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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/sylvia-earle-hope-spots-ocean-conservation/>
"Despite celebrating her 88th birthday last August, Sylvia Earle seems to whirl
around the globe faster than a hurricane gathering strength. She still travels
about 300 days of the year and just returned from the Cayman Islands, Brazil,
Mozambique, Mexico, Antarctica and Europe. “I feel like an octopus with all
arms fully engaged,” she says about her workload. “If a child is about to fall
off a 10-story building and you are in a position to catch it, you’ll do
everything in your power to be positioned just so you can save it. You don’t
look away and have a cup of tea in the meantime.”
Earle’s sense of urgency is due to her unique position in history. The first
woman to dive with scuba gear in the early 1950s, the first person to walk on
the ocean floor 1250 feet under the surface in 1979, the first female chief
scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in
1990, she has explored the oceans deeper and longer than any other woman on the
planet. This gave her a front-row seat to the changes occurring below the
surface, long before women were welcomed in marine sciences.
Now, when she returns to spots that once brimmed with fish and vibrant corals,
she often only finds a gray underwater desert. While about 12 percent of the
land around the world is under some form of protection, less than three percent
of the ocean is protected.
“Which means 97 percent are open for exploitation,” she says. “We have lost
about 90 percent of sharks, tuna, and other fish, and 50 percent of coral.”
“Her Deepness,” as the world’s most renowned marine scientist is lovingly
called by friends and fans, has been working to change that. In 2009, she
started the nonprofit Mission Blue with 19 Hope Spots, defined as “areas
critical to ocean health in that they have a significant amount of
biodiversity.”
There are now 158 Hope Spots, “and counting,” Shannon Rake, Mission Blue’s Hope
Spot Manager, emphasizes. Hope Spots can be as large as the coral triangle in
the Eastern Tropical Pacific Sea and as well-known as the Galapagos Islands, or
small and quite unknown, like a dozen seamounts off California’s coast. No
matter how tiny, Earle is convinced every Spot counts. “Every place, even the
small places, makes a difference,“ she insists. “But we need to scale up. We
need to get big. Take care of the ocean as if your life depends on it because
it does.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
