The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One [Paperback]

Sylvia Earle (Author), Bill McKibben (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2010

This book tie-in to National Geographic's ambitious 5-year ocean initiative—focusing on overfishing—is written in National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle's accessible yet hard-hitting voice. Through compelling personal stories she puts the current and future peril of the ocean and the life it supports in perspective for a wide public audience.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Known worldwide as the Ambassador for the Ocean, Sylvia Earle is also TIME magazine's first "Hero for the Planet" and National Geographic's first Explorer in Residence. She is former NOAA Chief Scientist, and the first person to walk untethered at the lowest depth ever—1, 250 feet. She is a major force in the establishment and growth of the world's marine sanctuaries and was personally responsible for convincing President Bush that the recently named sanctuary in Hawaii should be protected. She is founder and director of Deep Ocean Research and Exploration, which designs instruments for deep-sea exploration. She is author of 15 books on the ocean.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic; Reprint edition (October 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1426206399
• ISBN-13: 978-1426206399
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Oceans & Seas > Oceanography
  • #15 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Marine Biology
  • #28 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Ecosystems

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This might be the biggest issue facing earth's future, October 14, 2009

By 

Student of Life (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (Hardcover)

Sylvia Earle is a planetary hero. In this book she shows how the carnage going on in our oceans is going to have massive global consequences.

One reason this has become a giant, planet-threatening problem is that, by its nature, what happens deep under the ocean surface is invisible to humans. This book makes the invisible visible.

Until we devoured or polluted most of it out of existence, the oceans used to teem with life of the most spectacular, beautiful kind imaginable. Life that is an integral part of the global eco-system we need to sustain us. The World is Blue celebrates that life and sets out her dream for the creation (at large scale) of 'Marine Protected Areas' in order to give the oceans a chance to recover. With a major movie due out early next year, and Sylvia Earle's TED Prize wish being developed by many supporters, the global 'blue' movement is gathering pace. Maybe it's not too late.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars listen up, our future depends on it., October 15, 2009

By 

Greg Crandall "long-time environmentalist" (Monterey Bay, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (Hardcover)

Sylvia Earle is the most qualified individual on earth to promote saving it. She understands that the ocean is the source of most of the oxygen we breath, most of water we drink (rain water) and a large part of the food we eat. She systematically outlines what man has done to the ocean over the last 100 years and the implications for a dire future if we continue on this blind path.

Her book is more than a wake up call. We have known about the damage we are doing to the ocean for decades. We take all the different species of fish and crustaceans, etc. from the ocean and return to it our trash. It is not a bottomless sea that can continue to take this abuse. Dr. Earle has summarized the facts and they are irrefutable. We can choose to continue to ignore them or we can take action. Dr. Earle has a wish and is asking the world to create Marine protected zones in the Ocean. Right now less than 1% of the ocean is protected. She believes that if we can raise that to 10%, 20% or more, we can save the ocean and our planet.

Everyone needs to understand the facts that she presents in this book. Everyone needs to finally take action and support an organization of your choice, one that is trying to protect the oceans.

We spend a great deal of time and money on studying global warming and even more sending rockets into space. Global warming is real and we need to understand it. And understanding how the Universe was created might prove valuable in as yet unknown ways. Why can't we create the equivalent to NASA for our oceans. My wish is what if we spent that money studying the planet we live on and the oceans in particular? We have seen and explored more of the moon than we have of our own planet. It won't matter 50 years from now whether we found water on the moon or not if we are struggling to survive on this planet because our life support system, the oceans, are dying.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Are We Blue Yet?, March 26, 2010

By 

Adam L. Gruen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (Hardcover)

Sylvia Earle's The World is Blue is the kind of book that serves well as an introduction to the concept of Oceanspace. Indeed, it is more than just an introduction. It is a pail of cold water thrown upon anyone still asleep to the fact that humanity is committing suicide -- and in the process, is despoiling the habitat of many other species who are just trying to do their day job. I would recommend this book to anyone who hasn't thought about the subject before. Maritime analysts and marine biologists might find it a bit of a bore, but one can't please everyone.

Earle was the former Chief Scientist for the U.S. NOAA in 1990 and her work reveals this pedigree in many ways. Her writing is clean and straightforward; she provides plenty of interesting personal anecdotes to liven up what might otherwise be a dull litany of sins and penances; she seems particularly enamored of the authority of international and national organizations without any clear idea of how to resolve the problem and limits of power; and she supplies ample statistics and information to back up claims of destruction and unsustainability.

With respect to the latter, we have seen the pernicious political ramifications of poor factchecking. Get one trivial detail wrong, and large swaths of humanity will promptly disregard your message no matter how important, as if they themselves had never made a single mistake in their life.

It is moderately worrisome to me, then, that at random I found a claim (p.139) that a thousand years ago there were fewer than 300,000 people on Earth. Oops. It was actually 300 million. Whoever was Earle's factchecker was must now commit seppuku, preferably with a sushi knife, to atone for this shame. Thousands, millions, what's the difference? Well the difference is that when you write a book about sustainability or unsustainability, you have to get the numbers right. Because in the final analysis, sustainability is a simple equation of (consumption per capita) x (total population) = (total consumption). Overfishing is a total load problem. Pollution is a total load problem. Humanity is a total load problem.

Anyhoo. I haven't checked all the other numbers and I don't intend to. I don't even claim the necessary expertise to do so. One slip of the pen does not a spilled inkwell make. I will just assume that all the other facts and factoids in the book are reasonably accurate and move on to the next subject: compliance.

"There oughta be a law!" or its international equivalent, "There oughta be a treaty!" holds no water today. Or it's a leaky hull, let's put it that way. You make a law, you make a treaty, you better damn well back it up with military/police force. Otherwise it's just grand kabuki theatre on a planetary scale. I find no fault at all with Earle's recommendations on what to do to conserve marine life. Mysteriously absent are the recommendations on what to do when people and nations, some of them armed, refuse to cooperate. Maybe Earle just doesn't want to go there because she knows the answer.