Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Thank you and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. We’ve had quite an array of visitors and guests for this conversation. We’ve had a congressman, an opera star, and a Nobel laureate, but today’s guest is the first official Hero of the Planet that we’ve had here. That’s how Time magazine designated Dr. Sylvia Earle several years ago, the first Hero of the Planet. Since then, she’s been awarded a prestigious TED Award for her work with oceans, and is now the explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society.

It’s likely that Sylvia Earle knows the ocean better than just about anyone else alive. Some people have even taken to even referring to her as “her deepness,” and the “sturgeon general.” Dr. Earle has written a new book about the oceans, called The World is Blue: How Our Faith and the Oceans are One, that I commend to you. We’re going to be talking about her explorations, about the state of the oceans, and about our response as we face what is a quite challenging time with global climate change. Dr. Earle, it is a pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Sylvia Earle: It’s wonderful to be here.

Lloyd: You introduce your book with a compelling quote from W.H. Auden [that] I was struck by: “Thousands have lived without love, but not one without water.” What were you suggesting by that?

Earle: Well, Chris McKay, who’s a NASA scientist, one of those individuals who is smitten with a quest to try to find life elsewhere in the universe… The first thing that they look for is water, because, as he puts it, the single non-negotiable thing that life requires is water. Well, Tom Friedman says the world is flat—or, more recently, hot, flat and crowded—I say the world is blue.

Lloyd: You’re telling a different but complementary story that’s the other part of the picture, which is not hot, flat and crowded, but the immense importance [of] what the oceans are for us, and what they do for us, and how dependant we are on them.

Earle: Right. It starts with water. But it’s life in the water that really has made all the difference. If earth were just rocks and water, we still couldn’t live here. It has taken a long time to get it just right for the likes of us. Gazillions of these little guys that still live in the sea, that generate oxygen. We’re all connected to the sea, no matter where on the planet we live: with every breath we take, every drop of water we drink.

Lloyd: Tell us a little bit about how you fell in love with the ocean. Obviously it comes through every page of your book, that you find it endlessly beautiful, endlessly fascinating. You smile when I see you begin to talk about it. How did you fall in love with the ocean and why?

Earle: Well, it was really easy. As a kid, I think all kids are explorers. They start out asking questions. Who? What? Why? Where? How? When? And scientist explorers never stop. They are just little kids who never quite grew up, and I’m one of them. But as a little kid, on a New Jersey beach, the ocean got my attention. I talk about that in the book as well. I got knocked over and it really was scary at first, because I couldn’t breathe. We need water, but we also need air as humans. But when I finally, when my toes touched bottom and I could breathe, my mother was racing out to extract me from the ocean, she was afraid that that I was a goner; but then she saw the big smile on my face, and mother of all mothers just let me go back, and I’ve been going back ever since.

Lloyd: Going back in time and again, and never getting quite as at risk as you were that first time, I assume. As you began your studies, you seemed to be more and more drawn into undersea exploration. What is it about being down under that speaks to you? You have some vivid descriptions about what it feels like to be deep down under the surface of the ocean. What’s the pull there?

Earle: I think the lure is knowing what we don’t know, which is just about everything about the ocean. Everyone can be an explorer when it comes to the sea. Less than five percent has been seen at all below the surface, and that’s amazing.

Most people think this planet is really well explored. Well, it’s not. It hasn’t even been well mapped below the surface. Just last year, with a friend, a geologist, Linda Glover, we worked together to produce for the National Geographic, an atlas of the ocean. And I had worked on one earlier, but this time the National Geographic really went all out to bring the maps up to date for the first time in thirty years—the sea floor maps—and it was glaringly obvious that only about five percent of the ocean has been mapped in the same kind of detail that we have for the moon or Mars or Jupiter, for this planet.

