Dr. Sylvia Earle
Appearances
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
To be able to walk freely, people cannot normally dive in compressed air or even using a mixture of gases. On scuba, 50 meters, you know, 150 feet is a deep dive. With special mixes of gases, you can go down deeper than that. But not very many people do it because it's Experimental. Commercial divers do it in the oil patch, in the salvage work.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But you wouldn't do it recreationally for the most part. But to be able to package yourself, as I did, in a system that is one atmosphere. I was in a system that is known as an armored suit. It's like a suit of armor, actually. It keeps the pressure.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And so I could go down, as I did, to 400 meters. It's 1,250 feet. Wow. And normally there would be a line going all the way back to the surface.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Using a diving suit of that sort.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Descended and then walked off. And there was a communication line between the submersible and myself, but no line back to the surface.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Time on the ocean floor was... Two and a half hours, which is about the same as that first moonwalk.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Well, mundane. I was thinking the port, the little window that I... There are three little round portholes that I could look through. They were fogging up. The water around was cold. Inside it was warm because I'm a warm-bodied person. And I had to keep scrubbing the glass so I could see. But, you know, the time went by so fast. It was just glorious. It's right at the edge of light.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
It's the twilight zone, literally, where I can look up and I can see that it's slightly lighter above than below. And these luminous creatures, little fish with lights down the side.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
No, but the submarine that was nearby had lights and I asked them, turn off the lights. so I can see what it's like to be there without seeing what the creatures experience. And there were some long, whisker-like corals that are about six to nine feet tall. And when you touch them, They just burst with bioluminescence, little rings of blue fire. Wow.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And I just was mesmerized, of course, but I could not take any photographs. You know, fast forward to about three years ago when I was able to go back with my grandsons. Oh, wow. I have four grandsons, two are with me, and we had a new low light level camera, which means you can almost take pictures in the dark. Tiny bit of light, bioluminescence is enough to be able to image these creatures.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
So instead of just going down and experiencing bamboo coral doing its amazing light show, I was able to go and share the view with with my grandsons, and they, using this fancy new equipment, documented it.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
It was pure joy. Curiously, it didn't start out that way when the notice appeared on the bulletin board at Harvard. Anybody wants to live underwater for a couple of weeks?
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
This is during the high point of going to the moon, so astronauts and aquanauts were kind of mushed together with a similar kind of aura. And as a scientist, the idea that I could actually... Stay underwater and use the ocean as a laboratory, day and night. Swim out any time you wanted to. Get to know individual fish and really see the ocean in a new way.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And I talked with some of my fish friends, ichthyologists who specialize in fish, and they We decided to team up and we put together, I thought, some pretty good proposals that went to the Smithsonian. They thought they were great proposals, but there was a glitch. They did not expect women to apply at all. They never bothered because there are no women astronauts until 1986. This is 1969.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
So the head of the program, James Miller, I think had a good marriage, had a good relationship with his mother and had a daughter. His response when said, should we really think about having women? He goes, well, why not? Half the fish are female. Guess we could put up with a few women. But they couldn't let men and women live together underwater in 1970. Different culture.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Today, look, space station men and women live together. Airplanes, you know, you fly. It's not a big deal. But it was a big deal then. So... They had to put together a women's team and actually had to find an engineer who was willing to come and be a part of this. The others involved applied the way I did, and they just patched us together irrespective of our compatibility.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But, hey, you know, women get along.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Yeah. Well, one of them, sadly, is gone. One is a coral scientist, and we stay in touch from time to time. Another became an environmental lawyer. She got her Ph.D. at Scripps in zoology, but then got her law degree. And the engineer, Peggy Lucas, lives in Hawaii, and we talk from time to time.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Well, as I say, I evidently didn't manage all that well. But my mom and dad were together for 61 years. It was a model I tried very hard to emulate. I mean, that's what I thought was what I should be doing.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
When I could, I took them with me to places. They'd been diving with dolphins and whales. I mean, it was almost a condition of either it was acceptable for them to go with me or... Usually not all three, although sometimes all three got to go with me. But I don't know.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
