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.”
The World Is Blue
The World Is Blue by legendary marine scientist Sylvia Earle portrays a planet teetering on the brink of irreversible environmental crisis. In recent decades we’ve learned more about the ocean than in all previous human history combined. But, this eloquent, urgent, and fascinating book reveals how just 50 years of swift and dangerous oceanic change threatens the very existence of life on Earth. Modern overexploitation has driven many species to the verge of extinction, from tiny biota to magnificent creatures like tuna and whales.
In the book, she articulates, through personal experiences and scientific documentation, how the decline of the oceans is happening parallel to, and delicately intertwined with the fate of the atmosphere and what is happening on land. Sylvia argues passionately and persuasively to find responsible, renewable strategies that safeguard the natural systems that sustain us. Fortunately, there is reason for hope, but what we do (or fail to do) in the next ten years may well resonate for the next ten thousand. Her book is more than a wake up call.
Sylvia Earle is a former NOAA chief scientist. She is a National Geographic Explorer in residence, a woman who led a five year sea voyage and participated in almost 75 other expeditions, lectured in 70 countries, and authored more than 170 publications. She has been scuba diving for over half a century, walked the ocean floor some 1,250 feet below the surface, and utilized 30 different types of submarines. She was named “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, and Time Magazine’s first “Hero for the Planet.” Sylvia Earle is also a key reason why Google Earth developed Google Oceans – a phenomenal learning tool to help protect and maintain the ocean’s health.
She is the most qualified individual on earth to promote saving it. She understands that the ocean is the source of most of the oxygen we breath, most of water we drink (rain water) and a large part of the food we eat. She systematically outlines what man has done to the ocean over the last 100 years and the implications if we continue on this path. Dr. Earle has a wish in The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
