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

by Sylvia A. Earle

Book Overview

This book tie-in to National Geographic's ambitious 5-year ocean initiative--focusing on overfishing--is written in National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle's accessible yet hard-hitting voice. Through compelling personal stories she puts the current and future peril of the ocean and the life it supports in perspective for a wide public audience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1426206399
• ISBN13: 9781426206399
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: National Geographic Society
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Excited for the book 📖, however the copy I was sent 😔

Entirely stained pages , the book smells .. it has tabs on almost every page and the original price for it being bought brand new is literally almost not worth going through this . It's unfortunate, this was my first time buying from this site and I was really excited until my book arrived . Looks like it came from a hoarder home and was dug out of the garbage.

Life is like a PC

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

The world is blue

One of the most important books you will ever read. Pick your five or ten best friends and send a copy to them.

Water is the key to life

I heard Sylvia Earle speak on the subject of oceans, from which all our water derives, and I was so impressed by this, I book her latest book. Since all life on earth is dependent on water, it is tragic that so much public money is spent exploring space and almost nothing of our oceans. We are delighted that maybe there might be water on the Moon or perhaps Mars, but aside from a few specialists like the author, we have little idea of our oceans although they comprise 75% of Earth. Reading this book might stimulate needed action on the Earth's water before it is too late.

listen up, our future depends on it.

Sylvia Earle is the most qualified individual on earth to promote saving it. She understands that the ocean is the source of most of the oxygen we breath, most of water we drink (rain water) and a large part of the food we eat. She systematically outlines what man has done to the ocean over the last 100 years and the implications for a dire future if we continue on this blind path. Her book is more than a wake up call. We have known about the damage we are doing to the ocean for decades. We take all the different species of fish and crustaceans, etc. from the ocean and return to it our trash. It is not a bottomless sea that can continue to take this abuse. Dr. Earle has summarized the facts and they are irrefutable. We can choose to continue to ignore them or we can take action. Dr. Earle has a wish and is asking the world to create Marine protected zones in the Ocean. Right now less than 1% of the ocean is protected. She believes that if we can raise that to 10%, 20% or more, we can save the ocean and our planet. Everyone needs to understand the facts that she presents in this book. Everyone needs to finally take action and support an organization of your choice, one that is trying to protect the oceans. We spend a great deal of time and money on studying global warming and even more sending rockets into space. Global warming is real and we need to understand it. And understanding how the Universe was created might prove valuable in as yet unknown ways. Why can't we create the equivalent to NASA for our oceans. My wish is what if we spent that money studying the planet we live on and the oceans in particular? We have seen and explored more of the moon than we have of our own planet. It won't matter 50 years from now whether we found water on the moon or not if we are struggling to survive on this planet because our life support system, the oceans, are dying.

This might be the biggest issue facing earth's future

Sylvia Earle is a planetary hero. In this book she shows how the carnage going on in our oceans is going to have massive global consequences. One reason this has become a giant, planet-threatening problem is that, by its nature, what happens deep under the ocean surface is invisible to humans. This book makes the invisible visible. Until we devoured or polluted most of it out of existence, the oceans used to teem with life of the most spectacular, beautiful kind imaginable. Life that is an integral part of the global eco-system we need to sustain us. The World is Blue celebrates that life and sets out her dream for the creation (at large scale) of 'Marine Protected Areas' in order to give the oceans a chance to recover. With a major movie due out early next year, and Sylvia Earle's TED Prize wish being developed by many supporters, the global 'blue' movement is gathering pace. Maybe it's not too late.