There's no recipe that I can tell anybody else or that I can learn except to say, well, Jeanne Clark, the so-called Lady and the Sharks, started the Cape Hays Murray Laboratory, now the Moat Murray Laboratory. She had four kids and somehow managed to run a marine lab and be a distinguished scientist. For some, it was just too much that they decided just to stay solo.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Some of the great women scientists, in order to be able to stay on point, they didn't have a partner who cooked and did the laundry and... and took care of you when you were sick.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And they pulled speed ahead. They didn't have much time or take time for diversions. I mean, the history is full of such individuals who had to give up what many people think of as a normal relationship with family and kids. Did your parents help you with your kids? I was really lucky to have my parents... live nearby and take care of the kids.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And during the project where I lived underwater, they actually came and stayed at the home in Los Angeles when I was off aquanauting.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Absolutely, we have done it to ourselves, and it's going to get harder. But the sooner we take seriously the opportunity that will never be as good as it is right now, it's a race with what we're learning and what we're losing. Mm-hmm. And looking at the climate issues, the loss of the natural fabric of life, 5% maybe of old-growth forest.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Old-growth, meaning those systems that have survived, they were here preceding the advent of Europeans arriving in North America. Some preceding, going back literally thousands of years that are still intact. A few trees in a few places that literally are more than a thousand years old. Most of them have been converted to lumber, board feet that you can measure in dollars. Right.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But they're really priceless. What else can I say? This is the last best chance we'll ever have. And it isn't just in North America. It's across the globe. So I'm excited about a lot of things, mostly the kids. who I say to them, you're so fortunate. You're a 21st century kid. And I'm lucky, too, because of what we know that nobody could know before. It's that race with knowledge and loss.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But nobody had been to the moon or the deepest part of the ocean. Nobody knew about DNA or RNA or the microbes that live within us that we need. Now we might come to realize we need fish alive in the ocean. We need them, like we need birds in the sky. We need nature. We need a living planet, not a dead one.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And just what can anybody do to restore life instead of constantly being on the killing side, the consuming side? And if I could be born any time, I think it would have to be right about now.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Because of what's known, the best chance. What's known? Yeah.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Going back when I was a kid, that the kids of today grow up with that awareness that is in their everyday existence. Cause for hope. Cause for huge hope.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
I wish everybody could go back to 50 years ago, whatever it is, armed with what we know now.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And look at the choices that we could have made if we had known. Look at the plastics, for heaven's sakes. If we had any idea, they're so useful. They've been so... much a part of our modern culture that it's hard to imagine a time when there were no plastics. But I can imagine because there were none. And as I grew up, I embraced them. But now we know. I see. Imagine if all of us could go.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Right. How much more we could save. There'd be more tunas. There'd be more elephants. There'd be more big old trees. There'd be a better chance.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Yeah. But it's going to get harder. So welcome where you are, when you are, right now. Because based on what we know, we know what to do. Imagine if we didn't know.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
About this time next year, a new class of little submersibles, HONU, H-O-N-U, which is Polynesian for turtle, the land-sea connection, linked to the Brando Resort in French Polynesia.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
So you have responsible, environmentally conscious people I think of tourism as education when it's done well, linked to a research station in Tetioroa that is funded by the Brando and private contributions. And now they're behind getting two little thousand meter submersibles that can service individuals who want to come.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
and really experience what it's like in the twilight zone, and for scientists, and for kids, and just to be a window into the deep sea is now on the crosshairs of exploitation, the deep zone where a layer of life migrates vertically. You know, just packed with little squids and luminous creatures that William Beebe described using the bathysphere going back to the 1930s.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
That now, for the first time, they're able to be exploited to gather all those little fish and luminous creatures together. To grind up and feed to salmon, to feed to cows and pigs and chickens, just take this. I know, it's just like, oh, wait, no, stop. It's what they're doing with krill in Antarctica and what they're doing with squid around the world, just grinding them up.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
It's like taking songbirds and feeding them to the pigs. Like, wait, stop. Don't you know what you're doing? To get people down there. Of course, as a nerdy scientist, I just want to know who's living there. That would be my trajectory if it weren't the sense of urgency about getting others to see for themselves why we need to look at the world, look at the ocean with new eyes, look at ourselves.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
with new eyes, and treat one another with greater dignity and respect. We need to make peace with nature, but we need to make peace with ourselves, too.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Well, thank you. I hope everyone over the next few years will be following the voyage of the Hokulea, a sailing canoe that Polynesians have the same structure, sailing across the Pacific with a message of hope, of making peace with the ocean, looking at the issues like deep sea mining and say, why would anybody even think about
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