The problems is that, as you fly over the ocean, you can’t see the bottom in most places, and mapping has been done only in fairly recent years. Acoustically, and also from satellites, it’s possible to get some idea of the nature of the sea floor, by measuring the difference in wave height of the sea surface. It seems incredible we can do that. So we know where the mountains are now, we know where the valleys are, but we don’t have the degree of accuracy that we take for granted that we have on the rest of the planet.

Lloyd: One of the things you touch on a number of times is the natural human impulse to see the ocean as this almost infinite mystery that can take care of itself, and we’ll dip into it when we need something, but we have no need to understand the height and depth of it. It has its own rhythms, its own way of doing things, but they don’t really impinge very much on us. So there hasn’t been—as you’re saying with outer space exploration—there hasn’t been the same even scientific impulse to understand what’s going on underneath all of our oceans. Why do you think that is?

Earle: Well, even our policies are geared toward that attitude, that we know better, but we aren’t yet putting it into the way we regard the ocean. It’s still viewed as so big, so vast, so resilient that we can put anything into it that we want to and it’s away. That’s the thought. Or we can take anything we want to out of the ocean, and it will just spring back.

Well, we’ve learned in the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first, that there are limits to what we can get away with, and we’ve discovered that we have the capacity to extract on the order of ninety percent of the big fish from the sea and a lot of the smaller ones too.

The cod, even the little herring are way down in numbers from what they were when I was a child. Think about sharks. When I started diving, more than fifty years ago, the thought was, “The only good shark is a dead shark, and you’d better watch out, because they’re man eaters out there.” And then I thought about it: “I don’t have to worry. I don’t qualify.” [laughter]

Now we have to worry about man-eating sharks—women, too. We have an appetite that has developed in just the last few decades. In Asia, especially in China, there has for a long time been a market for shark fins, for shark fin soup, but only in the last few decades has it become global. And of course there are more people in China and elsewhere, which increases the demand, and there’s new wealth too.

It used to be a very special treat, that only the elite could afford shark fin soup, because it was a big deal to go catch a shark. Not anymore. Long lines, nets, we have the capacity to go almost anywhere in the sea and to catch almost anything out of the sea, even though we don’t know much about who actually lives there.

That’s the odd part of the way we approach the ocean, that it’s okay to take creatures such as orange roughy, and we started doing this more than thirty years ago. They live two thousand feet or more deep in the sea. Also things such things as Chilean sea bass; scientists know them as Patagonian tooth fish. They know orange roughy as “slimeheads.” If they were marketed that way, probably nobody would eat them. But they’ve been dressed up so that they can be marketed, but all too successfully.

Orange roughy, a totally unexploited population when I started diving—or even forty years ago—and today they’ve been so depleted in Australia that some are really considering putting them on the endangered species list. But you’d never know it going to my local supermarket. Orange roughy sells there for about $9.99 a pound, even now, though we know we’re going too far and taking too many, but we haven’t stopped yet. Policies haven’t caught up with what we know to be an issue.

Lloyd: I was struck, in your book, learning that even by the beginning of the twentieth century, the oceans had been significantly depleted of a lot of its major fish populations. And then, of course, as the twentieth century has pressed on, the scientific capacity to harvest them and bring them in in far more efficient ways have been rapidly depleting most of the major fishes that we would think of eating.

Earle: I think you really read that book.

Lloyd: I really did, and you began undermining my appetite for seafood. Because you raise major questions about one of the impulses of our time, has been to move away from depending so much on red meat, for example; and the environmentally responsible thing to do is fish and plants. And now you are saying there are very serious risks for most of the sorts of fish we would eat.

Earle: For two reasons. By decimating fish in the sea, we’re disrupting our life support system. If you think of them as birds, they are in a sense the counterpart of the ocean as birds are to the skies above. Birds are really important to keeping the land healthy, and they’re a part of what makes the systems work. But of course they’re beautiful. So are fish. If you haven’t really seen fish swimming other than swimming with lemon slices and butter, I encourage you to go get acquainted with fish at the aquarium of your choice. Or, better yet, go jump in the ocean yourself. My mother waited until she was eighty-one before putting on a mask and flippers and going with me to meet fish face to face in the sea. And then she scolded me for not getting her out there sooner, because it is such a wonderful experience. Anybody can dive, at least with mask and flippers.

