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

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.

"Thousands have lived without love—not one without water." ~ W. H. AudenThis book gets right to the point of our continued existence in a straightforward and factually compelling way.For instance, are you consciously aware that the oceans drive climate, regulate temperatures, govern planetary chemistry, are the basis of the water cycle, produce the majority of oxygen, and are home to conservatively millions of species, all of which makes our existence on Earth possible? With every breath we take, every drop we drink, every bite we eat, and every day we exist in a conducive climate we are connected to and dependent on our oceans."Deeply rooted in human culture is the attitude that the ocean is so vast, so resilient, it shouldn’t matter how much we take out of—or put into—it. But two things changed in the 20th century that may [should] jolt us into a new way of thinking."Contrary to common sense though, since the middle of the twentieth century we've extracted hundreds of millions of tons of ocean wildlife — not to mention inflicted habit loss, the effects of trophic cascades, accelerated global warming, and ocean acidification — substantially diminishing biodiversity despite arbitrary token conservation successes, and replaced them with our ever increasing wastes and chemicals, severely altering Earth's chemistry at a precipitate pace, and the chickens are coming home to roost. The threats to our oceans are so extensive that more than 40 percent of our oceans have already been severely affected and no area has been left untouched [see NG video Why the Ocean Matters; the Ocean Fact Sheet Package - United Nations 2017 from The Ocean Conference, UN, NY, June 2017; Oceans and the Threats They Face | National Geographic - Environment article; etc.].This book details the good and bad we are doing to the oceans, our life support system, and discusses what we can do better to take care of the blue world that takes care of us. The sheer volume of details presented is mind-boggling. This is not a book to be ignored.A quote at the end of one chapter encapsulates the essence of this book. "Carl Safina asks in his book Song for the Blue Ocean:'Which will it be, then: degradation or recovery, scarcity or plenty, compassion or greed, love or fear, ahead to better times or to worse? We will all, by our actions or inaction, help decide.'"

Loved the book it really opened up my eyes to everything and makes want to help the ocean more and everything in it

An important and well written book on the state of the oceans by a well respected marine biology authority. Easily read, with good references to facts.

This is a brilliant book. Thoughtful, emotional, interesting. Sylvia Earle is a giant in her field and one can tell that this book is the culmination of a life's incredible work. I have learnt so much about the destruction of the ocean by reading this; it's really stayed with me.

What an important book at such an important (and terrifying) time. If you aren't sure about buying this book - watch the documentary Mission Blue first. I bought the book immediately after. It is filled with Sylvia Earle's intense knowledge and understanding about the ocean from years and years of experience exploring and researching it. She also gives a Tedtalk where she shares her hopes...I think it should be required reading and watching.

I recommend this book to everyone, it's very easy to read and very very interesting. If you're someone that cares about the life in the oceans you'll love it, but if that's not the case, I think you will like it too since it makes you realize of a lot of things.