This inspiring interview brings together two extraordinary voices in ocean exploration and planetary stewardship: Dr. Sylvia Earle, legendary oceanographer, explorer, founder of Mission Blue, and one of the world’s most influential advocates for the protection of the living ocean; and Liz Taylor, President of DOER Marine, whose work bridges deep-sea engineering, underwater robotics, scientific research, and ocean conservation. 

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Earle and Liz Taylor reflect on some of the most urgent challenges facing humanity today: industrial fishing, the depletion of marine life, plastic and microplastic pollution, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, the loss of biodiversity, the need for open and interoperable ocean data, and the importance of translating scientific knowledge into public awareness and policy action. They also speak about the role of Mission Blue, Hope Spots, DOER Marine, and emerging deep-sea technologies in helping people see, understand, and protect the ocean before irreversible damage is done.

At its heart, this conversation invites society to rethink its relationship with nature — to move from extraction to protection, from indifference to responsibility, and from fragmented knowledge to collective action.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We're on the edge of the greatest era of exploration and discovery ever. Imagine earth without the ocean. What have you got? You have a planet a lot like Mars. No ocean, no life.

Liz Taylor

We've always used it to convey waste. And it's not, you know, you're seeing more and more of it coming back to us, whether it's in microplastics, heavy metals, toxins.

Olga Schmidt

Scientists were amazed to find that micro- and nanoplastic particles are down in the Mariana Trench and on top of Mount Everest.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

…and in the Arctic.

Olga Schmidt

A huge discovery.

Liz Taylor

The nano stuff… is clogging the filter feeders. So we're really kind of eating, you know, a dose of microplastic.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And not knowing it. Protect nature, especially the ocean as if your life depends on it, because it does.

Olga Schmidt

Doctor Earle, on behalf of ALLATRA and our international community of people from many nations, it is my profound honor to present you with the Honor of Humanity Medal. …As a symbol of our sincere gratitude and respect for your extraordinary service to the Earth and to all life.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I'll keep trying. There's so much to do. We're right on the edge of the greatest era of exploration. And taking care of this little blue place that sits right in the center.

Olga Schmidt

Hello. It is a true privilege and honor to be here today for this conversation with two extraordinary women whose life's work has shaped the way we understand, explore and protect our oceans. We are joined by a pioneer whose name is known around the world. Doctor Sylvia Earle, a legendary oceanographer, explorer in residence with the National Geographic Society and one of the most influential voices in marine science and conservation in history. Her work has taken her to the deepest parts of the ocean and to the forefront of global ocean protection efforts. And also alongside here, we have an honor to be joined by another remarkable leader, Liz Taylor, who happens to be Doctor Earl's daughter.

Liz is a visionary in marine engineering and the president of DOER Marine. Through decades of innovation, she has helped design and build the technologies that make deep ocean exploration possible, bridging science, engineering and discovery at the highest level. Together, their work represents both sides of the ocean exploration, understanding the ocean and creating the tools that allow us to reach it. From scientific discovery to technological innovation, their combined impact has helped redefine what humanity can achieve beneath the surface of our planet. We're so honored to be here today. Thank you so much for taking the time and for inviting us here.

And the first question I would like to ask you both: you have dedicated a significant part of your life to the ocean, and it comes across not just as a profession, but as a very deep personal connection. I'd like to begin with this first simple question. What was it about the ocean that touched you so deeply that you realized this would become your life's work?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Well, I got knocked over by a wave when I was three and had the ocean got my attention. But what really sealed my interest was as a kid, my parents moved from New Jersey to Florida, and we lived right on the water. And rather than do what many kids do with sports or whatever, I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with the Gulf of Mexico. Even before I had a face mask or flippers just splashing around and getting to see the creatures along the shore.

I think most children, if given a chance, are really curious about the world around them, about the nature of other forms of life, whether all forms of life, cats and dogs, normal things that might be around where people live or anything in the wild - birds, fish, little squirrelly things, whatever. And for me, I did not think about making a choice. I was just hooked on the ocean because there were creatures there that I didn't see on the land. And I got to know them just by looking because it was there for me to see, and it has just developed from then.

Liz Taylor

And for me, I've just always grown up around the ocean. It's been part of day to day life. You know, we had, you know, pet molluscs in the kitchen. We were pressing plants in the garage. So just kind of dragged into it from a very early age and then just having a lot of time outdoors to explore it. Back then, we didn't really have cell phones and tablets and things like this. So we were told to go outside and play.

And so it was just a lot of that basic exploration and looking after the place, going out with a hand lens and looking at small creatures and tadpoles and little coquina clams on the beach, and then all the way to exploring below the surface, learning to swim and snorkel at a very young age and getting first scuba, first scuba experience at nine, and then spending a lot of time around public aquariums as well. So kind of taking care of some of the fish that would come through and, and really trying to see how do they adapt in captivity and how can they be sort of ambassadors for their kind to help people understand what lives in the ocean and other aquatic spaces.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I think I got to see the nature of fish as individuals by living underwater. With the aquarium was the ocean you had a chance to get to know fish as individuals. Most people know fish on their plate, but you got to see them as creatures with whom you interacted and they recognized you.

Liz Taylor

Oh yeah. They are very much so and would recognize me as an individual versus other people, particularly some of the larger, grouper, and some of the other fish that people just kind of think of them as protein, you know, pound of protein, but they're very intelligent animals. And they would just come right over and they'd see me coming. They'd come over and just look at me.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Sometimes they squirted water or splashed water on people they didn't like.