The big loss of ocean wildlife, that’s a start. Think of fish as wildlife, because they are, and they’re mostly not grazers. Few of them are—mullet, parrot fish—but a few others—menhaden, really important fish, they graze on low on the food chain.

But most of fish that we consume are much higher on the food chain than lions and tigers, because they eat other animals. They eat other fish. It’s a long and twisting food chain to get to a tuna or a swordfish or a cod or a flounder. They don’t eat plants, they don’t go for salad. They’re carnivores. They’re top-of-the-line carnivores. We know that about sharks. You see a tuna fish and you think about it. What do tuna eat?

Well, you should think about it, because what they have eaten means that all the way down this long and twisted food chain, what is in the ocean, that we have put in the ocean, has been accumulating, whether it’s mercury, fire retardants, pesticides, herbicides… All that stuff we’ve allowed to go in the ocean gets concentrated the further up the food chain you go, and it comes right back to us in a concentrated dose.

I mean their advice about not eating shark or swordfish or some of the fish taken from fresh water systems because of the high level of contaminants of expectant mothers. But if it’s not good for them or for children, it’s not really good for any of us.

There are some choices that I do recommend. And that’s catfish. Not the ones you catch out of the Mississippi that have been around for sixty years, but those that are farmed locally, that are grown in about one year. They eat plants. You can control what they eat. Tilapia. It’s an African fish that has been adapted for cultivation. Probably not those that have to be shipped all the way from China, but local sources are easy to acquire and it only takes about a year, about the same for chicken or beef.

To make a pound of chicken, it takes about two pounds of plants. To make a pound of cow, about twenty pounds of plants. Catfish, carp, tilapia, low on the food chain, fast growing, it takes about a year and about two pounds of plants to make one pound of them.

Tuna fish, you are looking at about one hundred thousand pounds of plants that feed these many things that feed them, ultimately, and you’re not talking about a yearling. The tuna that comes to market take five or six years, and some species maybe only three or four years to mature; and swordfish the same way, so they may be six, seven, eight, ten, or if they are lucky, they can be thirty years old.

Orange roughy can be two hundred years old and they are only this big, but it has taken a lot of groceries to make one of them. And then we can do them in in twenty minutes. It doesn’t seem right somehow.

Lloyd: While we are complicating their dinner tonight, I have another one that surprised me, and that’s shrimp, a shellfish that you’d think is low on the food chain, that would be something worth doing but for a rather different set of reasons. You say there are some ethical questions about eating shrimp. Say something about that.

Earle: The methods used for catching wild shrimp are pretty terrible when you think about it, and I went for many years without thinking about it. I’ve consumed more than my share of ocean wildlife until I know what I know. Trawls, nets that scrape the sea floor like a bulldozer going through a forest, just takes everything. If you saw the film Forrest Gump, that will give you a clue. They’re out there trawling the ocean floor. Little shrimp boats, but they haul up this massive life dump it on the deck, and you see all these creatures, rays and eels and all the sea grasses, sponges and corals, starfishes, they could shove it over the side—dead or dying—and get a little bushel of shrimp. Then you throw the net back and you cut another swath over the ocean floor.

There are parts of the ocean that get trawled several times a year, back and forth, back and forth, it’s like plowing the sea floor, but you are not planting. This is all ocean wildlife, destroying the capacity of the ocean to generate life.

Yet if we understood those things, we’d change our ways, because it just isn’t right. These nets—and they aren’t just little trawls for the most part anymore, they’re trawls that are being used in the North Sea by some countries that have an opening that would have gobbled up a dozen 747 aircraft in a single bite. They just chew up the ocean floor.

