Who Heals the Ocean?

“Our world bank is blue”

Continuing in this series on Who Heals the Earth, I want to do more than ‘think blue’. Do all I can to preserve the lifeblood of our life support system.

Oceanographer Sylvia Earle has been teaching about the need to heal our oceans for a long time. Her citing of statistics is more than just shocking, maybe not quite in the way that Earthlings is; but her voice, like Earthlings’ filmmaker Shaun Monson‘s, has taken my awareness to a finer level.

Earle says that what was once a sea of Eden is now ‘paradise lost’, in that we’ve taken, eaten (and sadly wasted and misused) 90% of the big fish of the ocean. As a species, humanity has exploited the ocean in overt as well as insidious ways. Way that we can no longer afford to dismiss.

But, we still have the power to change direction and salvage what’s left

In this TED video, Sylvia Earle warns about the consequences of not knowing the cost of what we take from the sea. She correlates what we have done to protect 12% of the land on the earth with the need for more national marine sanctuaries to protect our life support system.

Earle also talks about how the advanced technology of Google Earth can reveal deforestation as it happens helping to bring more awareness and change. (Google Earth recently launched its forest monitoring tool and announced it on December 10, 2009, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen.)

“No blue, no green; no water, no life.”