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

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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.

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.

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.

I heard Sylvia Earle speak on the subject of oceans, from which all our water derives, and I was so impressed by this, I book her latest book. Since all life on earth is dependent on water, it is tragic that so much public money is spent exploring space and almost nothing of our oceans. We are delighted that maybe there might be water on the Moon or perhaps Mars, but aside from a few specialists like the author, we have little idea of our oceans although they comprise 75% of Earth. Reading this book might stimulate needed action on the Earth's water before it is too late.

As a geologist and oceanographer, I agree with Sylvia wholeheartedly about the state of the oceans and the need to save it. This book gives the lay reader an excellent introduction as to why we need to save the oceans and perhaps some easy steps in how to start the process (voting with our pocketbooks by being selective about what we purchase and eat, for starters).

I don't think she was as hard-hitting as she could have been, or as detailed, but I think this was appropriate to introduce folks to the plight of the ocean, its plants, and critters. I hope Sylvia continues delving into more depths in future books: the plight of plankton, how climate warming can drastically affect ocean circulation and why that matters, curbing world population growth, the effects of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring and summer of 2010, the effects of container shipping on climate and the oceans.....etc.

An excellent introduction and I hope it will spur many people into action. The choices each one of us makes does affect the planet.

One of the most important books you will ever read.
Pick your five or ten best friends and send a copy to them.

This is truly a must-read for all parents, grandparents, and all who care about the future. Famous explorer/oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau once said "if the oceans die, we will not be far behind." He said that 30 years ago and things have gotten much worse with acidification of our oceans from CO2 absorption (the actual pH balance changing to acid and killing our coral reefs and marine life).

This should be taught in all schools. The book is well written and very educational, but an easy read for lay persons.

This book was delivered promptly and in perfect shape. The book's message is extremely important for all of us.

THE WORLD IS BLUE: HOW OUR FATE AND THE OCEAN'S ARE ONE provides a fine survey of how human pollution is destroying earth's ocean and what can be done to avert environmental disaster. The ultimate goal should be to find responsible, renewable strategies that maintain natural systems: THE WORLD IS BLUE tells how to do this and is key for any conservation library.

In this book, "The World is Blue", Dr. Sylvia Earle, the National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, uses the analogy that Life is like a PC and human beings are wantonly destroying various components in the PC, without realizing that the PC could crash as a result.

If Life is a PC, then humans represent the CPU that is overheating the PC even as it is frying various components on the motherboard. The scary part is that the applications running on just two of the seven cores in the CPU are responsible for most of the overheating and the component frying, since most consumption is occurring due to the top 2 billion of the nearly 7 billion people on the planet. To make matters worse, Bill Gates is dedicating $50B of his money along with $30B from Warren Buffett in order to boot up the same applications on the other five cores in the CPU. One would think that he would spend some of that money to swap out the software on the problem cores, but...

Bill Gates has been crashing PCs for a living. This time, it is serious!

In the case of Life, the crashed PC might take about 10 million years to reboot, going by the last 5 major crashes that have occurred. The last crash was when the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. The rebooted PC will most likely be powered by a brand new CPU, just as the dinosaurs were replaced by mammals and eventually, humans. Therefore, it is a good idea for humans to change the software on the problem cores to prevent all that overheating and component-frying before the Life PC crashes.

Despite the hype on the publicity blurbs, in my opinion, Dr. Earle's book is not the "Silent Spring" of our generation. You won't catch Rachel Carson recommending that humans confine their DDT spraying over 70% of the earth's surface, in the vain hope that the other 30% will clean up the resulting mess.

The Earth has been sending all sorts of signals that it cannot support even 2 billion human ultissimo predators, to use Dr. Earle's characterization. It is not right for her to criticize the Japanese and Norwegian predilection for whale meat, while defending the American appetite for beef. Yes, there are a billion odd cows on the planet while there are only a few thousand whales left, but all those cows didn't materialize in natural ecosystems. While the Americans may not have eaten all the mountain lions, the Indians may not have eaten all the tigers and the Chinese may not have eaten all the giant Pandas, they might as well all have done so. They certainly caused the habitat losses that has resulted in the near extinction of these magnificent animals through their appetite for beef, milk and pork, respectively.

Therefore, it doesn't make sense for Dr. Earle to claim that humans can somehow optimize the Earth's photosynthetic bounty through careful resource management, and thus make the earth sustainably support 9 billion human ultissimo predators in the future. I wouldn't think so. At least, not a chance as predators.

It would seem that there is no way of stopping the Life PC from crashing without changing the software in those two problem CPU cores and before it infects the other cores. The new software should have sound power management to prevent overheating and must respect the roles of all the components in the PC to ensure that they don't get fried. That requires a spiritual awakening among the top 2 billion human consumers worldwide, which cannot be achieved by reserving 30% of the ocean as marine sanctuaries, while encouraging depredation on the remaining 70% of the high seas.

Despite these reservations, Dr. Earle makes an important contribution by bringing to light human impact on the ocean, for which I highly recommend this book. However, I wish the editors had done a better job of fact-checking the statistics in the book. On page 10, does the ocean really occupy just 331,441 square kilometers of the surface area of the Earth? Wikipedia says that it is ~361 million square kilometers.