Hero For The Planet

Sylvia Earle is a dedicated advocate for the world’s oceans and the creatures that live there. Her voice speaks with wonder and amazement at the glory of the oceans and with urgency to awaken the public from its ignorance about the role the oceans plays in all of our lives and the importance of maintaining their health. For over five decades her actions say loud and clear: “The planet earth is blue and I am going to make sure it stays that way!”

Sylvia Earle is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer with a deep commitment to research through personal exploration. She has been called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, and “Hero for the Planet” by Time. Her work has been at the frontier of deep ocean exploration for four decades. She was captain of the first all-female team to live underwater. She walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any other woman before or since. She started companies to design and build undersea vehicles that allow scientists to work at previously inaccessible depths.

She was former Chief Scientist of NOAA under President George W. Bush. The unprecedented Marine Sanctuary that President Bush established in the Pacific Ocean was due in large part to a personal encounter that Sylvia Earle had with our President. After the 2006 screening of a Jean- Michel Cousteau film at the White House, Sylvia sat at the President’s dinner table with a half dozen other people, and soon after, President Bush decreed 140,000 square miles of ocean in Northwest Hawaii as a marine sanctuary. At the end of his second term in 2008, President Bush designated almost 200,000 additional square miles of the Pacific Ocean as Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

Sylvia has led over 70 expeditions, logging more than 6500 hours underwater in connection with her research. Today, she is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. And, she led the Google Ocean Advisory Council, a team of 30 marine scientists providing content and scientific oversight for the Ocean in Google Earth. Among the more than 100 national and international honors she has received is the 2009 TED Prize for her proposal to establish a global network of marine protected areas. She calls these marine preserves “hope spots, to save and restore, the blue heart of the planet.”