Dr. Sylvia Earle: discussing the limits of the ocean’s bounty
At last month’s BLUE Ocean Film Festival, I had the opportunity to videotape an interview with Dr. Sylvia Earle on behalf of planSEA.com, an organization dedicated to teaching ocean conservation to the next generation: the children. Dr. Earle is one of the great figures of ocean exploration and conservation and we touched on a great many subjects in our interview. Here is a segment that addressed the need for education and also an important perspective regarding the taking of seafood. I found her viewpoint in comparing seafood to “bushmeat” very enlightening. I’ve always said we raise cattle and poultry to feed the masses and Sylvia backs that up with the idea that we long ago realized that simply taking wild terrestrial animals (bushmeat) would not work, that it could not be sustained. But that is exactly what we do with the ocean’s bounty – and it is a very limited bounty, limited in the sense that it was never meant to feed the human population. That is why I have always been a supporter of aquaculture or aquafarming, recognizing that there are significant challenges that need to be addressed regarding the practice but convinced that the ultimate future of seafood harvesting will need to come from these controlled methods. I have had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Earle and her staff on several occasions and let me tell you, she is one busy person. As explorer-in-residence with the National Geographic Society, she works 24/7 with major ocean conservation organizations and with the prominent decision-makers to help shape the future of our oceans. It must be frustrating at times because the bureaucratic wheels can seem to turn so slowly. But I take heart in something I read recently in TIME magazine regarding political decision-making and the control of power. In an article about FDR, David Kennedy wrote, “As the historian Henry Adams wrote, the greatest fear ’was power; not merely power in the hands of a president or a prince, of one assembly or several, of many citizens or a few, but power in the abstract, wherever it existed a…
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