And then there are others, long lines. If you saw the film, The Perfect Storm, you got a taste for what long lines are, these reels of filament. Not mono filament, really thick plastic wire or cable that goes out with baited hooks every few feet. The bait alone would feed a small country. They use small fish to catch the big fish, or squid to catch big fish. It’s just used to catch something larger.

What we really need to think first of all is the ocean. Is the ocean really just something to take food from or to put things into, as a place to throw things away? I mean, even on that basis, it seems a little bizarre. We use the ocean as a dump site, but we also use it to take food? That doesn’t make sense, but that’s what we do.

But I think, as people begin to understand the importance of the ocean as a place that gives us life, gives us oxygen, gives us water, drives the carbon cycle, it drives the nitrogen cycle, drives the chemistry of the planet, it shapes climate and weather, it’s home for most of life on earth when you think about it. Average depth of the sea is two and one half miles; the maximum, seven miles. We only see the surface. I don’t know. People—I was one of them, I didn’t realize how vast and how deep and how full of life the ocean is. It’s taken me a lifetime to gather bits and pieces as we have been discovering it. I’ve been just so privileged to be on a front row seat exploring the ocean, diving into the ocean on expeditions as a scientist, soaking up the latest news, things that we certainly did not know half a century ago, but now that we know, we can do better.

Lloyd: Let’s talk a little bit about the part of your book which takes one by one the principal threats to the ocean, since that’s part of what we want to understand today. First, why the ocean matters so much, but especially how it’s at risk. So would you maybe flag for us what you think the key threats are to the ocean? Because you write vividly about the threat that is quite imminent in some cases.

Earle: Disrupting the chemistry of the planet would be a good place to start. By putting into the atmosphere excess carbon dioxide, we worry about the consequences, global warming, climate change, issues that we can get our minds around, because we can see the polar ice shrinking.

But there is another factor, and that is excess carbon dioxide in the ocean—not just in the atmosphere, but going into the sea. Some of it is necessary. Carbon dioxide drives photosynthesis. It’s why green plants can do their thing, whether it’s on the land or in the sea, but seventy per cent plus of the photosynthesis that gives us oxygen and grabs carbon out of the atmosphere takes place in the ocean.

Little, little—I mean microscopic—photosynthetic bacteria are doing the heavy lifting in terms of giving us life. If you put on the balance sheet that we need oxygen—and we do. The atmosphere is twenty percent oxygen, thanks to all the green things on the land and the green and blue-green things in the ocean that every day churn it out, and every day we breathe it in.

So if you change the chemistry of this vast aquatic system, what is it going to do to the creatures, these little tiny things that are so important to our lives? We don’t know. We don’t have an answer. But one segment of these photosynthetic organisms have a calcium carbonate shell, and the acidification of the ocean that is taking place as a consequence of excess carbon dioxide in the sea puts them at risk, which puts us at risk.

And that’s just one chain of thinking. What we’re taking out of the ocean, in terms of the nearly one hundred million tons of ocean wildlife extracted every year, is disrupting the food webs which in turn disrupt the chemistry. We’re worried about the carbon. Where does it go? We’re encouraged to think green, to plant trees to soak up the carbon, to drive different kinds of vehicles to minimize the amount of carbon dioxide we allow to go into the atmosphere. But we haven’t really thought about, “What are we doing to the ocean.” After all, the ocean drives climate, shapes weather, is the great thermal regulator for the whole planet.

And we seem to be oblivious to what we are doing. It’s not on the big balance sheet now as importantly as it needs to be, with respect to the climate change issues or to the carbon cycle. That’s something all of us can think about, become knowledgeable about, and then do something about. Taking care of the ocean means taking care of us.

Lloyd: You also talk about some of the very direct human interventions, like drilling, mining, oil chemical spills. Why don’t you say again, “We think it’s such a vast ocean it can absorb just about anything.” Is all that having an impact?

