Ocean Protection Has Worked Locally, but 97 Percent Remains Exposed

Sylvia Earle returned to the wish she made as a TED Prize recipient in 2009: “to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.” Speaking in the context of that earlier wish, her argument had not softened. The premise was that the ocean is not a backdrop to human affairs. It is “our life support system,” and her answer to how much of it should be protected was deliberately expansive: “We need to treat all of it with respect.”

The authority behind that view came from a lifetime of direct observation. Earle described decades of diving, using underwater systems that made it possible to stay submerged for days or weeks, and traveling in more than 30 kinds of submarines to places most people will never see. The point of that experience was not adventure. It was witness: to the ocean’s living systems, and to the speed and scale of the change now taking place.

That change, in her framing, is not only a matter of pollution. She showed discarded nets and plastic debris. But she emphasized that what humans remove from the ocean is at least as consequential as what they put into it. The ocean is being “de-wilded,” she said, by extracting the animals that help maintain Earth as a habitable planet.

When she raised concerns in 1990 as chief scientist of NOAA — joking that she was called “the sturgeon general” — she was told not to worry. In the decades since, she said, billions of dollars in subsidies and global seafood markets have helped strip the ocean of wildlife. Industrial fishing, in her account, is not merely another human use of the sea. It is “too efficient,” backed by markets that are “too demanding,” and aimed at animals with no evolutionary history of escaping mechanized fleets.

Humans “almost succeeded in exterminating the great whales,” Earle said, but now know they need whales, squid, menhaden, tuna, shrimp, sharks and other ocean wildlife alive. She connected those animals to the carbon cycle: “Elements of the universe are moving from one creature to another, keeping Earth's chemistry within a safe operating space.” In that account, marine animals are part of how the living planet works.

She made the loss of ocean wildlife personal through sharks. Earle said she was warned 50 years ago to fear high-seas sharks. Now, when she dives, she is afraid because she does not see them. “We've eliminated more than half of them since I began diving,” she said, while images showed piles of dead sharks, many missing fins. The reversal turns an old human fear inside out: the danger she emphasized is what the disappearance of large marine animals means for the living systems people depend on.

Sylvia Earle’s 2009 wish called for films, expeditions, the web, new submarines and a campaign because she wanted public support at a scale matching the ocean’s decline. In the same week, she said, Google launched the first 10 Hope Spots on Google Earth. The following year, at a TED@Sea expedition to the Galapagos Islands, roughly 100 participants gathered around the question of how to change the trajectory of decline.

The commitments she described were practical and institutional. One was to begin protecting the high seas, starting with the Sargasso Sea, which she described as an open-ocean home for turtles, whales, sharks and thousands of other sea creatures. Others were to create the films “Mission Blue” and “Sea of Hope,” launch Oceans 5 and Ocean Elders, and secure funding to help protect the Galapagos Islands.

A second TED@Sea expedition, five years later, focused on the South Pacific with climate as a top priority. Earle said champions were enlisted to help protect “the top of the world,” including high seas in the Arctic, and to stop trade in wildlife such as polar bears for rugs and trophies. Others were enlisted around Antarctica to support full protection for krill and other wildlife in surrounding waters.

The logic of Hope Spots, as she presented it, is that intact places receive priority because some losses cannot be repaired. Asked where the best place to dive is, she answers: “almost anywhere 50 years ago.” The images she showed of vibrant coral reefs, she said, represented the ocean as she remembers it. Some places still look that way, and those places should be protected before they are lost.

Restoration still matters, but Earle drew a line between repair and preservation. “You can't put them back once they're gone,” she said of intact systems. Human intervention can help restore some damage, but a place that remains intact after the long ecological history preceding humankind is different from one rebuilt after collapse.

That distinction underlies the safety-net metaphor. Hope Spots are not simply attractive dive sites or symbolic conservation pins. They are meant to identify living places, connect people around them, support protection, and generate the local work required to defend or restore ecological function.

By Sylvia Earle’s current accounting, there are 169 Hope Spots in 116 countries. On an Esri map shown during the talk, those sites appeared as glowing points across the oceans. She cautioned against reading them as abstract markers. “These are not just dots on a map,” she said. “These are people.” She described people gathering data, sharing stories, bringing children into the work, diving with partners and connecting with others.

The activities she named were specific. Mangroves are being restored in 15 Hope Spots. Seagrasses are being restored in 12. Turtles are being monitored in 26 places. Sharks and rays are being monitored in 30. Across the network, these efforts are creating awareness and stronger protection.

Chile was one of the examples of what can happen when early Hope Spots become connected to protection commitments. Earle said Chile’s coast and offshore areas were among Mission Blue’s first Hope Spots and are now part of Chile’s commitment to protect more than half of its ocean area. Her most striking example there involved the Juan Fernández fur seal. On her first visit, she said, the team found one. The species was thought to be effectively gone, but finding even one was “cause for hope.”

Today, according to Earle, there are more than 100,000 Juan Fernández fur seals “with protection.” The number functioned in the talk as evidence for one of her simplest propositions: protection can work when animals are given a chance to recover.

The Shinnecock Bay Hope Spot, in the shadow of New York City, illustrated a different restoration path. Earle described it as a place where people and nature had thrived for thousands of years before 20th-century seafood markets beyond the bay upended the system. More recently, she said, the bay became known for brown tides and the loss of seagrasses, oysters and clams — species that had filtered the water and fed people locally.

