Ocean Planet

Water is a phenomenal thing. It is an amazing aspect of our everyday lives, connecting everyone and everything. I like to think about an “Ocean Planet.” If we start looking at oceans and the ocean world as a three-dimensional system, the ocean represents more than 99 percent of total living space on Earth. This environment houses nearly 95 percept of the world’s biodiversity, of which we have explored less than 5 percent.

All the things that we have been talking and hearing about on land—pollution and its effect on our health, endangered ecosystems and species—have been happening to the oceans as well. Everything ends up in the ocean, from what we put down our drains to the pollution we create by driving. We do not hear as much about ocean acidification. The ocean is a carbon sink that absorbs up to 65 percent of our total carbon emissions. The carbon in our water breaks down the zoea plankton (the free-swimming larvae of certain crustaceans) before it has a chance to mature into animals. We are at the center of these problems, not only contributing to them, but also being affected by them. We are now at a point where we have lost nearly 60 percent of our world’s total fish stocks and more than 90 percent of the far-traveling fish like Atlantic bluefin tuna, which are now actually down to less than 4% of their original numbers. Why are we treating our one and only life support system like this? My grandfather used to say, “People protect what they love.” But how can people protect what they do not understand?

We can connect people with the ocean by telling stories and taking action, by connecting communities with their waters and the creatures that sustain them. I created Plant A Fish (www.plantafish.org), a hands-on outdoor education and restoration experience program to help people understand—and protect—our oceans and waterways. We are familiar with the idea of planting a tree, so why not plant a fish? It is time we start seeing our oceans as a bank account, that we stop eating away at the capital and begin paying it back and living off the interest. We can start in unlikely places, like planting oysters in New York Harbor, which Plant A Fish does in partnership with schools and community groups. All of us must tend to the oceans as we do to a prized garden, as we ultimately depend on them and are connected by them.