic signals
from other animals.
To humans, these signals are completely imperceptible,
but for most sharks, they're easy to feel of fresh breeze.
Some ocean animals, like octopuses, have the ability to change color.
Let's try that.
Close your eyes and focus all of your energy on turning red.
Not easy is it?
Not bad.
How would you describe
the ability to find a tiny island in the middle of a vast ocean?
Or the ability to detect electromagnetic signals?
In animals, we call this instinct,
but if a human had that same ability, we'd call it brilliance.
This notion of animal intelligence was driven home to me
in an unforgettable way one day
when I was learning how to fly an airplane.
As a student pilot, I was pretty comfortable in small planes,
but there was still one thing that terrified me:
I was intimidated by making steep turns
because I was afraid this plane would go into a spin and crash.
This fear wasn't completely unfounded.
Spins and spin recoveries were no longer taught in flight school
because it was considered too dangerous.
I was determined to confront my fear head on.
So, on one of my solo flights, I tried it.
I put the plane into a spin,
and everything seemed to be moving in slow-motion
as I looked through the windshield, and I saw cow fields spinning clockwise.
I finally got the plane under control after a few tense moments and I landed it.
Then I got out, went over to a picnic table,
sat down to collect myself.
That's when I saw the sparrows; there were maybe half a dozen of them.
They were flying from a low branch of a nearby tree
down to the ground where they'd pick up a breadcrumb and back up to a branch.
And then it occurred to me.
They're pretty good pilots.
I never really paid much attention to sparrows before
but in that little bird brain is written
all the flying lessons that would take me years to absorb.
After that experience, I began to question how we define intelligence.
We define it in human terms.
Intelligent people get good grades in school,
they go on to have successful careers at one thing or another.
Even broader definitions of intelligence that include
artistic intelligence and emotional intelligence
still describe only human traits.
We measure intelligence with a human yard stick,
and that gives us a very biased view of nature.
In fact, we're surrounded by intelligence,
and we don't seem to have the ability to appreciate it or even recognize it.
My eleven-year-old son who's always full of questions I can't answer
asked me one time,
"How does a tree know it's fall?"
How does a tree know it's fall?
Could we possibly describe a tree as being intelligent?
All I know is if I stood in a field holding a leaf
and I have to determine the right moment to drop it
based on the angle of the Sun, and the length of the day,
and the air temperature, and a thousand other variables
I couldn't do it.
In that regard, a tree is more intelligent than I am.
And so, armed with this broader definition of intelligence,
I devote a lot of my career to finding examples out in the ocean
and using it in the strip.
The more I learn, the more I realize
that in the ocean, much more so than on land,
evolution is taking some bizarre turns.
The variety of life and intelligence in the ocean goes way beyond
the imagination of a mere cartoonist.
One would think that discovering animals such as these
would inspire a race to discover more much like the Space Race in the 1960s.
But it hasn't.
Certainly, if we were to look through a telescope, and we would see this,
nothing would stand in the way of us learning more.
But when we pull it from the bottom of the ocean,
it doesn't seem to capture our imagination as a society.
If we can't eat it, it's of no value to us.
The ocean is, and always has been, a source of commodities,
mostly food commodities, and not much else.
And that has set up a race of a different kind,
a race to strip the ocean of all its commercial value
as quickly as possible.
All of this life, and beauty, and complexity, and intelligence
is being destroyed in the quest for protein.
Now, I don't want this to become
yet another doomsday talk about the environment.
You're probably getting tired of listening to people like me.
The theme of this conference is transition.
Sometimes, transition's a choice, and sometimes it's forced upon us.
We are in transition.
We're undergoing a transition into a more sustainable society.
The problem is this so-called sustainable society
doesn't have a lot of appeal to most of us.
This isn't a transition we want to make,
we seem resigned to having it and forced upon us.
As environmentalists, we've been doing a horrible job marketing this concept.
It's portrayed as a world of less instead of more,
but a sustainable society doesn't have to be like that.
As humans, our intelligence, our social capabilities,
and our problem-solving skills enable us to work together and innovate.
And that's especially true with the ocean.
The solutions are out there and we're putting them in practice.
But we have to find ways of doing so on a much larger scale.
When we manage the ocean properly, it bounces back,
when we create marine reserves, fish populations and habitats recover;
when we manage fisheries,
they can become sustainable and even more productive.
In the ocean of today,
we're quickly turning vast amounts of our planet's precious wildlife
into protein
going farther and deeper as more and more fisheries fail.
The ocean of tomorrow is going to look a whole lot better than that.
This is a transition we want to make.
(Applause)