Earle: Absolutely. I mean, everything has an impact. That’s just the nature of things. Our challenge is to realize, how can we live within the natural systems that give us life?

We aren’t going to stop eating fish. I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that we make better choices about what we consume. And maybe not expect to have shrimp on every menu in every restaurant all over the world. It wasn’t that way when I was a kid, and it hasn’t been that way through all preceding human history.

We live right now at a special era when you can go to any restaurant and see ocean wildlife, right there. It’s like seeing a menu featuring snow leopard and tiger and other wildlife that wasn’t on menus going back fifty years and won’t be on menus going forward fifty years either, because we choose otherwise or we go on keeping doing what we are doing and we will see others on our watch because we have eaten them.

We are eating them, eating them out of existence and disrupting the way the world functions in the process.

Consider Chesapeake Bay. It isn’t just the fish, although little fish called menhaden have been so depleted, that that’s part of the reason Chesapeake Bay is in such bad shape: because the cleanup squad has been depleted down to a fraction of what it was fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago.

Menhaden have been attacked by us for fertilizer, for oil—not to eat directly, but we feed them to cows and chicken and pigs. Seems odd it’s not on the menus of cows and chickens and pigs unless we force them to eat these little fish ground up.

Or how about the oysters? They’re down by 98% since the time that my father was a boy. He was born in 1900.

I think sometimes that my dad and my mother came from a different planet because they did. The planet was so different, and even I, born in the 1930s… It was a different planet than the planet that we live on today. But not so different that it has ceased continuing to support us, but how far do we have to draw down the living assets before we don’t have a place for ourselves anymore within the natural systems that now keep us alive? That’s the key question, I think.

Lloyd: One more of these unpleasant pieces, and then I want to talk about fixing it a little bit. The way the ocean is being used as a garbage dump was just staggering, the scale, the plastics. Say something about plastics.

Earle: I love Ziplocs. I mean I can’t imagine living my life without some of the plastics that have entered our culture in my lifetime, didn’t exist when I was a kid and somehow people survived without plastic. But if you go through any day of your life and think how plastic supports what we do, it’s become sort of a backbone of much of we do whatever we do. From the shoes we wear to the clothes, to the fleece—the polar fleece—it’s amazing It’s just crept into our everyday lives so completely.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s what we do with it when we are done with it that is really shocking. Bottles, plastic, cans, and they do exist. I have been diving of course for a long time, but certainly over the last thirty years, I have been impressed with the amount of trash I see, even a thousand feet under water.

I was diving, just for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been off of the coast of Costa Rica just scuba diving, but also using a little three-person submarine, going down every day, commuting down to a thousand feet or so. We did not have a single dive without seeing debris, mostly fishing gear, these great lines of monofilament that have been discarded. The fish takes the hook and runs off with it, the line breaks and there is this great muzzle of plastic in the ocean.

The beaches, we’ve moved places in the Indian ocean, twenty years ago and astonished… places where nobody lives, no human lives, but the beaches are just loaded with debris that has been washed there, tossed overboard from ships, but also allowed to flow into the sea from places where we dump things. And it’s increasing partly because our numbers are increasing, but also our use and our abuse of the things that we use in our everyday lives.

We need to think more in terms of not just recycling but there’s a move to try to build cars, for example, that can be broken apart once we are finished with them, and put back into the system somehow. Or computers… I’ve seen piles of dead machinery or new machinery, electronic gear that is just staggering, when you think about how many cell phones have you used in the last ten years. How many have you burned through? And then what do you do with them? They stack up after awhile.

They don’t just meld into the landscape the way our trash used to, although we can still find the trash and debris from our predecessors that go back 10,000 years. But that generally gets shaped and softened by the systems that work on our long-ago trash. But our modern trash is meant to last for a little while, for us to use it. But then it lasts for centuries, our use of it.

Lloyd: I want to give our guests today a chance to ask some questions as well, but let’s turn to some of the things that you see going on that you think could contribute, such as your TED project. Why don’t you describe something about that, and your efforts to try to reclaim some of these areas that are suffering so much?