The Shinnecock visual framed the work as a bridge among “tradition, science, conservation & technology.” The diagram on screen also included “eDNA,” “data sovereignty,” “Indigenous voice,” “collaboration,” “exploration” and “inspire new generation,” tying the Hope Spot to both scientific monitoring and local authority. The spoken example centered on a restoration calculation by Dr. Ellen Pikitch of Stony Brook University and her colleagues.

Pikitch’s team, Earle said, calculated that restoring health to the bay would require 53 million clams to filter the water and eliminate brown tides. They also calculated a cost of 53 million dollars, at a dollar per clam. They did not have that money, so they bought as many “mom and pop clams” as they could, planted them, and “let the clams do the rest.” As the clams returned, she said, seagrasses began to grow again, the water became clearer, and creatures dependent on seagrass habitat returned.

This example sharpened the broader claim about restoration. The work depended on restoring a living filter and the relationships among clams, water clarity, seagrasses and animal habitat.

Sylvia Earle described coral restoration as a source of hope, while keeping clear that restoration is not equivalent to never losing a system in the first place. Around the world, she said, people are doing what they can to restore damaged coral reefs. Mission Blue champions in 29 Hope Spots are growing and planting corals to help repair damage.

The visual contrast was central to the claim. She showed healthy coral reefs as the ocean she remembers, then a damaged, bleached and dead reef as what is happening “on our watch.” In the Nusa Penida Hope Spot, she pointed to a visible progression from a damaged reef to recovery after care. One image was labeled “Before - October 2023,” showing broken coral rubble and bare metal frames. A second was labeled “After - March 2025,” showing substantial coral growth on the frames and surrounding area.

Those images served a narrow but important claim: repair is possible in some places when people intervene and continue care. Earle did not present restoration as a full answer to loss. Her argument remained that the highest priority is to protect places still intact, because “there’s nothing like a place that is still intact after the long history that preceded humankind.”

In French Polynesia, Sylvia Earle pointed to the Tetiaroa Hope Spot as an example of conservation tied to revenue and public engagement. Richard and Mary Bailey, she said, are pioneering “science-based tourism with a conservation twist.” They have protected sea turtle nests and acted to restore a place losing wildlife the ocean needs “to have a secure planet.”

The turtle numbers, in her telling, moved from “only a very few” a few years ago to hundreds under protection. Earle made the conclusion explicit: “Protection works.”

She described the Tetiaroa Society and the Baileys as bringing tourists, scientists, children and CEOs into what she called a business plan that couples tourism revenue with exploration, research and conservation. Her phrase for it was a “blue-green, nature-positive model” that generates income and jobs in a healthy ocean. In that description, conservation is not treated as separate from the economic plan; it is built into the plan’s stated purpose.

Technology is part of that model. A new class of submersibles is being built, Earle said, to take scientists, visitors and curious children into French Polynesia’s twilight zone, allowing them to explore a vital global system of animals that migrate vertically through the water column every day and night. The talk showed submersible vehicles and deep-sea organisms against black backgrounds, linking access to scientific curiosity and public commitment.

Earle then connected Mission Blue’s work with Polynesian voyaging traditions. The organization is partnering with the Polynesian Voyagers, Nainoa Thompson and those who travel across the Pacific in traditional canoes such as the Hokulea. She described ancient pathways represented in traditional maps like an octopus: the head in French Polynesia, its arms extending to islands across the Pacific, including Hope Spots established in recent years.

A three-year expedition is underway, she said, to connect people across the Pacific with ancient values of ocean care and respect. The submersibles add a new dimension to that effort: for the first time, people traveling in those canoes can “go see who lives under their canoe.”

For Earle, that access matters because the deep ocean is not marginal. Below the sunlight, in cold, dark, high-pressure waters, she said, is where “most of life on Earth actually exists.” The merger she emphasized was between new technology and ancient wisdom: instruments that make the deep visible, joined to cultures with long traditions of ocean navigation and care.

Sylvia Earle’s hopeful examples did not erase the scale problem. At the time of her 2009 wish, she said, 99 percent of the ocean was open for exploitation. Today, 97 percent is still open for exploitation. The improvement is real but small relative to the system she wants protected.

Her conclusion from that number was blunt: “It's time to seriously scale up.” Hope Spots are helping, she said, and new tools can help them work better. She pointed to spatial AI visualizing Hope Spots with global data on temperature, chemistry, fishing pressure, whale migration routes and land-based information, so that local problems can be understood “in the context of the whole world.”

The actions she named were direct. Planting trees, corals and clams helps. Humans can stop trashing the ocean. Humans can stop industrial fishing. And, in her strongest warning, humans “must never allow mining the deep seas to sweep away the security the living deep ocean provides to all of us.”

That warning sits inside her broader account of knowledge and choice. Earle said people today are “armed with greater knowledge than has ever existed before” and are therefore “the luckiest people ever to have arrived on Earth.” The luck is not because the situation is safe. It is because humans can see the stakes and act deliberately.

The choice, as she framed it, is whether humans can find “an enduring place” within the natural living systems that make their existence possible. Hope Spots are one mechanism for doing that: not sufficient alone, but evidence that protection, restoration, public engagement, science, technology and local stewardship can be organized around actual places.