 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and Welcome to an insight an idea with Sylvia Earl. My name is James Harding I'm the editor of The Times and it is my huge and happy privilege to introduce Sylvia Earl Before we got here. I was asking Sylvia. What's the best sort of official Way to address her and she said well obviously Sylvia, but as well as that as an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society and The founder of mission blue But she is someone unlike many of us who has nicknames that we would all be envious of the Sturgeon general her deepness here is a lady Who is I can't help feeling a hero of many of us in the room Rarely do any of us get to say we are going to spend half an hour with a Scientist an oceanographer an aquanaut so Sylvia Earl. Thank you very much for being here We're instructed to ask you one thing straight off the bat And that is if you were to impress upon people one idea one idea that would meaningfully change the world What would yours be? it would be to Respect the ocean and take care of it as if your life depends on it because it does It's just that simple we're doing terrible things to the ocean the ocean is in trouble therefore we're in trouble I think the good news is it's not too late to reverse some of the dire trends that are not working in our favor And could we but let's start with you. How did you discover the ocean? I think the ocean discovered me when I was three years old on the beach in New Jersey with my brothers and my parents a Wave knocked me over got my attention, but it's life in the ocean that has held my attention It is what inspired me to be a biologist most of life on earth is actually in the sea So it seemed like a natural thing. I never remember making a choice. It's just where my heart took me And forgive me the New Jersey shore doesn't necessarily strike me as the place you're going to discover The wonders of Aquatic life. Well, we're talking a few years ago But it's a where did you do in your early diving? Where was the time that if you say it captured your imagination and my parents moved to Florida when I was 12 My backyard was the Gulf of Mexico and that doesn't today inspire images of clear water and sparkling beaches and so on but in the 1950s I went to Clearwater High School when clear water had clear water and That's where I first learned to dive. I was given two words of instruction breathe naturally. I survived and thereafter Never took a course never really ever have taken a course, but I did it the hard way by watching the Navy divers in Panama City who Who took me along as a mascot sometimes let me go with them on some of their training dives So I watched what they did and tried not to get left behind. I would say I feel like a little bit of a fool I did a five-day diving course. They just instructed you to breathe naturally That was it. Well, that was among the first scuba apparatus in the United States in the early 1950s So before that I had tried a copper diving helmet our next-door neighbor in Florida was a sponge diver and my older brother and I and The son of the sponge diver kind of borrowed the equipment I went to a river in Florida and I had a chance to first have that sensation of breathing Under water but to be free of any heavy gear and not have a cable back to the surface That was such a joy. I mean everybody should do it And how much time do you spend underwater now? Are you counting the shower? Try to do that every day But you know as much as I can I'm somewhere really wonderfully wet and blue and salty and full of life About once a month. I just was in Midway Island halfway across the Pacific last week Amazing what we can do today. Here I am in Switzerland Well, I have to say I think one of the things that is really exciting about having you here Is that people would look at Davos over the years and say the agenda has probably been as landlocked as the Location and it's great to see that that you're here and bringing the issues of concern around the ocean Can we turn to those for a minute? I guess this a general sense. Isn't there that we are seeing? really serious destruction of our Ocean wildlife and the ocean habitat How bad how good is it? I think the great news is that Since the middle of the 20th century, we have literally learned more about the ocean about a lot of things about our place in the universe about Other people we have the capacity to now share knowledge all over the world and begin to connect the dots in Ways that were impossible to do when I was a kid We have learned about the ocean that there are mountain chains down the Atlantic Pacific Indian Ocean Rachel Carson when she wrote the sea around us published in 1951 Thought that the ocean was infinite Not the land everybody kind of saw that we were doing some Destructive things on the land losing forests losing wildlife and actions were being taken policies conventions protected areas as you know to try to Maintain some integrity of the birds and fresh water and things like that, but the ocean Until fairly recently the idea has been that the ocean is so big so vast So resilient that there isn't much that humans can do that can harm it And we have looked at the ocean as a place to put things We don't want near us on the land and a place to take things that seemed in infinite quantity That the we'll never run out of fish. It was thought it was a place to go for To solve the food problem now. We know that there are real limits. Well, we're talking about wildlife after all We aren't planting things in the ocean. We're just taking wildlife We couldn't sustain ourselves with wild birds or little furry things We stopped basically trying to feed all of our population with wildlife Thousands of years ago and began to