Earle: Well, I had a telephone call about this time last year that knocked me off my flippers. It was from Chris Anderson, who is head of this organization called TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment Design. It seems like an odd title, but it started in Silicon Valley 25 years ago. Some entrepreneurs got together to think about just solutions to some of the problems, and how we could technically advance the way we do things. But then it grew over the years.

If you go Google TED, you will see what I am talking about. The topics that are discussed that once were done behind closed doors have opened up, available to anybody who goes to Google and looks. You will see these ten-, sometimes two-minute, sometimes twenty-minute talks about everything in the universe: philosophical talks about art, about music, about science about religion, about whatever. Anyway, they decided along the way to begin giving prizes, and now they are giving three prizes that have a cash contribution—which is nice—but what is really cool is you get to speak to the world and you get to have a wish, a wish, as they call themselves “the Tedsters,” not just those who sign up to listen live when it’s happening, but also this community around the world that does what I’m suggesting you do, tune in and just go graze through this wealth of amazing discussions that expand your heart and mind by sharing the views.

Anyway, my wish, that was so easy, what I would say, not just a little wish, like “I’d like to go to Bermuda and spend two weeks,” it had to be a wish that would change the world. I knew what I wanted to do ’cause it is what I’ve been trying to do for a long time. The tough part was to cram it into eighteen minutes, which was all they allowed me to do to make a case for why this wish. It’s there, I managed to just squeak by with eighteen minutes. They would have hauled me off the stage if I’d gone over. My wish…

My wish was to mobilize the people of the world—you, anybody who is listening, anybody who cares—with means available to us, to communicate, to use our good minds and our hearts to protect the blue heart of the planet, the ocean, by establishing, embracing hope spots, places that (if we can protect them) will serve to stabilize the downward spiral that we are now experiencing with the ocean. To stabilize and cause places such as Chesapeake Bay to recover, or the Gulf of Mexico that’s been really exploited seriously over the years.

If we at least identify critical areas and protect them, just as our national parks have done for the land, and a growing network of marine sanctuaries in this country and around the world. There are now about 4,500 places that people have identified already to—say, like, on the land, the Grand Canyon, the redwoods in California. If we can just put our arms around this place and protect it, it will be a source of renewal for surrounding areas.

A place where the birds can live on the land, where the fish can prosper and make more fish. Presently on the land, about twelve percent is protected one way or another with parks or preserves. In the ocean, people most people are astonished to find that it’s a tiny fraction of one percent that has some form of protection. Or those areas that are fully protected, where even the fish are safe, is like point zero or whatever it is, a tiny fraction of one percent.

If you take all of the protected areas, including the management areas, such as what we have in the Florida Keys, a marine sanctuary, where some fishing is allowed but it’s restricted in some areas, or the Monterey Bay marine sanctuary, 5,000 miles that has the name and it’s a management area. If you put all of that on the balance sheet , the Great Barrier Reef, the new areas that President Bush established during 2006 and in the latter days of his administration, it amounted to nearly three hundred thousand square miles of ocean that is now fully protected.

That is bigger than all the national parks in this country put together. But when you put all those things together, and what the little island country Kirabash in the Pacific did also just this year, a magnificent area that was embraced, the largest in the world right now is still less than one percent of the ocean.

It is not enough to keep the blue heart of the planet functioning in a way that will keep us alive. We have to do a lot better, and I am so pleased that, not just because of what has been energized because of the wish with TED, but because around the world people are beginning to understand how important the ocean is, and how important it is for us to do what we can to protect the places that in the end protect us.

I was in Martha’s Vineyard; I went to Nantucket this summer. The whole community is looking not just to the land but to the marshes, the coastline, looking at the ocean beyond. How can they… they are asking, how can they do things that will restore health to the place they know and love? What can you do, what can any of us do in our own aquatic back yard? Even if we think, “Well, the ocean doesn’t matter to us, we live far inland, we never see the ocean,” just have to remember that the ocean keeps us alive.

