Sylvia A. Earle - The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One

I f there is one thing most of us know about the ocean, its that its big. We may not think about it as often as we should, preoccupied with events here on land, but when we dowell, words like vast and mighty and horizon quickly come into play.

Sylvia Earle, who may know the ocean as well as any human being now alive, helps us cut that intimidating vastness down to size. She does it in two ways, both amply illustrated in this new classic book. Her first method is to bring the ocean to full lifeto remind us of the very nearly infinite abundance of things that live there, some of them things that only a few people besides her have ever laid eyes on. Many terrestrial species are still undiscovered, of course, but were pretty clear on the basic categories: beetles, things with feathers, lizards. Underwater, there are great varieties of stuff weve never even thought of, like fish that dangle lights on stalks in front of them to attract their prey. Stuff so big its hard for us to even quite imagine, such as whales, at once so other and so close. Earle, though a great scientist, is also the heir to Jacques Cousteau, inducting the landbound among us into the mysteries of the sea, helping us to feel both astonished and at ease.

But theres another, much darker, way in which Sylvia Earle helps us understand the size of the ocean. And thats to point out that, vast as it is, its not so big that we cant screw it up. Theres the dead zone at the mouth of almost every big river, and the great gyres of plastic turning slowly in every ocean, and the astonishing fact that weve managed to peer through the opaque depths of the sea with technology that has let us catch most of the biggest fish. Weve also managed to melt vast stretches of the Arctic sea, and the UV pouring through the hole weve opened in the ozone has thinned the ranks of Antarctic krill. Theres evenand no one predicted this even a decade agothe fact that weve managed to change the pH of the seas, pouring so much carbon into the atmosphere that they are fast turning acidic and corrosive.

So our job becomes protecting that gloryusing the insights and emotions, the reason and the passion, that this tour creates to make us take some serious action. This action is personalthinking before we order bluefin tuna off the sushi menu. But it is also political, because one by one were simply not going to change the pH of the ocean back to where it needs to be.

Sylvia Earles passionate lifeincluding this powerful volumecalls us to that work. But weve got to respond. Brilliant and committed as she is, Sylvia Earle is not going to save the oceans on her own. Theyre too big. But all of us dwell near the sea, even if we live a thousand miles inlandthe sea falls from the sky when it rains; every drop of water we use eventually finds its way into the ocean. It is therefore our duty, and also our delight, to take on this defining challenge of our time.

Bill McKibben, American environmentalist and bestselling author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy

This globe strikingly represents just how blue our world is: The Pacific alone covers 58,925,815 square miles of Earths surface, and thats not even half the total surface area covered by all the worlds oceans. Home to millions of species and responsible for driving climate, regulating temperatures, and governing planetary chemistry, the ocean makes life on Earth possible, and its health and protection are issues of critical importance to all of us.

Thousands have lived without lovenot one without water.

W. H. Auden