Photo credit: Renée Bonorchis
The ocean's future is still ours to determine, says Dr Sylvia Earle
By Renée Bonorchis
CAPE TOWN (28 Feb., 2025) - People alive today are lucky because there is still abundant hope that the ocean can be protected, according to Dr Sylvia Earle, founder of Mission Blue, marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, author, lecturer and National Geographic Explorer.
“None of us were ever more fortunate than to live now,'“ Earle, 89, said to a gathering of ocean conservation organisations and traditional coastal communities at Dalebrook in Kalk Bay, Cape Town on 22 Feb. “Kids now know far more than we ever did or could have known.”
While we live on this ocean planet, with the sea accounting for 71% of all of the world’s surface, human beings as a species have developed outsized power. We may be just one species out of millions, but none have ever been as capable as taking from nature as we are. That still doesn’t spell calamity for Earle.
“We’re so fortunate to not only know what we know, but we can share what we know with people on the other side of the world,” she said. “It’s knowing that leads to caring. And it’s never been so important to care."
We can see that the climate is changing, Earle said, adding that she first visited False Bay in Cape Town in 1971. At that time whales we still being killed, but, as she points out, that was stopped and now whale populations around South Africa have recovered. These, she said, are creatures that have families, that have their own languages. They needed our protection rather than our exploitation and in some parts of the world, the exploitation cruelly continues.
Still, we’re also lucky because we can get beneath the ocean. Earle was particularly fortunate because she was one of the first people in the world to have acess to scuba gear after the modern design made it feasible for people to safely spend extended periods of time under water. “Now we take it for granted,” she said to a crowd that included many freedivers and scuba divers.
“We have power that our predecessors didn’t have,” she said. “What we do with that power will determine the future and who will still be here a thousand years from now.”
Will sharks still be around, she asked. There’s just 10% left of historic shark populations, 90% of all of them are gone. But we could choose to do with sharks what we did with whales, according to Earle. “This is the moment in time. Never before did we have a choice.”
With more than 500 species of sharks and their adaptations to almost every kind of environment from very deep waters to cold seas and warm oceans, these animals have survived for hundreds of millions of years. They may not survive us, but we desperately need them. Even though most of them aren’t the apex predators in their ecosystems, they are vital for marine food webs. And those food webs contribute to what we eat, the climate we experience, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Ultimately, no sharks, no us.
So what will we do in the next week, the next month, the next year, the next five years, the next 10 years to change that trajectory while we still have time, Earle asked. Right now we still have a choice. We can still have whales and sharks and octopuses and kelp forests. And because we have a choice, because we're here at one of the most precipitous moments in Earth's history, “there’s plenty of hope.”
The Ocean Advocate © 2025 by Renée Bonorchis is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
“For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the everflowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.”
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