Liz Taylor

They did. There were certain people they didn't like, they didn't like. And they would just take a big of the tail and send a wall of water out of the tank at them. So some of them were very, you know, very much that way. And I got yelled at when I had my hand in the aquarium with the electric catfish, and I was cleaning the glass. And the fish really liked me. He never bothered me. And one of the senior aquarists, you can't do that. You know, you could, he could shock you, but he never attempted to. He was always this very calm and never bothered me.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

But he did bother some.

Liz Taylor

Oh yeah. He knocked a couple of people out.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

It's the empathy that many seem to have forgotten about. I think kids are naturally curious and kind.

Liz Taylor

Mhm. That's true.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

But we treat.. we encourage kids to be, you know, to kill basically. “Let's go catch something.” Mhm. And anyway, it's great to be in an atmosphere where people care. And often that's the case. And you have that direct experience as a kid, you were head of the volunteers for a while.

Liz Taylor

Oh yeah. Led a big band of volunteers at the time when kids could volunteer. Now it's a big process, but back then, you're basically just allowed to come through and help out with whatever needed, helping with whether it was, you know, feeding the dolphin, walking a shark. It's incredible.

Olga Schmidt

It's incredible.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Olga Schmidt

And Doctor Earle, you often say, health to the ocean means health for us. When people hear the word ‘ocean’, they usually think of whales, beaches, reefs. How do you explain to a broad audience today that the health of the ocean is directly connected not only to nature, but also to the human body, our food, the air we breathe, and the future generations.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Well, one way to create a recognition that the ocean really matters to everyone, everywhere, all the time, is imagine earth without the ocean. What have you got? You have a planet a lot like Mars. Mars apparently had an ocean long ago, but not now. There's water there, but not much compared to Earth. It's an ocean dominating planet. 97% of Earth's water is ocean. Only 3% makes up rivers, lakes, streams, groundwater, the water in ice. Most of Earth's fresh water is locked into Antarctic ice. So when you say, why should I care about the ocean? No ocean, no life.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And I sometimes say no blue, no green, which is true. We need all of the ingredients that make earth habitable. But without the water, there would be nothing alive.

Olga Schmidt

Just like Mars.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. And we do have to really think about all, particularly since the start of the industrial age, all that we've put into the ocean. So we've always used it to convey waste, you know, wastewater, agricultural runoff, old munitions, all these things that we've just put into the ocean just thinking that the solution to pollution is dilution? And, and it's not, you know, you're seeing more and more of it coming back to us, whether it's in microplastics, it's heavy metals, it's toxins.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

It's agricultural toxins.

Liz Taylor

Agricultural toxins. And it bioaccumulates in fish that people and shellfish that people might eat. And we've also seen a tremendous uptick in the Vibrio bacteria infections in people. When I was a kid, we were always told, oh, if you cut your hand, you know, go to the ocean, it will help you heal. Today, it's like, oh, you have an open wound, don't get in the water. You could, you could get flesh-eating bacteria from it.

And so it really, and we're really looking to track and understand where these areas of infection or health concerns can occur and try to do a better job of tracking them back to see what the point sources are, and what we can do to clean them up through coastal restoration efforts, restoration of marshlands, and really allowing the planet to do that filtration job that it had always done for millennia.

Olga Schmidt

For many years.

Liz Taylor

Right. And now we've got to do a better job of protecting open space on the land that helps us have better water quality.

Olga Schmidt

Looks like we've disturbed that cycle.

Liz Taylor

Correct.

Olga Schmidt

Yeah. The planet was doing a good job without our.. 

Liz Taylor

Yes, our help. Right. Exactly.

Olga Schmidt

Yes. And then also today, NOAA emphasizes that a large portion of the ocean remains unexplored. And as of June 2025, only 27.3% of the global seafloor has been mapped in modern high resolution, and less than 0.001% of the deep sea floor has actually been visually observed by humans. And doctor Earl, you often draw parallels between the ocean and space, and noting that the ocean floor is less explored than the surface of Mars, as we mentioned, which areas of deep sea life, the ecosystems, sea floor or the microbial world do you consider the least understood today?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I can't say that I can give you a straight answer, but one of the things I think the most important thing of all that we've learned about the ocean is the magnitude of what we don't know.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

So knowing that on my watch, we found not just new species, not just new families, new kingdoms of life, we don't know what else is out there? Since we've explored a tiny fraction of the volume of the ocean.

Olga Schmidt

Very small.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We're on the edge of the greatest era of exploration and discovery ever. I mean, when you think about the policies we have, the laws that we make are based on what we know. But we should be, now that we know what we can glimpse of the unknown, we should leave some space for what we are learning. We've hampered ourselves, in a way, by locking down certain policies about how we use the ocean, calculating numbers of how many creatures that we think we could take safely and still have tuna and swordfish and squid and lobsters and shrimp and all those other things. But understanding that we really don't know how many there were or even how many there are. So it's an artificial kind of peace of mind that we impose.

But if you understand that we really don't know. We should be cautious. We should be far less greedy. We've already taken about half of the volume of life that was in the ocean, out of the ocean for human uses, partly for eating fish and other creatures. But it's also not knowing the consequences of our actions, the loss of so many creatures in the process of catching the fish that we are targeting with long lines. We don't have a sign out there that says “only swordfish need to bite the hook.” You get a whole array of creatures that are caught and they die and they're just thrown away. That's one of the ways that we have extracted life out of the ocean.