cultivate But in the ocean, we're still taking wildlife in Huge quantities. Well, that's one of the things we've learned. We've learned more in the last 50 60 years and during all Human history put together about the ocean and its relevance to us We now know that there's life from the surface all the way down. It isn't just rocks and water out there It's it's like a minestrone Except all those little things are swimming around It's alive and it wasn't until 1960 That a descent was made by a Swiss engineer scientist Jacques Picard Don Walsh US Navy Lieutenant They went to the ultimate depth 11 kilometers seven miles down. They only had about half an hour though to look around and nobody has been back Since cameras have been there on a few occasions. Japan had a robot that ultimately was lost at sea Woods hose and a graphic institution has sent a robot down now. That's still is active. It's been there I think nine times and they've confirmed what those two guys did back in 1960. There's life. In fact, there's light By a little in essence. I wish everyone Listening in looking in in this room wish you and I could go on a dive as You go down through the surface, you know, it's blue at the surface in the sunlit part of the sea Do you go down, you know a couple hundred feet? Mostly the world is blue because the red the yellow Colors have disappeared and the deeper you go the bluer it gets and then it's like indigo black Purple black and then it's black except for the flash debarkelling glow of these living lights by luminescence. It's like gazillions of fireflies Jellyfish a lot of crustaceans little fish with lights under their eyes Or like lights down their side like a like a little deep sea liner of some sort and it's true Picard and Walsh discovered as they made their Their descent to the full ocean depth little flashes It's how communication in the sea takes place for many creatures and and how do you explain that it's now more than half A century since anyone has been down there. It's the great mystery of the sea as far as I'm concerned, you know, we've invested So much in what goes up aviation aerospace and it has paid off Hansomly, but we've neglected the ocean and it's costing us dearly only about five percent of the ocean has been seen at all Let alone explored. We know how to take from the ocean. We know how to dump things there. We don't really Understand how it works. We know that the greatest diversity of life The 97% of the biosphere where life on earth exists is out there in the ocean You never mind that most of it lives in the dark, you know, you could have a thousand feet It's dark all the time except for these little galaxies of light that flash around you and What one thing we did learn is Despite the vastness of our ignorance about the ocean the one thing we've learned is that the ocean drives The way the world works drives climate weather The water cycle 97% of earth's water is ocean So if you like water that falls out of the sky, you will love the ocean if you like to breathe Do you like to breathe? Yeah, if you like to breathe everybody likes to breathe Most of the oxygen that is replenished every day Comes from little microscopic organisms or some of the big ones that helps the seagrass meadows, whatever But mostly little tiny photosynthetic organisms That not only generate oxygen they grab carbon out of the ocean and and then it goes through the food chains think of Every fish like every tree There's a carbon-based unit and it's sequestered in the ocean as long as we leave them in the ocean and The cycles go round and round the fish when they die that they Nutrify the system that keeps life going in it. This was going on Literally for hundreds of millions of years before there were any creatures that remotely resembling human beings But can I just press you about this we are a we are quite a curious species not to mention good in a hurry the reason that such extraordinary Wonders mysteries magic remains remain unexplored At the bottom of the ocean is that is that the consequence of an engineering challenge a lack of Political imagination is what do you think is keeping us from going back down there? I? Say it to me. It's a mystery because I've always wanted to understand ever since I was a little kid wondering not just What's at the surface, but what's going on below and as a diver? you know I could go down to 50 meters sometimes really pushing the limits to where you can go on compressed air I Mean to look over the edge, and it just keeps going, but I couldn't go Ah, and it made me so cross that I actually started three companies Just to develop equipment to be able to solve the problems about going deep I mean you could wait for others to do it, but I'm a species in that part of this that species in a hurry We only have so much time in life to make things happen And it and I think it's picking up I think people are beginning to appreciate That what is beneath the surface? It's like what if we just looked at our skin and didn't know anything about our heart or circulatory system or anything else And so we ignored it But now we we know that the ocean not only is critical to our lives to our economy our security to our health Basically our lives depend on a healthy ocean and Now knowing that the ocean is in trouble half the coral reefs have disappeared or they're in a state of decline Since I was a kid We've lost on the order of 90% of many of the big fish like tunas swordfish sharks Marlin cod even a lot of the little fish the herring earns and trouble Kaplan things that we don't often eat directly Other a lot of people eat herring, but a lot of herring also go just for making fish oil or or animal food Not just herring, but a lot of small fish in that journal family that