of undertaking the destruction of the largest, last remaining wilderness on the planet. We have a chance to save it or destroy it right now. Be so glad that you can be a voice for keeping Earth safe. And it's called the Wananuiakea.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
This voyage of hope, making peace with the nations across the Pacific, engaging the indigenous, the people who've lived in places for a long time but who know the ocean. The ocean is really their home. So I urge everybody to tune in and look at what others are doing in your neighborhood, in your city, in your state, in your country.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Wherever your community is, we're increasingly global in our friendships.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But find some kindred spirits. See what you can do that will change this trajectory of tipping in the wrong direction to tipping in the right direction. We can do this.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
In about five minutes. Everybody's ready. I'm ready.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
We'll see. I'll make you an offer you can't refuse.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
The urge to submerge in a submarine. Yes.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
I feel pretty sure it's going to happen. I have such respect and admiration for using your great sense of humor to change the way people think about themselves and the world. So go, Julia, go.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Great to be on board, really.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
I am. I'm offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, one of my favorite places.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Not old enough yet. Still working on growing up.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
I came along in 1935. You do the math.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
I don't feel any particular age. I mean, my knees are a little creaky.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Divers, especially over time, because you keep stressing your ears. I don't hear as well as I did when I was a teenager.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
But if you focus too much on how old or young you are and use it as a reason why you can't do something, why you shouldn't, I just say, why not? Why not? Oh, I love that. It's up to you. Yeah. You're too tall. You're too short. You're too fat. You're too thin. You're the wrong color. You speak the wrong language. Whatever it is, there are plenty of excuses. why people tell you you cannot do that.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Look them in the eye and say, why not? There may be reasons, maybe good reasons. Okay, but don't let somebody else tell you that.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And we both have an association with NRDC.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Well, I travel quite a lot right now. So morning is wherever I am. I do like to get up early. I also like to stay up late. Oh, you do? But I also like to sleep.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Well, as often as I can get there. Yeah. But running through airports, lifting bags into the overhead compartment on a long-distance flight.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Or just staying active every day.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
What happened to Cousteau, too, he said the first time he put his face in the water, he came back up. He went down, came back up. It's like, where am I? I had no idea that this existed.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
That it's alive. It's not just rocks and water.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
From the top all the way to the bottom.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And even beneath the bottom of the ocean, all life needs water, at least life as we know it. And 97% of Earth's water is ocean. And the rest, that 3%, is mostly ice. Antarctic and Arctic and glacier ice. And we need to take care of the ocean. That's where life is. The ocean governs climate and weather. The ocean governs our life support system. The ocean makes Earth habitable, the living ocean.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
It isn't just rocks and water. But 97% of the ocean is currently open for exploitation. Only 3% is highly or fully protected. And that's part of why I'm here on the Gulf of Mexico. There's a goal, I'm sure you know, many people probably don't know, that
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Nations around the world, most of them, have come together to say that by 2030, it's not far away now, of course, but to safeguard 30% of the land and sea that give back to nature to secure our safety, our security, by securing our life support system, the diversity of life in the ocean.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
So many possible things. Nobody can do... I can't do what you do, Julia. I mean, I can't do what anybody else does. Everybody has power. My question is, what have you got? Do you have a way with music? Are you a great communicator? Are you good with kids? Do you love animals?
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Are you okay with signing up and being a part of an organization that's doing something that you see as doing the right thing by your measure? Whatever it is you've got, do you have resources that you can invest in solutions? Everybody can do something.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
Nobody can do it all, but working together, we can come up with ways, starting in your backyard or starting in your community, to give back to nature. Understand, just think, craft your own recipe for what you can do that is special to you. I mean, there are people who sing and they convert people with their inspiration.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
There are those who write, whether it's poetry or scientific articles, they're using what they've got to go from where we are to get to a better place. Kids go out on the beach, they start picking up trash.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Gets Wise with Sylvia Earle
And you see grown-ups... watching the kids take the leadership. The kids can inspire all of us. Their future is on the line. And, you know, I have for many years worked with National Geographic and have been involved as an explorer with them and going way back and tell stories and inspire people and then find something that you can do that inspires you.