Another is when you drag a net across the sea floor, you only keep a fraction of what you catch. The rest of it gets dumped back overboard, dead, and right down the line. Whatever is caught in the net. You look, drag a net through a forest and what you want are the songbirds. But you destroy the forest and you only get the songbirds. That's how we treat what we take out of the ocean. Big nets catch lots of stuff, and only a small amount is actually taken to market. The rest is simply destroyed. We wouldn't do that on the land because you can see it. People would be outraged.

Olga Schmidt

And in the ocean.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I'm one of those outraged about what fishing techniques have been developed in recent times, as the technology enables us to do what we could not do before the 20th century, now into the 21st, and the process being so destructive of life in the sea.

Liz Taylor

A lot of it's happened because, as you say, the engineering and technology has moved very aggressively to help us take more fish from the ocean. But it's also the advent of containerization and refrigeration and freezing at sea. In the past, you couldn't go offshore more than a few miles and grab a fish and then hope to be able to eat it safely at the end of the day, because it would spoil. Now, now, you know, you can capture fish in Alaska or krill in Antarctica and ship it, you know, tens of thousands of miles anywhere. And so that whole industrialization of fishing has just created a very unfair and unreasonable approach to removal from the ocean.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And a disconnect between what or who you're eating and where it has come from and the impact it has. I mean, there are places, island countries, not all have behaved equally toward their source of food from the sea, but they've managed to maintain a relationship where they realize they can't take too much because then it'll be gone.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

They've developed internally some cultures that have protected areas for the species that they take. It's just become part of their nature that if you want to have them in the long term, don't take them all at once. Maintain security for them because that's security for you. But right now, with 8 billion people taking wild animals, whether they're birds, or squirrels, or fish of many species. We have to think differently because we need to eat differently.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Taking wildlife from the ocean to feed 8 billion people is simply not realistic, right?

Liz Taylor

Not at all.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We have to also think about the impact we're having on the natural life support system, living systems. With agriculture, we've converted about half of the land to grow either crops that we consume or plants that animals consume that then we eat. And it's happened largely in the 20th and 21st centuries. The massive elimination of wilderness, converting it to farmland and other human purposes that we now face a real choice: well, what's the world that we want? Should we convert all of nature into farmland and cities and roads and all the things? Well, realistically, that's not possible because the systems that keep us alive, the natural living places that we think of as wilderness areas, that's our life support system. And it's mostly ocean.

That's 97% of the biosphere, but we've only been able to get into the ocean and significantly extract, as Liz says, we've had the technology in recent times to go far beyond where we could 100 or 200 years ago, right? Safely, and to find, capture and market and send from one side of the planet to the other through refrigeration in ways that were simply not possible before. And it's the marketing of ocean wildlife as seafood that has scaled up since the middle of the 20th century to now, a level of extraction that puts not just the fish and other creatures that we consume from the sea, not just puts them at risk, puts us at risk because we're destroying the very systems that maintain the nature of earth as a habitable planet.

We're really good at taking and killing and converting the systems that keep us alive. Astronauts are smart enough not to mess around with their life support system. I learned very quickly using submarines, and as Liz knows, you have to take care of your life support system.

Liz Taylor

Yes, you need redundancy and you need to really pay attention.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Yeah. When you're underwater, you're there as a guest. That's it is part of our home Earth, but we're not naturally adapted for life under the surface. We have to rely on technology, just as astronauts do, to go high in the sky. That's not our natural home, either. But it is part of our universe. But we are blessed with the capability of doing what other really intelligent creatures on Earth haven't been able to do. Whales are very smart and they have a long history and they have culture. Same is true with elephants and our fellow primates. They've got a lot going for them, but they…no elephant has been high in the sky to look back and see the Earth.

And even if they could see it, we have now the technology that has enabled us to know what we're seeing. To use microscopes and telescopes, computers and other kinds of equipment that gives us an edge not just over other intelligent creatures. But when you think about other humans in the past, we're the first to have this capability. 21st century kids are the beneficiaries of all preceding history, coupled with modern technology that gives kids of today knowledge that didn't exist when I was a kid. I mean, important knowledge, like what does Earth look like from space?

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

The fact that microbes are part of us, each of us, that we can't live without them. We have a symbiotic relationship that makes our existence possible because of the little guys who help us digest food, that really serve as our immune system in very basic ways. We didn't know that when I was a child, just couldn't know that—we had not reached the level of understanding. And we have so much more to learn about our relationship with bacteria, with other microbes that are so diverse and so abundant. They basically hold the world together. They existed, whole categories of life existed before there were creatures that had more than one cell, like 2 billion years of existence of life before there were multicellular creatures at all.

And it's no wonder that we have a very close, intimate relationship with these small creatures that basically rule the world. But if you don't know they're there and appreciate their functions, their relationships. We've developed any number of antibiotics that sometimes kill everything, not just the things we want to have destroyed. And it's a balancing act. Of course, we should continue using antibiotics, but as we learn more, we can be more targeted about which ones we're aiming for. So it's like so much we keep learning and benefiting from what we learn. And I think our best hope for the future is the kids, to the extent that they will take advantage of the knowledge that is there, that you don't always get in schools and…

Olga Schmidt

Use it for something positive, right?

