A diver in her 70s has set herself a ’Mission Blue’

Sylvia Earle is 78, but she’s still diving and urging us to help save the oceans, says Jonathan deBurca Butler

IT has been 60 years since Dr Sylvia Earle’s first dive, but her memories of it are as clear as those blue waters all those years ago.

“It was in the Gulf of Mexico, about five miles off the coast of Florida,” says the 78-year-old. “It was such a joy to actually realise that I could breathe under water for longer than I could hold my breath; to see all the fish who were, in turn, looking at me. I didn’t expect that, actually. If you go into a forest, birds will usually fly away and animals usually get out of your way, too, and disappear, but in the ocean the animals are more innocent, I suppose, and you find yourself surrounded by these creatures, each one with their own face and features, who are, in turn, curious about you; this creature who has dropped in through their ceiling.”

Since that first dive, into the Atlantic, Dr Earle has clocked up 7,000 hours under water. She has led 100 research expeditions in the ocean,where she has discovered and studied other ‘worlds’.

“There’s been big discoveries about the ocean since I started diving,” she says, from her home in California. “We’ve discovered mountain chains under the water and people have been down as far as seven miles to see what’s at the bottom. But the biggest discovery is that every breath you take, and everything we do, is effected by the ocean. Even if you’ve never seen the ocean, even if you’ve never touched the ocean, the ocean touches you. Everywhere. No ocean, no life and we didn’t really realise that until recently.”

Dr Earle says that for a long time we saw our seas and oceans as endless and indestructible entities; they were, as she says, “too big to fail”. We could use, and consequently abuse, them, safe in the knowledge that they could take it. Anaemic coral reefs, depleted fish stocks, and vast oceanic pools of discarded plastics are all evidence to the contrary.

In a new documentary, entitled Mission Blue, Dr Earle hopes to “ignite public support” for her quest to protect the oceans. The film, which premiered on Netflix last month, is co-directed by Fisher Stevens, who was a producer on The Cove, and Robert Nixon, who was a producer on Gorillas in the Mist.

The pair were inspired to help after hearing Dr Earle’s impassioned speech at a 2009 TED conference. The plan to spend a few weeks with Dr. Earle on the Galapogoas Islands turned into a four-year project.

The result is a stunning-looking feature with a hard-hitting message. But while the focus is the problems faced by the ocean and their causes, Dr Earle’s core message is one of hope.

“We’ve killed 90% of the fish in the sea,” she says. “We know how to do it and we’ve got to the point where they, and we, are at risk because of our ability to take on a scale that is unprecedented. We are the biggest predator on the planet and that’s certainly been evidenced in the sea, as well as the land. But we have hope. Firstly, because we now know why they matter and, secondly, because we have the capacity to stop the killing. We can use areas that I call ‘hope spots’; they’re similar to national parks we have on the land, and we can use them as a place for recovery and renewal. In the United States, we have a fish called the Striped Bass. People loved catching hem and eating them, but they gave it up for five years, because they were at the point of extinction. And while they’ll never go back to the numbers that were there before, they did rebound, because we changed our attitude to them. So we have to have protected areas; the breeding areas, the feeding areas, the nursery areas. If there are to be fish in the sea, we have to look at what it takes to make fish.”

“Half the coral reefs that I’ve seen around the world are now gone or are in sharp decline,” she says. “But, again, knowing the cause means we can also find the solution.”

Mission Blue is all about showing rather than telling. If people could see what lies beneath the ocean they would be inspired to help with its upkeep. Investment in underwater technology is hard to attract and the number of research submarines is small. The number of passenger submarines is even smaller. Elsewhere, Dr Earle has spoken of “like a Hertz rent-a-sub” that families could use “to go out and explore the ocean for a weekend”. For now, we will have to rely on her to be our eyes. “I hope when people see Mission Blue that they’ll be inspired to go and see the ocean for themselves,” she says. “Edison said that if the public is with you, anything is possible. So it’s a continuing effort to explore and gather information, and then to share that information with the world. That’s what I’m certainly driven to do.”

Since Dr Earle made that first dive, off the coast of Florida in the 1950s, the population of the planet has gone from two billion to eight billion. The ocean is feeling the pain of that expansion. A change of attitude is required. “We know more, and we’ve lost more, since I’ve started diving,” she says. “But we have an opportunity, maybe an obligation, to use our knowledge to turn things around. It’s within our grasp. We don’t have to watch the end of coral reefs or the last of the sharks. There’s an opportunity here, as never before, but also, probably, as never again.”

www.netflix.com