Racing Extinction Page #3

with a buttonhole camera

in China.

If for some reason,

we run into people

with badges and uniforms,

strip off all the sh*t.

Just rip it out from under your

shirt and throw it over a wall.

Go right in.

Go in, go in, go in.

Hi.

We're starting a business

where we want to sell seafood.

We have a seafood shop.

Well, back where we do it,

it's mainly tuna and marlin

and swordfish.

They want to see something

more exciting.

'Cause the Chinese traveler

and the Asian traveler

has become big business now.

It's more than 50%.

We should go.

We should probably go.

No, no, no.

-This is nice.

-Yeah.

I need to go to

the bathroom bad.

There's the bathroom.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

Yeah.

Are these expensive, also?

$44,800 US Dollar per kilo.

No way.

We ended up going down the road

to another warehouse

on the Hong Kong waterfront.

Louie, look at this.

It must have been

1 0,000-20,000 fins in one location.

This was one of the biggest

facilities on the planet.

Look at that.

It looks like a blue.

The scale of it was

just out of control.

l've never seen anything like

that before in my life.

Jesus!

I feel like this world

is absolutely insane.

I remember once diving

the northernmost islands

of the Galapagos,

Darwin lsland and Wolf Island.

You know, islands that

Darwin actually never had

been to before.

It's the land before time.

I mean, it's like land

before humans got there.

And I remember

this giant whale shark came by,

and then a pod of dolphins came by.

You know, this is back

when you shot film.

And the whole frame was just

filled with wildlife.

And this dolphin came

swimming from behind

the front of the whale shark,

and it grabbed this tuna,

and it brought it and looked

right at me and shook it,

and it swallowed it, tail first

down its throat.

And I thought, "You know,

"this is when you want 37 pictures

on a 36 roll of film."

It's just magical, absolutely magical.

As underwater photographers,

photojournalists really,

we're documenting a time and a place

that in the future

may not be there.

And the clock is moving.

The first photographs I shot...

...the assignment for

National Geographic, 1960,

I took a total of.. .

...seven or eight frames on

two and a quarter square film,

on ektachrome film,

and butted them together.

It was the first underwater, color

panoramicever done on the reefs.

And this was when I came back

in 1 989.

The beautiful Barrier Reef

forest went to hell.

Now I'm looking around

and saying, "Well,

"what happened here?

"It's not so far off from what

happened 65 million years ago."

Extinction is often being driven by...

...direct human activity,

things like habitat destruction

or overfishing.

And then there's

global climate change,

which is happening

in a different way.

So we have these

sort of dual things,

like the direct hand of man,

and the indirect hand of man

in the change of climate.

Climate is controlled

by the oceans.

The oceans are the big guy.

They're in control.

And the oceans now

are slowly changing.

And that is the danger

we face today.

A mass extinction is driven

by a change of the environment...

...and we are changing

the environment precisely

along the lines

that can trigger off

one of these great catastrophes.

There's been

five mass extinctions,

and they've had

different causes,

but there's been

one common factor in all.. .

a massive increase

in carbon dioxide.

And we've never had

a carbon-dioxide spike

like what's happening now.

We are burning through

the fossil fuels laid down

over hundreds of millions

of years.

Really reversing

geological history, basically.

And we're doing it

really, really fast.

In the Gulf oil spill,

about 4.9 million barrels of oil

were spilled.

That represents about a quarter...

...of what we use every single day

in the U.S.

You look at an event

like the Gulf oil spill,

and you think,

"This is the biggest

environmental catastrophe

"in America ever."

But that spill is nothing

compared to the damage

caused by us doing

everyday things

we don't even think about.

And I'm more guilty than anyone.

The worst thing you can do

to the environment

is make a film about it.

This looks really cool.

We did a carbon assessment

of the first two years

of production.

And I was horrified at how much

energy it takes to do what I do.

Sweet. We're gonna

turn this one on.

We're at the point where

we're making our lives

a lot better for us,

but we're doing it

at the expense of

of everything going forward.

We have many, many ways

to fix this problem.

The question is,

are we gonna do it fast enough?

What we know at the moment

is we're driving this

out of control...

...and the ocean's chemistry

is changing really rapidly.

Scarily fast.

When we put carbon dioxide

into the atmosphere,

it doesn't all stay there.

Between a third and a half

gets absorbed by the oceans.

The CO2 reacts with water

to form something

called carbonic acid,

and each year, the ocean

becomes more and more acidic.

If you want to know

what that does,

get a seashell and drop it in,

...you know, a glass of vinegar.

A whole variety of creatures

will simply

dissolve into the acid ocean

that we have created.

There's massive death

in the oceans.

It's already started.

Well, it's not only started,

it's well underway.

Those are larvae?

Yeah.

See the little...

The brown smudge?

Yeah, yeah.

Each year, we harvest

seven to ten billion oyster larvae...

...that we send out to growers

throughout the Pacific northwest.

I still remember the day

all of the larvae essentially

in our entire hatchery

were on the bottom of the tanks.

So around six billion larvae all died

in a single day.

That deep-ocean water

off the coast of Washington

and Oregon

comes into

the hatchery intakes,

...and they can't grow

their shell.

lt's dissolving faster

than they can grow it.

It seemed outlandish to think

that the ocean

could be acidified enough to

cause these kinds of problems.

It just seemed like something

from the distant future

and nothing we ever had

to pay attention to.

The rate of change

that we're seeing in the ocean

and the change that it's gonna

create in our food chain...

it's gonna be dramatic, and it's

gonna be in our lifetimes.

The things

that we're used to eating

may not be available anymore,

and we may need to transition

to, you know,

eating jellyfish

or something like that.

Start a new trend.

It sounds a bit silly,

"Change your diet

and save the planet"

But if humans could

become vegetarians now,

you would make

a massive difference.

By far and away,

the biggest factor in terms

of this mass extinction

is destroying natural habitat

or converting natural habitat

into land for food.

The more dependent we are

on meat, milk, and eggs,

the greater the CO2

and methane emissions.

Cattle and Brahmanas of all kind

produce methane as a byproduct

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