Liz Taylor

Right. You know, kind of recognizing the fragility of not just of the planet, but of human beings. You know, we are very fragile creatures at the end of the day, and it just takes a lot of luck and balance to keep us right in that sweet spot. And too much disruption, and we… you know, it's a very, very critical cycle. So I hope with all the knowledge that is now available, that people use it for good and they, they kind of have better, better decision-making, better choices, you know, predictive analysis, the sort of thing that it's not just sort of used to predict profits for next quarter, but really taking sort of the seven generation view.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Or at least the next quarter century.

Liz Taylor

But take that seven generation view of how will the actions we're taking today affect the capacity for the planet to support human beings in future, along with other biodiversity?

Olga Schmidt

What would you change to help us better understand the ocean floor? What could be done?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I think the number one thing is to use that thing you carry around on your shoulders.

Liz Taylor

That we all have.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Have the curiosity that is there. It's there, in humans. It's there, perhaps in all young mammals? Maybe. I mean, maybe baby spiders are curious, I don't know. But certainly humans have that capacity. Just keep learning. All right? And for something to do, number one priority, I think for all of us everywhere, doesn't matter who you are, what you know, or what you do, protect the natural systems around you. Use whatever you've got. If you live in a place where you, for whatever reasons, have a nice grassy lawn, think about what other things could be grown there instead of just this cultural icon known as the lawn. Where did that come from? Well, I know where it came from. From raising sheep in Europe. It was a sign of prosperity.

The grazed area turned into a lawn, and it became fashionable. We need to make it fashionable to love wild things.

Liz Taylor

I really love seeing the trend where people are purposefully rewilding their garden or a school is taking on a project or a church, or even a corporate business park that is all previously just kind of lawn and sprayed with roundup and kept everything very trimmed. But now they're coming through and saying, you know, can we attract caterpillars? Can we attract hummingbirds? You know, what can we do to create these spaces and then protecting those zones and, and everybody, you know, like piece by little piece can make a big difference that way across even a very urban environment, you can really create some little zones that are extraordinarily helpful.

Olga Schmidt

That would be.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Even planning things to eat.

Liz Taylor

Sure, yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We take for granted going to sources with concentrated food, grocery stores or markets, whatever. But unless kids see things growing, how would they know where a carrot lives or..

Olga Schmidt

Where it came from? Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

…or where eggs come from?

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

If you've never seen a chicken, you've never watched a chicken lay an egg.

Liz Taylor

No. But it's great to see that I don't know, sort of a rebirth of the family garden or community gardens, these sorts of things.

Olga Schmidt

Community gardens. I think they're coming back, little by little. Yes.

Liz Taylor

So it's little by little. But each of those steps is so fundamental. And when you take a kid out and they get to pick a strawberry, or they get to, you know, gather a warm egg from the chicken, now their curiosity just explodes and they're just so joyful.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And you begin to appreciate where food comes from. I mean, it's surprising, shocking to me actually. People equate fish as if it's just fish, at least 33,000 different kinds of fish. There's one kind of bird that we call chicken. There's another kind of bird we call turkey. There's some variations on the me, but basically it's one like dogs represent one species with lots of variability. When we talk about fish, we're talking about that kind of individual variability within species but different categories. And the great majority that we consume are carnivores.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And they are not taken like chickens and ducks and turkeys, cows, pigs, goats, sheep that are taken when they're young, typically within the first year when they're growing fast and there's great efficiency of converting the plants that they eat to the animals that they become. So on that basis, it takes about 2 pounds of plants to make a pound of chicken. For cows and pigs and the other animals that we eat, it's somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds of plants. If you take these animals when they're young, and mostly we do, we don't eat old sheep, we eat lamb; we don’t eat old pigs, we eat the ones that are within a year or during this fast-growing stage. And in the ocean, we eat ten-year-old tuna. We eat a hundred-year-old orange roughy.

Liz Taylor

It's shocking.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We.. in some cases, not so long ago, turtle was common on the menu, but turtles can live 50 or 100 years. Wales. We only stopped killing whales commercially globally in 1986. But think about how long whales live. As long as humans, in fact.

Olga Schmidt

Longer.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Yeah, one kind of whale lives for at least 200 years. Wouldn't we like to know the secrets?

Olga Schmidt

The secret? Exactly. Exactly.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Greenland shark that lives for perhaps 400 years. And anyway, what we take out of the ocean, they're basically carnivores. There's some exceptions, but they're not just a baby. A parrotfish can be five years old or ten year old. We don't have five-year-old chickens.

Liz Taylor

No. And it's the concept that wildlife is free for the taking, right? And that's the problem is that, you know, a farmer is not going to go out and, you know, have to pay to feed a chicken for five years or six years. They're going to try to optimize the timing of how much, how little food can they feed it to get it to the market. And, you know, that kind of whole cycle. And there's like an economic model they can follow.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

One of the stupidest things we grow are salmon. These are carnivores. And the efficiency of raising them is ridiculous. You know, we take a lot of wild fish to feed to the cultivated animals. And they're not taken in one year trying very hard to be more efficient. But it's become almost as common as chicken on the menus around the world, maybe not in the diets of people, but it's been equated. So you can have some form of beef or some form of lamb or some form of chick or salmon. It's the fish that you commonly see.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Quite widely everywhere. And it's new. Nobody could find salmon in markets in the 1940s or the 50s or the 60s. It wasn't until the 70s that cultivation of salmon really began to take off. And now it's in countries all over the planet, even where you wouldn't think you could grow salmon. We find clever ways to adjust the environment to suit salmon like South Florida growing salmon. Are you kidding? And there's a market for it because we've been led to believe that this is a good thing, but taking wildlife out of the ocean. Liz, you mentioned rewilding the land – we are de-wilding the ocean.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Liz Taylor

Mhm.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We're taking wildlife on a mega scale and disrupting the systems that keep us alive. Our life support system, the systems that generate oxygen, capture carbon and maintain this diversity of life in the sea, which is much greater than the diversity of life on the land. When you understand that it's a three-dimensional realm, and there are about half of the known categories of life that exist only in the ocean, nowhere on the land, but all of the creatures that have representation on the land have at least some. Even insects have representation in the sea. So..