occur in large schools But they're critical to the health of the ocean krill in Antarctica also We don't eat them directly, but we take them bite the millions of tons and thereby take the cornerstone of the whole Antarctic ecosystem just you know haul it out It's critical for birds for seals for squid for whales For the chemistry of the system whales eat krill, but they give back nutrients that cause the plankton to grow generating oxygen grabbing carbon driving food chains including the whales and It's now only now that we're beginning to understand how this works and why it's important back to us And and I think there's I think there is a quite widespread and certainly Deeply felt concern about what's happened to the ocean, but the scale of it is such and the complexity of it is such It's quite hard to think through so Can we do this for a minute just think a little bit about? What we're taking out and then do a bit about what we're putting in and what you're what? Let's start with taking it out and particularly around fishing. What's your prescription for what? We should do Well, there are actually three things that I worry about most What's what we're taking out? It's what I'm putting in but it's the biggest thing of all is ignorance if people understood the relevance of what we're taking out The relevance of that live fish are more valuable than dead fish. I mean fish are nice to eat But you ought to think about the investment in what it takes to make that fish on your plate It's not like a chicken that might take a year to mature or less and only a couple pounds of plants to make a pound of chicken or Grazers generally about 20 pounds of plants to make a pound of cow But if you're eating tuna you've got to think in terms of tens of thousands of pounds of Plants at the end of this food chain They're top carnivores that eat fish that eat other fish that eat other fish Finally you get down to the plants and oh by the way to make a bluefin tuna It takes 10 to 14 years for them to mature Well, we take them sometimes before they're mature the the fish that we're taking out of the sea used to be this big now They're getting smaller because we take them we've taken most of the big ones already and so the question is What can you do? Think about what you're eating make better choices know where the fish come from Think of the carbon footprint not only about what you're taking out of the ocean carbon-based unit But how much has been invested in bringing a fish from one side of the planet to you the so-called? Patagonian tooth fish or Chilean sea bass from the southern hemisphere from Antarctica Think of the fuel to get down to Antarctica to catch the fish then to transport them back to wherever you are There it's now all over the world Not an efficient way to feed people at all and and the difficulty is that's quite a That's a powerful message But also quite a subtle one and leaves people a lot of discretion think about what you're eating Should we be much too low on the food chain? But should we just be much tougher on this? Should we just say look there we should introduce a ban on? Fishing on the high seas. I mean, I don't know you would frame it better than me Should we do something much for some of the techniques for fishing should definitely be banned and that includes bottom trawling They're so destructive. It's like using a bulldozer to catch songbirds and You shake out a few pounds of protein, but you've destroyed the forest and everything that's in it and you just you know Stripping does that you trawl the bottom and the bycatch alone is horrendous Some say it's five to one. It's ten to one sometimes It's it's much more than out a hundred to one this much gets thrown away for this much that gets retained We don't think about that because we don't see it Why don't people care about the ocean perhaps because there aren't enough divers and divers can only go down to a hundred 150 feet 50 meters or so and if you know You might care. There's this great ignorance factor that I think is driving But that runs you headlong into a governance issue as well, which is if you wanted to say right we're going to ban Certain types of fishing What are the institutions what are the levers that will actually make that happen the United Nations actually was able in 1992 to establish a Ban on high seas drift nets because like some of the other forms of fishing that it proved to be so destructive Thousands of birds are being caught and a lot of creatures that were not targeted the bycatch issue and It was of course straining a lot of what was in the ocean, too I used to say well, you know even the jellyfish are getting Scrunched and I was told at the time nobody cares about jellyfish And then you go now to aquariums all over the world and they feature of these beautiful Creatures and people are starting to to care about jellies But most importantly we should care about the ocean as a living system that keeps us alive I think of the ocean as the blue heart of the planet And you say well, how much of your heart do you want to protect in a sense? You want to protect all of it that doesn't mean that that we have to just not use the ocean We will of course ships can pass over it and we can dive in it And we but we ought to think about non-destructive uses of the ocean if you like to breathe If you like water if you like to have the Maintaining the systems that keep us alive will be very careful about taking bites out of those systems We don't want to lose coral reefs High degree of diversity in coral reefs that could serve us in so many ways deep-sea mining is on the Agenda now to also taking taking out of the ocean It's like come on come on come on one two deep-sea mining I just want to follow up this fit this fish