Mission Blue Page #2

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.

So, I never got to meet William Beebe,

but I regard him as a soul mate.

Jacques Cousteau was able to

vicariously, and sometimes directly,

get people in the water.

He got me in the water

by inspiring me to say,

"That's so cool! I wanna go!

I wanna see it!"

His Silent World made me

want to see what he saw.

To meet fish swimming in something other

than lemon slices and butter on a plate.

To actually go and witness

this vast blue realm.

Before the 1950s, diving had been

very risky and experimental...

until Cousteau invented

the Aqua-Lung,

and became one of the first

to use a Self-Contained Underwater

Breathing Apparatus, SCUBA.

He showed how simple it could

be to explore the sea.

In the summer of 1953, I enrolled

in a class in marine biology.

My major professor

somehow managed

to get two of the very first

scuba sets that were available.

Come with me, my love

To the sea

The sea of love

I want to tell you

How much I love you

It seemed so improbable. You

can be underwater and breathe.

Come with me

Most of all, it was

the gift of time.

Be able to actually stay and watch

the creatures that were there.

And it made me want to always

go deeper, stay longer.

Was there that moment,

like in a movie,

if we were in a movie of Sylvia

Earle's life, like you're...

- The "Ah-ha" moment?

- Yeah, somebody puts...

You put the mask on and you're

seeing, and you're, like,

"Oh, my God, this is what I wanna

do with the rest of my life."

- Is that what happened?

- I already knew.

In the water, anyone

can be a ballerina.

You can stand on one finger.

You can do... back rolls.

You can look as if you are... the

most graceful creature in the world.

And along the way you see all this...

this galaxy of life.

You know, it's

just exhilarating.

If I can do it... you can do it.

I'm not Superwoman.

I'm not big and muscular.

My mother, at 81... put on a mask

and flippers and took on the ocean.

And then she would tell people,

"If you are 81, don't wait any longer.

Just do it."

Thousands of delighted visitors

are discovering the fun of a

Florida Gulf Coast holiday.

From the time I was a

child, seeing Florida,

what I thought was just

wonderful wilderness...

watching it change

before my eyes.

The Tampa Bay area

is one huge resort

with gleaming new

hotels and motels.

To watch Tampa Bay

getting dredged,

taking what was a marsh and then

putting a parking lot there,

putting a housing

development there.

Watching the Weeki Wachee

River as a witness,

this crystal river... that starts

with a spring like a morning glory.

You look down, you see this blue throat

that just seems to go into infinity,

and then it spills out into a

river that goes off into the Gulf

in this water that's so clear it looks

like there's no water there at all.

And then development along the edge,

just clouding that amazing water.

The trees were starting to

turn brown around the edge

and all the grass was dead.

It was...

that kind of

experience, a witness.

I saw the before.

I saw the after influence of what

we can do to the natural world.

The Gulf of Mexico is this

extraordinarily wonderful,

productive, magnificent place

that had the misfortune of being

right on top of a ton of oil,

and being the sewer for the people

of the United States of America.

Call it the price of progress.

For six decades, big agriculture

and industrial farming

have affected the Gulf of Mexico

from hundreds of miles away.

A little less than a third of all

the corn grown in the entire world

is grown in Iowa, Nebraska,

Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota.

That productivity is due to

the application of humongous

quantities of nitrogen fertilizer.

All that fertilizer runs off the land,

makes it into the Mississippi River,

comes down the river...

fuels extraordinary population

explosions of phytoplankton,

the stuff dies, it rots.

When something rots,

it uses up oxygen,

and then anything that is alive,

like crabs, little tiny fish,

they can't hightail it

out of there, they die.

They die from no oxygen.

Boom, that's the dead zone.

The Gulf of Mexico already hosts

one of the most notorious

dead zones on the planet.

The Deepwater Horizon spill

just made things a lot worse.

Around the world, hundreds of dead zones

have formed just in the past few decades.

So let's be honest.

You're 18. You're

very beautiful.

Aren't all your friends

going off, getting married?

And did that ever... No, you're

like work, all about work?

I'm not abnormal.

Of course I enjoyed

dating boys and so on.

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