Mission Blue

Look at this.

It's an ocean full of whale sharks.

I can't even count the number of fins.

Are we awake or are we... are we still dreaming?

They've been living here for millions of years.

We're newcomers in their backyard.

I love being a part of their world.

They're completely innocent of anything humans do.

Since the oil spill, this group of whale sharks,

the largest ever witnessed in the Northern Gulf...

has not been seen there again.

Guess we'll put this little... beast inside.

There you go. Thank you.

In the last few years, I'm on the road... probably 300 days out of the lot.

And I give a lot of talks... some days just from dawn to dusk.

I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing... other than diving.

Aren't you a radical about protecting the oceans?

If I seem like a radical, it may be because I see things that others do not.

I think if others had the opportunity to witness what I have seen in my lifetime,

what I see when I go diving

and the perspective that I've gained from thousands of hours underwater,

I would not seem like a radical at all.

She has seen with her own eyes,

parts of this Earth few others could even imagine.

Sylvia Earle, this country's foremost oceanographer,

exploring depths thought impossible to reach.

It's a pleasure to introduce a scientist,

an engineer, a teacher and an explorer,

Dr. Sylvia Alice Earle.

I can see in my mind's eye... a different world,

a world that's changed enormously just in my lifetime.

Sixty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean,

no one imagined that we could do anything to harm it.

It seemed at that time to be a sea of Eden.

But now, we're facing paradise lost.

And this is not, "Woe is me,"

this is just the reality of what's happening.

But it's also the reality, we have a chance to fix things.

Please welcome Dr. Sylvia Earle.

On any given night,

Sylvia Earle can be found in Norwalk, Connecticut,

or Stockholm, Sweden, or Cape Town, South Africa.

Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle.

In Beijing, Belfast, Davos or the Galapagos Islands.

Think of the changes that have occurred

in the world in the lifetime of a 200-year-old orange roughy.

But they don't know why their world has changed.

And that's where I met her, at a sort of ocean summit.

I'm a big scuba diver. I love the oceans.

I love them more now that I've met Sylvia,

but, um, it's also people like... like you in this room

that can save the ocean.

The world's largest fishery was,

and still the largest fishery in the US,

is Alaskan pollock, and it's moving into the Arctic.

Bluefin are pursued wherever they go.

It's really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet.

If we fail to take care of the ocean... nothing else matters.

I've been diving for over half my life now...

but that is nothing compared to her.

She's been exploring the ocean since before I was born.

Sylvia, that turtle was a trip!

- And she came back here. - Yeah!

She went up, got a breath of air, came right back to that same place.

I spent one week with Sylvia and I was hooked.

- Gular flutter. - Gular flutter.

How could I have not known who she was before?

After the Galapagos trip,

I really didn't wanna leave Sylvia's world.

So I didn't.

Is that her? Yeah, yeah. That's her.

That's her. There she is.

Thank you!

What a beautiful place.

What I didn't realize at the time...

was that this would be the beginning of a three-year odyssey...

a chance to see the ocean and the world through Sylvia's eyes.

Sylvia, the minute I met you, you became an example for me.

Like, seriously.

Just take me back to how you became so passionate

about the ocean.

Well, it all started in New Jersey.

As a kid, I had complete freedom to go play in the woods,

to spend all day out, just fooling around.

On my own, often.

I mean, a lot of the time, just on my own.

My mother was known as the bird lady of the neighborhood.

People would bring injured squirrels, birds, frogs...

anything that needed help.

My father, who was really so bright and so capable of fixing things.

When I was a little kid, I'd try to take things apart to see how they worked

and he always reminded me to save all the pieces, don't lose any,

and be sure you know how to put it back together again.

We're losing a lot of the parts...

the loss of the diversity of life on Earth...

the bits and pieces have just disappeared...

and we don't know how to put things back together again once they're gone.

When I was 12, we picked up and moved to Florida.

At first, I was not particularly charmed, because I loved the other place so much.