Liz Taylor

And fungi.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We are terrestrial. We have a bias. But that's changing as we get to know the ocean.

Liz Taylor

That's true.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And to appreciate the need to take care of it, it's our best hope for a long and enduring future for ourselves.

Olga Schmidt

That's probably our mission. Yes. And in recent decades, scientists have increasingly spoken about global diversity, loss, and even signs of a sixth mass extinction. While these processes are actively studied in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, as we mentioned, deep ocean zones remain far less explored. And are you observing, and you kind of answered it partially, but are you observing a loss of life in the deep ocean? And if so, what do you believe are the main causes.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We humans are the drivers of change. Changing the climate has an impact on everything, everywhere. If you really want to change a system, change the temperature, change the chemistry. We're doing both. The ocean is becoming more acidic because of the carbon dioxide that we have turned loose through burning fossil fuels. And beyond a certain point, the ocean that has taken up much of that excess carbon dioxide that we've generated, but beyond a certain point, it turns to carbonic acid. And that's what's driving the acidification of the ocean throughout, top to bottom…

Olga Schmidt

It's changing the composition.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

…our ability to extract using technology that didn't exist until the middle of the 20th century and onward. We've gotten better and better at finding, capturing and marketing ocean wildlife, deep sea in particular, things like so-called orange roughy, like the so-called Chilean sea bass.

Liz Taylor

And I think most alarmingly, we're seeing a really big effort to scale up the removal of, kind of, fish and other wildlife from the mesopelagic zone. Because those animals, they live very deep in the sea, but at night they come towards the surface. They have this huge migration, the biggest animal migration on the planet that happens every night, kind of coming up. Physically, their biomass kind of mixes the ocean layers and kind of helps drive down carbon into the deep sea.

And we have countries now that are going out and trawling that zone, you know, down hundreds of meters and catching and pressing oil out of these animals or pressing fish meal out of them, just not even considering how many species are there, but just crushing them into meal for salmon or into fish oil capsules for people that we don't really need. And there's also the really.

Olga Schmidt

So not realizing their function.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. And also.

Olga Schmidt

what they do for the ocean…

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And there are miracles out there, these incredible kinds of squid, the jellies and.

Liz Taylor

The squid is shocking, you know. These fleets of squid vessels visible from space with all their lights on, just, just mechanically jigging the squid out of the ocean. And, and both legal and illegal fishing that's going on

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Deworlding the ocean.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. By metric tons.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And seriously, tuna looks when you go to a store and you see cans of tuna or frozen tuna or even fresh tuna, not realizing that you're part of the problem if you choose that as something that you wish to consume. But you don't know because it's there. You think somebody has figured out that it's okay, otherwise it wouldn't be there on the shelf, would it? (

Olga Schmidt

Right). But that's the power of marketing (

Liz Taylor

Right) that we delude ourselves and then it's gone. It's not gone yet. There's still a chance with awareness of how fast we are consuming the ocean. There's the evidence that may be helpful, may be convincing enough to enable the current agreement among nations to protect at least 30% of the high seas (

Olga Schmidt

Mhm) of the ocean from extractive industries. Right now, it's a tiny fraction of 1%. Tiny, tiny fraction.

Liz Taylor

Right. And there's the new BBNJ treaty that's come online

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Yeah, just last year.

Liz Taylor

to help protect the high seas just last… Is it last year or earlier this year? You know, when it was really enabled. But now the question is, how do we enforce it?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

How do we first agree on doing it.

Olga Schmidt

It is probably the biggest question of all time.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Yeah.

Liz Taylor

And it is a problem, you know, universally for small island nations. They have a big EEZ, you know, how do they enforce the protection? How do they protect themselves from sort of renegade countries coming in and, you know, trawling in the dead of night or and just extracting things and running away. So there's a lot of the sort of you know, theft of… It's really wildlife trafficking is what it is that goes on. But it's legitimized.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Legal! Legal and sometimes illegal and unreported and unregulated. But subsidized, we're talking billions of dollars are made available to those who go out to find capture and market ocean wildlife is part of the problem. It's also part of the solution. And there's been an effort to try to bring back those billions and invest them into giving the industries involved a soft landing to figure out what else to do.

Olga Schmidt

what else to do.

Liz Taylor

Right.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

The same thing that we're looking at the oil and gas industries – is there a way to not destroy these companies, but to convert them to positive impacts rather than negative?

Liz Taylor

And we've seen it in action in some places, some of the Hope Spots, you know. We saw it, we visited Isla Mujeres in Mexico a couple of years ago, and a local hotel owner realized that his diving tourism was dropping down because people wanted to come there and see the sharks. The sharks are disappearing. So he went out and he decided he was going to pay the shark fishermen to not fish for sharks.