issue. Are you saying in When you cite the UN example that you're confident that the UN will be able to address this Effectively, I'm not confident, but I'm I'm modestly optimistic cautiously optimistic. In fact, it's the on an international basis You know 64% of the ocean is high seas beyond national jurisdiction and even those nations that have a coastline Like the United States. There's another United States out there There's the part that you see on the map and then there's the blue United States. It's bigger than the land part, Australia There's a blue Australia bigger than the land mass itself Island nations in the Pacific. It was a little speck of land and there's great big Blue part that is under their jurisdiction Getting to wake up to that that this Really is a governance issue writ large and this is the moment in time We can do as we did in ages past. You just mow it down to go with the attitude Let's go take take take or we could go with a concept This keeps us alive. Yeah, we need to move with great care. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take fish Doesn't mean that we shouldn't take minerals doesn't mean we shouldn't go there But it does mean you should do it with your eyes open And you need to see what's there first and not just blindly scrape the ocean floor and evaluate It's like going to new york city if you have an appetite for cement And you say oh, let's just take new york city and throw out the cab drivers the lawyers the doctors the Music makers or whatever else it is. We just care about the cement And that's a commodity way that we look at the ocean whether it's fish or minerals and so I cut you off Just as you were getting in the water But the deep water drilling obviously that's become a very vivid concern for people particularly After what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, there's there's the oil and gas drilling extraction of minerals There's also the hard minerals Manganese nodules were a big deal going back to the 80s sort of derailed the law of the sea for a while the interest in Imagined interest of the great value of these Manganese nodules that litter the deep sea too deep to economically be Considered for extraction it turned out but now now there's a greater value. There's a Concern about the supply of some more the rare earth Substances that we now have uses for that are important And so we're really reconsidering the whole idea of manganese nodules and that crusts around hydrothermal vents that are rich in certain metals minerals and and how realistic is it? I can imagine 50 years ago if we'd sat here and we were discussing the idea that Most fish many fish should be considered a protected species because we'd fished the ocean People would have thought that was madness madness. Are we on the brink of another crisis in the sea? Are we about to see demand for commodities at such a scale that actually we start? We start mining the seabed in a way in which we've previously mined on land The cusp of that yes, I think we are I mean in 1950 think how many oil wells There were in the ocean at all not many and certainly not in 10,000 feet of water or even a mile where the The deep water horizon was drilled It was a mile of water and then two more miles down beneath the bottom of the ocean the technology is Absolutely stunning. I mean it's space-age technology for sure, but if we can do that we also ought to be smart enough to evaluate what the trade-offs are and to realize that there may be things of greater value that we're missing and Losing before we even get to understand what's there and how you know? We talked we touched on the idea of governance in this fisheries question There's also a question isn't there about the capacity of government underwater one of the things that was quite striking after the deep water horizon spill was that essentially the government was in the hands of BP and its contractors in terms of understanding the problem and fixing the problem if we ought to do much more underwater How do you rate the capacity of government to understand what's happening underneath it on a scale of one to ten? Yeah, why not like one? Okay, that's not good But we have the capacity to ramp up very quickly Much that we've learned that it's been applied in other areas can be applied in the ocean with materials with the whole range of new technologies that have served us so well and understanding where we are in the greater scheme of things we just need to Focus on the importance of the ocean for the many ways that it serves us We're concerned about climate change but and a lot of attention on the atmosphere, but the ocean drives climate and it drives the carbon cycle and yet we aren't really thinking about the ocean at the scale that we need to the world after all To coin a phrase the world is blue and If you look at it from space now, we know that image should alone inspire us to think That we too are sea creatures We're as dependent on the ocean as any whale or any coral reef take away the ocean and know us and tell us a little bit in Terms of understanding or seeing the ocean you say we we are as you say a blue planet You've been involved in this very interesting project with Google In trying to enable us to actually look at the blue bits of that planet How did that work? Well, it's an example of how we have taken the ocean for granted I met John Hankey who was head of an or of a company that was called keyhole that was a predecessor to Google Earth acquired by Google and when I first met John Hankey was 2006 at a conference in Spain where I had 15 minutes to talk about the importance of the ocean and John Hankey of course was going to talk about Google Earth and I got up on the stage and there he was and sitting up