But the Gulf of Mexico was this great blue body of water

that created almost this mythic place that lured my parents there.

Some kids play in the streets.

Some kids have a backyard

and my backyard was wet.

It was the Gulf of Mexico. It was glorious.

That's where I first fell in love with the ocean.

I could see it. I could hear it.

I could smell it. I could touch it.

I could splash around in it.

I loved when seaweed came ashore in huge amounts.

It was like going to the zoo.

I had fun finding these creatures... like little crabs.

You could take them and then gently put them back into the ocean,

and they'd scurry off.

It was just heaven for a kid... for me.

It will always be that way in my mind, it's just this paradise.

Happening now, an explosion and fire

devastate a massive oil rig off the Louisiana coast.

Last week's deadly oil rig blowout

remains unchecked tonight.

And it's raising fears of an environmental disaster in the making.

As long as the oil is flowing down here in the Gulf,

this will simply keep growing and growing and growing,

and they have no idea where the end will be.

How'd you feel? What was your first reaction?

It was shocking.

And it just got worse as the news unfolded.

Of course, the tragedy was the human lives lost.

Then this gush of oil wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop, wouldn't stop!

When I was a child living in Florida,

there was only one offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, there are more than 33,000 drill sites.

All of us... we are the beneficiaries of having burned through fossil fuels.

Coal, gas, oil.

But at what cost?

I really come to speak for the ocean.

We put billions into what takes us into the skies above...

and it's paying off handsomely.

We've neglected the ocean... and it's costing us dearly.

The thing that's impressive to me about Sylvia

is that she's not afraid to point fingers...

and say, "You know what you're doing, and it's wrong."

You know, she's kind of the Joan of Arc of the oceans.

- Go! - She's the one that's out in front

leading the charge in the fight to save the ocean.

And she's made it her life's purpose in the last couple of decades

to make sure everybody else understands what's going on and why it's important.

It's life itself that the ocean is delivering.

This is a turning point.

If we continue business as usual, we're in real trouble.

Her passion for the ocean comes from the fact that...

like myself and like many of us who were young...

in a younger world around the ocean,

we saw a place that was more full of life.

It was... beyond frustrating.

It was agonizing.

Because I know what's in the Gulf of Mexico.

I just could flash back to times when I'd be diving in the Gulf of Mexico...

when it was a place...

an underwater paradise.

And to know that it was vulnerable, that it could be right in the path of...

of this...

This avalanche.

It's just hard to express.

YOUR BOOK, THE WORLD IS BLUE: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One.

That's a bold statement. My fate and the ocean's are the same fate?

I don't live in the ocean.

I ain't got gills.

Why should I care about what happens in the ocean?

It's deep, it's dark, people drown in it

and it's full of sharks

who want to eat us.

Or don't you watch Shark Week?

Yeah, I watch. But think of the world without an ocean.

You've got a planet a lot like Mars.

No convenient life support system.

Most of the oxygen that you breathe, that everybody breathes,

is generated by the ocean.

And it absorbs much of the carbon dioxide.

In a way, we're all sea creatures.

Every whale, dolphin, coral reef, whatever...

they obviously need the ocean, but so do we.

No ocean, no life.

No ocean, no us.

So were you that geeky girl in high school?

The science nerd?

I suppose, in today's terminology, I would be regarded as a geek.

People sometimes have a hard time figuring out what they want to do.

I always wanted to be whatever it is that a scientist does,

I just didn't know what to call it.

There's a little library in Dunedin...

that I used to haunt.

I'd sit on the floor and that's where I first saw a book by William Beebe,

and became entranced with the idea of submarines.

His book, Half Mile Down, it was published in the '30s...

described how he and Otis Barton

crawled into this little steel ball with a tiny window in it,

and could look out and see what it was like a half-mile beneath the surface.

What it's like in the deep sea with these sparkling creatures

that illuminate the sea below where light penetrates.