Olga Schmidt

Mhmm!

Liz Taylor

So he paid them the same money that they would get for the shark. He paid them not to fish for the shark. And then he started hiring some of their family members to work in his hotels and to work at, you know, in local companies (Sylvia: Give them another work) and found them other jobs in the tourism sector. And pretty soon these guys, they weren't having to go out to sea. They came home at night at a reasonable time. The family is happier. The whole dynamic shifted. And they all had to turn in their hooks. And then they all had to come, you know, put them in, you know, no more fishing for you. Now you are an ocean, you know, guardian. And the tourism dollars went way up. And it just was, like, this simple model that really, really worked.

It's just kind of.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Restoring the.

Liz Taylor

Restoring it. But leveraging the intelligence, the experience that these fishermen had, their knowledge of the area where the birds were, where the sharks were. But now pivoting to a sustainable tourism model, where people are now paying money, they want to go bird watching. They want to go down and sit down on the boat and watch the giant bull shark come in.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Instead of killing them.

Olga Schmidt

That's a great example!

Liz Taylor

It was a huge example. So it was this, this story of kind of hope, but also determination to do something better and to really lead by example. And that's a story, that's an example that can be now applied almost anywhere (

Olga Schmidt

to other areas). And it's really one of the things that we're trying to do here broadly with bringing. Still in business, but with a good...

Liz Taylor

A good positive outcome for people and planet.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Nature positive.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Olga Schmidt

And that's, that's very good. (

Liz Taylor

Yeah.) And the ocean is also one of the most geologically active environments on the planet. According to NOAA, up to 70% of all volcanic eruptions occur underwater. And yet most of them remain out of sight. We don't see them. We simply don't see how the ocean floor breathes.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Mhm.

Olga Schmidt

Have you ever witnessed an underwater volcanic eruption? And if so, was there any visible impact at the surface? And how did the marine life respond?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I have not personally witnessed it, but we have friends who have seen molten lava pouring out off in Hawaii, for example, (

Olga Schmidt

Underwater?) underwater.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I've seen the images from that.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. And it's quite spectacular. We don't realize how seismically active the ocean is. And what we really don't appreciate is the extraordinary risk that we face by not having the body of knowledge to understand where these fault zones are. Because one of the most dangerous things that can happen is you have a very large earthquake, and then it's followed by a tsunami. And that happens because just as on the land, you have a very, very large earthquake – what happens is you're followed by a big landslide, but you have an underwater landslide, a big seismic rift. And now you have the potential for very large tsunami. And you can also get a lot of bubbling that happens at the surface. You can get the release of gases.

If the volcanic eruption is a small seamount, is it going to become an island? Is it going to build into an island? Is it coming through the surface? And there's lots of stories of sailors that have suddenly seen the surface of the water kind of bubbling and boiling, and they're, kind of, “Oh, is a whale going to come up here?” and, like, no, it's much worse than that. And sure enough, the seamount now starts becoming an island. But that's the nature of the… I mean, if you look at the Hawaiian Islands, you'll see some of the very old ones. It's just now it's like a little caldera or it's an atoll. And that's where a mountain once was, but it's just been eroded over time. So, that's just the Earth rebuilding itself over millennia.

And I think many of the fish do know the same way that our dogs or cats (

Olga Schmidt

They can feel.) alert us ahead of time and some of them will get out of the area. Um, but, you know, in the ocean, you're not experiencing really that kind of shaking. ( Right, right, right.) It's kind of, like, “Oh, it's a weird wave.” But the tsunami is the dangerous part for people.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I think even more dangerous than these natural events are the things that we've… we ourselves have caused. Like, when I was a child, plastics did not exist. (

Olga Schmidt

Mhm) And now the children of today live in a world – doesn't matter where you live or if you've never even seen plastic – plastic has reached you through the atmosphere, through the air we breathe, the water that we drink, the food that we eat. Because it's become commonplace. It's become normalized. Everything from buttons to clothing and (

Liz Taylor

everything) all the wraps around food and cans and (

Olga Schmidt

everything, the medical equipment) are lined with plastic.

Liz Taylor

And we see it really, kind of, force multiplied whenever there's a large storm event. So even if it's a hurricane, if it's a tsunami, if it's a flood – whatever it is that happens – it always used to be just sort of debris from the land or maybe it was some soil that was flushed out into the ocean. But now it's, like, an avalanche of plastics that's flushed out into the sea. And, and it's just.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Or taken to sea like fish nets.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And gear. That's more than half of the plastic in the ocean is from discarded nets lines. I mean, once upon a time, creating a fishing net was a big deal. Handwoven. I've sat with fishermen who were creating nets. It's like mother and some of her relatives and friends made quilts. It's a big deal to hand-make something as big as a fishing net that you don't want to lose it.

Olga Schmidt

Not anymore.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

If it gets lost, you do everything you can to recover it. Today, with these synthetic materials that are relatively inexpensive, if you’re just buying them, so you can afford to lose them. And they're so easy to handle compared to the handmade lines and nets that were in more common use early in the 20th century and through all preceding history of humans.

Liz Taylor

And they're incredibly persistent, you know. We see some of the synthetics now that can exist, you know, hundreds of years in the environment. (

Olga Schmidt

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.) They can easily just stay out there and they become these ghost nets. So they capture fish that were never intended or a whale becomes entangled and they die and they sink to the bottom. And then as soon as they decompose, that net comes back up again and it continues the cycle of killing. Or it can just become entrained on a coral reef. And because those materials are so strong, it begins, like, sawing through the reef and creating damage. Or it saws through the tail of a whale. You know, there's the famous tailless whale that had a piece of line wrapped around its tail, and it just kind of, you know, cut through and, you know. It never disappears.