We are touched by the ocean no matter where we live, and we can do things though the choices we make about what to eat or what not to eat, the support that you give to people who are making rules and regulations about the ocean.

There’s another whole United States out there, within our exclusive economic zone, out two hundred miles, over which this nation has jurisdiction. If you put that on the balance sheet, this country is more than twice as big as what we thought this country was. It more than doubles in size if you include the aquatic real estate and the waters above.

We in this country have a chance to have a leadership role. Other countries are stepping up to the plate and doing things. Australia is looking at the Coral Sea and the south coast. And these little island nations, the Maldives—oh my goodness, do they ever have a vested interest in protecting their two-hundred-mile zone. The land is really tiny, the ocean part of their nation is really huge. We need to just put that into our thinking and imagine what we can do.

Lloyd: I want to make sure we give people a chance to ask you some questions. Deryl, go ahead.

Deryl Davis: We’ve got some questions here to start with. “Can eco-tourism make a difference in terms of how we preserve our oceans and ocean species?”

Earle: Can Eco tourism make a difference? Absolutely, mostly positive. In some cases there’s a downside to eco-tourism, but generally speaking, I think of this as education. People can’t care if they don’t know. If they do know, there’s a chance that with knowing will come caring. And these wonderful expeditions, the National Geographic certainly supports tourism on the land and in the sea. They have a partnership with Lindblad. I go on those trips often to the Galapagos and elsewhere, [Baja], California. The transformation in people when they actually go under water and see fish and get acquainted face to face makes all the difference. They’re changed, and that’s the kind of sea change we really need.

Davis: This questioner asks, “Will you comment on the status and impact of plastic waste accumulation in the Pacific Ocean and what are the solutions to that?”

Earle: There’s a place in the Pacific Ocean known as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that’s hard to see from high in the sky. But when you’re down close to it, as some have been; when you are sailing across that part of the ocean, you realize that they sail and sail and sail and sail and sail through an area that has been characterized as as big as Texas, twice as big as Texas, as big as all of the United States.

Actually our plastic has reached all of the ocean. It really doesn’t have a limit, although there is an area of concentration, because the currents in the north Pacific gather these into a great gyre. It also happens elsewhere in the world. There are parts of the Gulf of Mexico that similarly, through the motion of the currents, concentrate masses of this plastic debris, bottles, Styrofoam, many things that we just allow to go into the ocean, thinking that that somehow is a way. But it is not, it’s our circulatory system, it’s our home and we’re just trashing it.

What we do with plastic when we’re finished with it is really the key. I love what Yvon Chouinard with Patagonia is doing with recycled plastics. He is making those neat fleeces. He charges us big bucks for the recycled plastic, but he transforms them into another life. We could do a lot more to do that, if we really think about it, instead of thinking one-time use and then something is gone. And maybe just to think of better uses for the plastic, instead of one-time-use systems that have just become this enormous problem.

The water bottles alone are staggering. They are wonderful because they are handy, but then we use them once and they are gone. And when they get into the ocean, they float and they travel and they accumulate and they break up ultimately into little pieces, but they don’t go away. That’s part of the problem. And the materials that are used to make plastic bottles and all the other toys and things that we use, they’re called nerdles. It’s the little tiny plastic balls, they’re light and they escape and they bounce along. You can see them in beach sand if you go to almost any beach these days and look at the sand, children call them “mermaids’ tears,” these little clear, if you look, like tiny little pearls.

But the insidious thing is, critters eat them. Oysters suck them in, fish grab them, up birds take these little colorful bits of plastic. Thousands, actually hundreds of thousands of sea birds are lost every year because they get crammed with this plastic or they feed it to their chicks, who never get to fly.

