Earthsky Interviews
Private: Sylvia Earle’s global ‘hope spots’ hold hope for humankind
08-13-2008 - Human World
That’s Sylvia Earle, National Geographic explorer-in-residence and former Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earle likes to call the world’s “hot spots,” “hope spots.”
Sylvia Earle: I refer to these places as “hope spots,” because if we can embrace them and protect them, there is hope, not just for continuation of these wonderful, extraordinary places, but there’s hope then for humankind.
Earle recognizes the problems – the intense pressure on the oceans and its life from human activities, from overfishing, pollution and global warming. But Earle – who as a young woman gained fame for her deep sea diving – also recognizes our human connection to the sea.
Sylvia Earle: Every breath you take is connected to the ocean, because most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by living systems out in the sea. With every drop of water you drink, you are connected to the ocean, because 97 percent of Earth’s water is out there in the sea, it goes into the atmosphere, into the clouds, falls back on land and sea, regenerates the water in lakes, rivers, and streams, rivers, springs, and ultimately that’s where our water comes from. Take care of the ocean, and it’ll take care of your self.
Our thanks to:
Sylvia Earle
Explorer-in-Residence
National Geographic
Chair, Council of Advisors
Harte Research Institute
Corpus Christi, Texas
Pamela S. Showalter
Research Associate Professor, Director
The James and Marilyn Lovell Center for
Environmental Geography and Hazards Research
Hope spots, like worm holes in space, may be everywhere. Obviously less spoiled wilderness (land or sea)thrives as a system. But also in human nature, women and men and children who live with misguided mainstream tv impressed people, these singular enllightened people of all ages who are aligned vertically with right action infiltrate humanity…hopefully the interface grows between the ignorant and the wise.
Anne, thank you. What a wonderful comment.
There is one “hot” topic nobody is openly discussing.
What a shambles is being constructed for our children to confront. What a colossal sham is the soon to be unsustainable pursuit of the primrose path of endless economic growth. What a shame.
Please consider the exemplary work of a splendid scientist, Martha M. Campbell, Ph.D., whose work reminds me of the good science of Sylvia Earle.
Dr. Campbell’s 2005 presentation has been ignored and yet it is particularly timely in 2008, especially in the light of so many of the world’s major polluters avoiding their duties and responsibilities to protect Sylvia Earle’s “hot spots” as well as to preserve the integrity of Earth and its ecosystems.
Please click on the following link,
http://www.populationandsustainability.org/papers/campbellagm.pdf
Thanks to all,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Please meet John Gray……………
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=6951612
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
In addition to Sylvia Earle and Deborah Byrd, we have other exemplars who are standing up and speaking out………..
Lee Iacocca Says:
Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course’
Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned ‘Titanic’.
You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up.
These are times that cry out for leadership. But when you look around, you’ve got to ask: ‘Where have all the leaders gone?’ Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage………. and common sense?
Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone’s hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn’t happen again. Now, that’s just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you’re going to do the next time.
Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening.
Hey, I’m not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I’m trying to light a fire. I’m speaking out because I have hope……………….If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this:
You don’t get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action….. It’s not too late, but it’s getting pretty close.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Dear Friends,
There are many lessons in these threads, but this thread appears to point out so dramatically one of the most pernicious human-driven challenges confronting the family of humanity: the deleterious effects of filthy lucre that is consolidated in the hands of a tiny group of people at the tiptop of the human community’s global economy. The way the economy of humanity is organized and managed, endless economic growth, endless wealth accumulation, conspicuous resource consumption and endless hoarding of limited resources are presented as the only way to play “the only game in town.” That the ‘only game in town’ richly services the few, unfortunately sacrifices the “many too many” and is soon to become patently unsustainable is shrouded in silence.
Of course, everyone who looks out at the world with fresh eyes as Sylvia Earl, Nelson Mandela, Rajendra Pachauri and Jane Goodall do, sees this immediately and refuses to allow personal, selfish interests and the approbation of others to keep them from breaking the silence that engulfs most people in the human world today.
The lesson here to which I draw attention is the way wealth and the power it purchases serve so pervasively to corrupt the thought, judgement and will of the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and leave the rest of us searching, despite the silence, for acknowledgement of the need to find a sustainable path to a good enough future. The well being of our children and a chance at life for coming generations are being put at risk by too many leaders who adamantly call for evermore over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation on the tiny planet God blesses us to inhabit and not overwhelm, I suppose.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Dear Sylvia Earle and Deborah,
A new kind of leader, like both you are, presents the rest of us with something of surpassing value: intellectual honesty. You think and speak out courageously in an intellectually honest way. You do not cover-up or hide from what could somehow be real and true.
Perhaps human beings could more effectively address the emergent and convergent global challenges we see looming ominously before the family of humanity on the far horizon if so many of our leaders did not abuse human intelligence and ingenuity by choosing to adamantly idolatrize the endless growth of the global political economy.
Science, reasoning and common sense are being twisted and subordinated to conform to whatever thinking serves our leadership’s intentions to promote the politically convenient and the economically expedient, in the course of its worship of soon to become, unsustainable economic growth.
Sylvia and Deborah, among many others in the Earth & Sky community, show us how ignorant too many of our leaders are of the human condition and the finite world we inhabit, and how selfish and harmful are their intentions when they relentlessly seek to accumulate material wealth and political power, come what may for the children, coming generations, life as we know it, and the integrity of Earth and its environs.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Sylvia Earle is so great!
We need to hear from many more exemplars like Sylvia Earle.
When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are present at that time, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as many too many in my not-so-great are doing in these days.
What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today’s leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.
After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions’ (ie, fools’ errands) the leading, self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of the dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom without responsibility…….come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth’s body.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
How could one generation go so wrong? Here are some of the ways.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.