Plastic doesn't biodegrade, it just becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, and it's always in our atmosphere. Scientists were amazed to find that micro- and nanoplastic particles are down in the Mariana Trench (Sylvia: Yes) and on top of Mount Everest, and it was a huge discovery.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And in the Antarctic, far from where you think.

Olga Schmidt

Yes. They were amazed to see… I mean, not you know, we're not talking about when they discovered even microplastic in the placenta and, you know, all the human organs and so on. Of course, that's a different story. But yes, that's something that's a big problem today. (

Liz Taylor

Yeah) And we recognize it as well. Delineates us in geologic history. You know, the Pre-Plasticine.

Olga Schmidt

Yeah.

Liz Taylor

And then the Plasticine, you know.

Olga Schmidt

Yeah, exactly.

Liz Taylor

Really, it's just wild.

Olga Schmidt

And actually, when we talk about plastic pollution in the ocean, most people imagine something visible as we talked about trash on the beaches, floating debris, fishing nets. But looking beneath the surface, the problem of micro and nanoplastics is increasingly coming to light today. And a 2025 Nature study estimated around 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics in the North Atlantic alone, suggesting that nanoplastics may actually be the dominant form of marine plastic pollution. How serious do you think this less visible part of the problem already is for the ocean, for the marine life, and ultimately for humans?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We don't know.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We don't.

Liz Taylor

That's the problem.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

There are some indications, but we… This is all new (

Liz Taylor

Yeah) and it takes time to evaluate and see reliably cause and effect. And we're in the midst of that right now. But I think if plastics were essential to life in our system, they'd be there already. They can't be indifferent. They can't just be without some impact. We just don't know what it is. Yeah, we don't really know yet. We do know that we've seen examples of things like corals kind of starving because they're filter feeder. So they open up and they're bringing in the water and so forth. But they get this sensation of being full when they've taken in plastic in addition to things that are actually edible. So their resilience comes down where they may actually starve. We've seen the evidence with albatross chicks.

The parents pick up plastic from the surface thinking it's a fish. They feed it to the chick, the chick starves to death, and you'll find the bodies decomposing. And it's just a pile of plastic in the crop of the baby.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Those are the bigger forms that clog the system.

Liz Taylor

Yeah, they clog the system. But the nano stuff is the same way. You know, it's clogging the filter feeders, the menhaden, the oysters, the mussels, the clams, the things that a lot of people like to eat. And in many cases, it kind of bioaccumulates in those animals. So we're really kind of eating a, you know, a dose of microplastic.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And not knowing it. (

Olga Schmidt

Absolutely) And so the higher up the food chain, like tuna eats fish that eats fish, eats fish and keeps not just the chemical pollutants or the mercury that has been acquired by consuming it up the food chain. But the older, the larger the fish, the longer they've been accumulating, bioaccumulating – and it isn't just the micro- and nanoplastics, it's all the other stuff we put into the ocean. All the other pollutants.

Liz Taylor

So it really comes back to that, that issue of awareness. And then how do we, you know, how do we mitigate that? And of course, the best thing is to, like, stop the flow of plastic going into the ocean or going into the environment, so making...

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Stop consuming the fish.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

You don’t really have to do that.

Liz Taylor

But also thinking about how do you really lessen your relationship with plastic across the board? You know, choosing recyclables, making sure that we really do advocate for… you know, there are some valid uses for some plastics, you know, particularly in the medical field where you have very durable plastics, like, plastic food storage container that you keep for a generation in the family. But there's this disposable single use plastic is really… It's got to stop.

Olga Schmidt

It's just so much out there already.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

The gear that's used to capture ocean wildlife should not be created in the first place, given the damage it's doing to life in the sea, wildlife – catching and killing. Aside from the legacy of plastic.

Liz Taylor

There is some push now to use technology to put, you know, like, a transponder tag on every single fishing net and every single shipping container and all these things that are lost at sea so that we could better stimulate going out and recovering the gear. Right now, when they lose a big net like this, they just say the insurance company, “I lost my net.” You know, “write me a check.” Now, if the insurance company said, “You fishermen are on the hook, literally, to go get that net or you're going to be charged damages for the environmental damage that it will cause,” they're going to have an incentive to go get that net or to not lose it in the first place.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Return to sender.”

Liz Taylor

But there's the technology there, you know, all the different kinds of little tracking tags and things. You can track your iPhone, you can track your fish net. So there's ways to do it. But it's there's a lot of barriers to implementation.

Olga Schmidt

Implementation and awareness. Mhm. So even if humanity were to drastically reduce new plastic entering the ocean tomorrow, a major challenge would remain. The vast amount of micro and nanoplastics is already circulating in the water, air and the food chains. It's already there. In your view, how important is current research focused on what can be done about the enormous amount of micro and nanoplastics already present in the ecosystems?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Again, big X factor, but in the ocean, clams and oysters and other filter feeders are, like it or not, cleaning up some of these little guys, concentrating them. It's a terrible thing to… have caused problems for them as well as for ourselves. There is no easy answer. The first thing is stop the flow. I mean, that seems… Let’s take as much of the plastic out of the ocean while it's big, before it is reduced to micro- and nanoplastics. So at least, I mean, there are some things that we can do proactively.