One little fish that I write about in the book was taken from deep water off Hawaii. It’s just a tiny little fish from deep water and it had 82 pieces of plastic in its little [gullet]. It’s amazing. That’s the dark side. What can we do about it? What can you do well think about what you can do, because everything starts with individuals. Some get involved with cleanups, but we can clean up our everyday lives by what we put in the trash or don’t let go there in the first place.

Davis “Can you address the problem of decreasing crab population? Should we be concerned about the consumption of crabs as well as these other marine species?”

Earle: Absolutely. Crabs equal wildlife. And it doesn’t mean you have to stop eating crabs, but eat them with great respect, and realize what it takes to make one, and realize that we don’t know how to cultivate them. We rely on wild populations.

I stopped eating blue crabs and Dungeness crabs, all kinds of crabs, because I am aware, acutely aware how few there are today as compared to what there were when I was a kid, and how it’s become an industrialized extraction of wildlife. It’s one thing to go out, as we used to do as a family, to catch blue crabs for dinner. It’s another thing to catch every last crab that you can possibly catch to send to commercial markets, so that restaurants all over the country and all over the world can have ocean wildlife. It’s a short term phenomenon because it won’t last.

I really recommend giving crabs a break and giving the ocean a break and giving the fisherman a soft landing to give them alternatives, even if it means paying them not to fish. Whatever it takes. They’re taking from the common treasury, the common asset base. They are considered to be free until they go to market where we pay for them. Anybody can go to catch crabs.

Anybody can go, but the commercial licenses and the large scale take of ocean wildlife has gotten to be a problem now that can be solved only when we realize that it is a problem, and to take actions that will cause us to hold back, give swordfish a break, give tuna a break, give sharks a break, give crabs, oysters clams, mussels, give ourselves a break. We don’t actually grow the groceries that we feed to them.

Oyster farming is really like ranching, because you can put the oysters out as little oysters. But then we turn them loose on ocean plankton, and that doesn’t belong to the farmers, it belongs to everyone if it belongs to everybody. So it’s not like raising cows, where you have to own the land and think about the whole system that makes cows that, in the end, are making more cows. I do favor, just extend this question a little bit more, aquaculture, maybe another question out there.

Closed system aquaculture has real promise, places like aquariums where you can raise oysters and clams and certain kinds of fish, like tilapia, and carp and catfish and maybe other things. But controlled systems, you know what goes in, you take care of the water so that it’s cleansed, You can do biological filtration instead of high density systems that raising shrimp hasn’t yet been successful, but maybe someday it will be.

Davis: That was our next question.

Earle: Okay, good.

Davis: This quick question is: “Can you address the acoustic component of the ocean? Are we exploring the natural sounds of the seas?

Earle: That’s a question that nobody thought about going back half a century ago. Even Jacques Cousteau called the ocean “the silent world.”

It’s not silent at all. I think every fish makes sounds. Every marine mammal does. I mean grunts grunt, croakers croak. Groupers make such powerful sounds with their big bodies in an aquarium they can sometimes break glass, this deep oomph-thump that they make. So what noise we are adding to the ocean is confusing things, certainly has caused problems for marine mammals, but it probably trickles right down through all of the animal kingdom that have become accustomed to communicating and signaling one another with sound. It’s another issue to think about.

Lloyd: We’re going to have to wrap it up there. This has been a wonderful conversation. I hope you’ll come back for another TED award winner: Karen Armstrong is going to be here to talk about her book The Case for God, a response to the neo-atheists. But for now it has been such a pleasure to have Sylvia Earle. She’s going to linger to sign books at the west end of the Cathedral. You’re invited to stop by for that and then our St. Francis Day observance goes on with the 11:15 a.m. service and then Dr. Earle will be back at 12:45 for a panel conversation in the Perry Auditorium on the seventh floor of the Cathedral at the west end of the Cathedral. By all means, come join us for that, and then we will be blessing the animals at 2:30 here, so come join us for that. But for now, join me in thanking Dr. Earle for this wonderful conversation.