Save the Ocean, Save Ourselves | Sea of Hope: America's Underwater Treasures

There's been this arc to my career in the sense that in the beginning I just wanted to make beautiful pictures. But I began more and more to see all these problems happening in the ocean. Fewer fish in the places I used to see many fish, or not as many sharks when we go out looking for sharks.

I started to see a need to tell those stories as well. You know, I didn't think that most people recognized the decline, what was happening in the ocean. As a journalist, I saw that I had a responsibility to tell those, and I sensed a sense of urgency to tell those stories as well. I wanted to get that out there and began doing stories about problems in the ocean, and hopefully offering solutions as well as a way to maybe move that dial a little bit in favor of conservation.

If somebody had told me when I started diving back in 1977 that within a couple of decades, a few decades in my lifetime, I would have seen this seismic shift, this dramatic loss of marine life, I wouldn't have believed it. I didn't think it was possible when I was 14 or 15 years old that the ocean couldn't possibly lose that much in such a short span of time.

The problem is the ocean suffers from this terrible fate of having a beautiful exterior, her finest silks on view when we go to the beach or we go sailing. But very few people know what's happening below those waves, and unless you're poking your head under that water on a regular basis, you might not see that dramatic change. Everything seems to be fine, but it's not.

I believe the good news is that it's not too late. There is still hope and there's still 10% of the sharks left of all species, and there's half the coral reefs left. So what we need to do is preserve what remains. I think the ocean has the ability to heal itself; it is resilient and can be restored.

I've seen this happen in places where protection has been given. We have to be good custodians; we have to do the right thing. We can't just keep doing what we're doing because we're at a pivotal moment in history, where if we let it slip through our fingers, you know, it'll be us who pays the price.

When you consider how tied we are to the ocean, every other breath that a human being takes comes from the sea. It's vitally important to our own existence. In the end, when we save the ocean, we're saving ourselves. That's a pretty good motivator for doing the right thing.