\nwith me at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, D.C. Her Deepness was
\nthere to help promote a film made by the Natural Resources Defense Council
\nabout the problems of ocean acidification from carbon dioxide called Acid
\nTest<\/a>. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Q. If you had an elevator ride to tell <\/p>\n A. Everybody <\/p>\n There was a <\/p>\n Q. What do you <\/p>\n A. All things considered, I think that the biggest problem comes down to complacency born of ignorance, of people simply not knowing, of still believing <\/p>\n Q. I saw an ad <\/p>\n A. Well think <\/p>\n And actually <\/p>\n Q. I have read <\/p>\n A. A few years <\/p>\n Q. Can you tell us about The Great Garbage Patch<\/a> and what <\/p>\n A. I’m asked <\/p>\n Q. What’s one thing you can recommend that people do to help the oceans? <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A. I appeared on The Colbert Report<\/a>, and we began a <\/p>\n And then the <\/p>\n Watch the full interview with Sylvia Earle:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Scientists: BPA has widely contaminated the oceans<\/a><\/p>\n The changing threat to water: Global warming & World Water Day<\/a><\/p>\n ‘The Story of Bottled Water’ and big fun learning about water<\/a><\/p>\n
\nsomeone about the state of the oceans, what would your pitch be?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nshould care about the ocean. Just imagine Earth without one. We’d have a
\nplanet a lot like Mars. No ocean; no life. No blue; no green. A lot
\nof people are really concerned about what’s happening to the green—to
\nterrestrial life. But everybody needs to understand that all life depends on
\nthe existence of the ocean. The ocean shapes climate; 97 percent of the water
\non earth is in the ocean. It’s where the greatest diversity and abundance of life
\nis. That’s no surprise, given that all life requires water. And where is the
\nwater? It’s in the ocean. That’s where the action is.<\/p>\n
\nfeeling going back up until about half a century ago when people still thought
\nthat the ocean was so vast, so resilient, that it didn’t matter what we put
\ninto it or what we took out of it—that the ocean could somehow recover.
\nSomehow the belief was that our job was to extract from the ocean wildlife with
\nno limits. Now we know that there are limits to what we can take from the ocean and get away with.<\/p>\n
\nsee as the greatest human threats to the ocean currently?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nsomehow that the ocean is big enough, vast enough, to be able to recover no
\nmatter what we put in and take out. Everything that we care about is connected
\nto the ocean. It doesn’t matter where on the planet you live; your life depends
\non the existence of the ocean—and not just rocks and water but a living
\nocean, a healthy ocean, an intact ocean where the integrity of systems is
\nstable. We have destabilized the ocean systems. Our complacency is the worst
\nproblem because if you don’t know, you can’t care. Ignorance is the basis of
\nbeing complacent. Once you know, once you understand, you’re burdened with that
\nknowledge. I can’t eat fish anymore, or any sea food, because I know too much. I
\nknow the consequences not only to the ocean and the health of the ocean, but
\nalso how that comes back to affect me personally.<\/p>\n
\ntoday for Burger King. They have a fish sandwich for, like, $2.99. What’s the
\nreal cost of that fish sandwich? How does that relate to sustainable seafood,
\nand is there even such a thing? <\/strong><\/p>\n
\nabout a fish sandwich. Do you go to a burger place and get a mammal
\nburger? Do you get Kentucky Fried Bird? People will take and accept a
\n“fish sandwich,” not having a clue about what kind of fish it is. Now
\nI could go along with it being farmed responsibly—farmed catfish or tilapia—creatures that are as low on the food chain as chickens. It takes about two
\npounds of plants to make a pound of 1-year-old or less catfish or tilapia. It’s
\nabout the same as it is for chickens. For cows, it’s about 20 pounds of plants
\nto make a pound of cow. To make a pound of tuna, think thousands of pounds of
\nplants, or tens of thousands of pounds of plants, or even a hundred thousand
\npounds of plants going through this long and twisted food chain. An orange
\nroughy takes 30 years, and yet they sell on the market for $8.99 a pound in my
\nlocal supermarket in Oakland, Calif. That doesn’t begin to pay the real cost.<\/p>\n
\nthese creatures are priceless. We don’t know how to make them. We don’t farm
\nthem. We’re taking wildlife out of the sea. And even those creatures that now
\nare being “farmed” such as salmon and a few other species, mostly we take
\nwildlife out of the sea in large quantities to get small quantities of farmed
\nfish or other creatures that we’re growing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It
\ncertainly doesn’t make dollars and cents if we put a value on wildlife in the
\nsea.<\/p>\n
\nthat if we don’t do anything we may have very few fish left by 2043. Can you
\ntalk a bit about that?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nago, I was visiting in Australia. It was just after a report came out that 90
\npercent of many of the commercially extracted species from the sea were gone—gone in a few decades, since the 1950s. Taken. Extracted. What did we do with
\nthem? We ate them. We caught them, and we killed them; and we disrupted the ecosystems
\nfrom which they were extracted, using trawls that take not just the fish but the whole system. They take the equivalent of bulldozing the forest
\nto get a handful of songbirds. That’s the way we have fished—destructively.<\/p>\n
\npeople can do to help?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nsometimes, “How bad is the problem of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch?”
\nAnd I have to say, it’s not just the great Pacific that’s in trouble; it’s the
\nocean, all of it, that is in trouble—from the debris, the plastics, and the
\nother stuff that we’re putting into the ocean. A lot of it we can’t see because
\nit’s chemical waste or carbon dioxide that’s causing pollution. It’s hard to
\nescape plastics in our lives these days. But one thing every person should try
\nto avoid is the one-time-use plastic. There was an illusion that you could have
\nbiodegradable plastics, but plastics generally don’t just disappear. They get
\ninto smaller and smaller and smaller pieces—so small that they’re now being
\nconsumed by planktonic creatures.<\/p>\n
\nlittle conversation about this. Colbert being Colbert said, “Well if I
\ncan’t eat fish anymore, how am I going to get my mercury?” Another good
\nissue to question whether you should continue to eat ocean wildlife. If you
\ndo, know what you’re eating, know where it came from, know what it’s name is—not a mindless chunk of fish in a fish sandwich or “catch o’ the day.” It could
\nbe any of 20,000 different kinds of vertebrate creatures. We don’t do that with
\nbirds or mammals. You kind of know when you’re eating lamb or chicken or beef—mostly. There may be some mystery meat circulating out there, but, with fish,
\nit’s all mystery meat<\/p>\n
\nso-called vegetarians that say, “Oh, I don’t eat meat; I just eat
\nfish.” If I were a fish, I would be outraged at that comment. I mean, “I’m
\nmeat too,” I would say.<\/p>\n