near the front It just struck me that There's a chance to say thank you for Google Earth How I love it to hold the world in my hands and my kids love it my grandkids love it We can look at our backyard and see our neighbor's backyard and we can fly around the world and whatever And I said it just came to me John I hope someday you'll finish it because the ocean is a big blob of blue The land is great, but you should call it Google dirt Came out of my mouth and I couldn't get it back and later after our Talks John said it was like getting stabbed in the heart. I Knew something was missing. I like most of the world and That's kind of the where we are now most of the world is still missing from the big balance sheet We're terrestrial in our thinking. That's why we aren't exploring the ocean That's why we don't think of biodiversity in in the wet part of the planet. That's where most of it is So he asked me to come down to the Googleplex and talk to the Googlers Which I had the great pleasure of doing and then assembling a brain-trusted people who over three years Really worked with Google and their 20% time To solve the problem of how do you put the ocean in Google Earth and now Any little kid can dive into the sea in many places any CEO. It's there to be able to Get a fast update on the state of the ocean Anybody can begin to connect the dots and see what's going on and it's going to get better and better and better It's hard because only five percent of the ocean has been mapped with the same degree of Accuracy that we have for the moon or Mars or Jupiter or the land of this country or any this planet This little speck in the universe and and just rounding back to your first idea I did Treat the ocean as if your life depends upon it because it does that is We'll all walk back and think about that in our professional lives, but individually, how do you deal with an idea like that? well an idea started in early in the 20th century to begin to protect Special places on the land to protect watersheds because we really need them to protect wild places because We know how to destroy them, but we don't know how to put them back together again And we really need them for all sorts of reasons and it isn't just the aesthetic wonder and beauty Although that counts too and the same is true of the ocean, but we're a little behind the curve It wasn't until 1970s that Australia Established the Great Barrier Reef and the United States little places began popping up that were protected, but like last year UK protected half a million square kilometers of ocean were even a fish or safe around the Chagos Archipelago Chile established a protected area around one of the islands offshore Sally Gomez The island countries in the Pacific are beginning to realize the blue part of their jurisdiction counts And so they're getting their heads together about how do we protect large parts of the Pacific using our power? And there seems real momentum to this. I mean, I know this is the heart of what you're doing with mission blue and other things But where do you focus now because there are lots of places like this? Where where is the one that's at the top of your list ignorance? ignorance, it's getting people Hold up the mirror and say, okay. I Have some power whatever it is if it's a head of state or a Mayor of a city or a kid who's energetic and wants to make a difference or I don't know Whoever it is to think what they can do but first they have to know that it matters And I think my self-appointed job ambassador to the fish Is is to try to inspire people to get to know for themselves Taking advantage of all the wonderful means now available to us. It isn't just Google Earth. You can just ask Questions. What's the status? Where do Where does Chilean sea bass come from and What does it take? What is deep-sea trawling or long-lining with these baited hooks that you know Thousands of miles of hooks are out there in the ocean as we sit here now and they're just taking indiscriminately whatever comes to the hook It's not like farming cows or chickens. There's some problems with agriculture, of course But if we're going to feed people going forward, we need to think about efficient effective Low on the food chain means of getting protein and all the rest that we need to support can't do it with wildlife in the long pull maybe a small amount but not not as a real means of gathering food for Seven little own ten billion people. I like people to think if you were Imagining what you could take back 50 years ago armed with knowledge. We've got today What might we do differently? That was kind of your question. Yes Well, the other question to ask is what 50 years from now with people looking at us today say that We can do we have options That we'll lose we only have 10% of the tunas the sharks the swordfish left Half the coral reefs are already either gone or in serious trouble. We'll lose them Even those fish we like to eat if you look at the trends. Here's where they were when I was a kid Here's where grouper snapper cod tunas are today. How many years before they're all gone? commercially extinct if not actually extinct and the projections are by the middle of this century Can't we stop while there's still time can't we mean? We should stop Well, there's still time but but I think for us for us all. I'd just like to say what you do as Ambassador to the fish but in providing such an articulate and thoughtful Wake-up call on the ocean. It makes me think that there is an answer to the issue of ignorance That is more than just more more information It is also about more inspiration and you provide that to us So on behalf all of us in the room and everyone else watching silver oil. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you