Olga Schmidt

Right. I think even today we take out 0.01% of plastic out of the ocean, and we dump in more than.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Whatever.

Olga Schmidt

10 million tons of plastic. So the amount of what we take out (

Liz Taylor

We are not catching up.) does not equal to…

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Does not commensurate with what we're putting in.

Liz Taylor

And we've got to do a better job of dealing with the wastewater systems. Because we see a lot of nanoplastics that end up being flushed into the ocean through, you know, shunting wastewater into the sea. So you have, like, a big sewage outfall pipe, for example. And a lot of microplastic is introduced that way because it just come through our laundry and through our showers and other places where we might have microplastics occurring and shedding off. But the filtration at these plants (

Olga Schmidt

they are so tiny)

Dr. Sylvia Earle

They cannot stop it at the source.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Olga Schmidt

It's not studied.

Liz Taylor

You just can't catch it. They haven't really developed a way to catch it yet.

Olga Schmidt

And Liz, your work sits at a unique intersection of engineering, accessibility and ocean advocacy. What are deep sea technologies already allowed us to see that society still doesn't fully realize about ocean pollution, especially at the level of small particles, pollution in the water column, and remote depth.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. So we see a lot of, you know, we build here at DOER, we build autonomous underwater vehicles, robotic vehicles or remotely operated vehicles, and of course, human occupied vehicles, along with a lot of other samplers for testing sediments and water quality and so forth. So whole all things underwater.

But it's shocking that we had a very large 6,500 meter rated, remotely operated vehicle that we built for a University of Hawaii, and on its inaugural dive, 4,000m test dive, we sent it down, we were all excited to see what we were going to see, turned on the lights and the camera, and the first thing we saw was a Dasani water bottle at 4,000m, sitting on the seabed, just as pristine as when someone threw it over their boat or it washed off from the shore. But it's shocking to see that and the amount of debris that's just out there that we encounter all the time. We've seen everything from, you know, teddy bears to whole sea containers to fields of unspent ordnance, you know, dumped ordnance.

And then we've spent a lot of time with the scientists at the Clarion-Clipperton zone, where the deep sea mining is being proposed and the incredible diversity of life that's out there, and we still see some weird plastic stuff that shows up once in a while. But just to see the incredible diversity of life out there and to think about the damage, the potential of deep sea mining would cause out there would just be catastrophic. And so we really kind of look to these areas. And the more technology we can build to have people directly understand what's there, what are the problems, areas that we should protect.

And hopefully we build enough awareness to take the precautionary principle around any kind of extraction in the deep sea, and to really think about what we can do to protect it. You know, these shipping containers that fall off ships and dump things into the ocean, it's mind boggling that the stuff that you find out there.

Olga Schmidt

Oh, I'm sure it's everything.

Liz Taylor

It's just crazy.

Olga Schmidt

And in your interview with Divers Alert Network, you spoke about data hoarding and said that we don't have time. In nanoplastics research one major issue is the fragmented method and incompatible data. And in your opinion, how critical is it today to build an open, interoperable ocean data system that's including micro and nanoplastic level pollution data so that different teams can finally see one coherent picture instead of these disconnected fragments that we see today.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. Well, you know, along those lines, you know, we're working with a company called Tanzle. And that's really their goal is to bring real world data together in a way that we can see it, you know, create actionable choices, drive better decision-making. And we're actively looking for people that want to link their data into it so that we can pull things together. And we're really focusing, again, around the Hope Spots to see what communities are doing, you know? Maybe they're all tracking sea turtles by example. Now we can go in and say, hey, other Hope Spot. What are your sea turtles doing? What are some of the things that are putting them at risk? Is it light pollution from new resorts? Is it plastic that they're eating?

Are there bacterial infections or viral infections? How can we kind of start sharing information and not siloing it, but share the information across in a visible platform where we can drive better decision making and also drive policy change because.

Olga Schmidt

International.

Liz Taylor

Just dealing with hard facts, not it's warm outside today, but no, it's, you know, 28 C you know, yes, it's a fact. [

Olga Schmidt

Absolutely.] It is or it isn't, you know, and, and having it in one place like that is a big project that we're working on right now.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

That's dissemination of knowledge.

Liz Taylor

Right.

Olga Schmidt

That's where it starts.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. And being able to look at things like, you know, wildfires.

Olga Schmidt

Mhm.

Liz Taylor

Which way is the wind blowing? Am I going to be affected by smoke and ash? Is it going to go out over the ocean and create a situation where we might have a dead zone? You know, but that being able to use real world data predictively to drive better decision making and to help us in an emergency as well.

Olga Schmidt

And NASA has highlighted that your projects with Doctor Sylvia Earle demonstrate how ocean and space exploration can strengthen one another when it comes specifically to micro- and nanoplastic pollution. What tools are most urgently needed today for better mapping? Autonomous platforms, deep sea sampling, new sensors materially, or do we need something entirely different to get this data?

Liz Taylor

Well, I think there's more sampling that can and should be done, starting in sort of municipal wastewater plants of the mountainous ocean and river interface zone — any place you have kind of a large body of water enter freshwater intersecting with the ocean, it's carrying a lot of plastic with it typically, and a lot of other sediments and chemicals. So we need kind of a broader sensor network that's reporting in real time. But we also need to make sure that these sensors that we're building are not becoming part of the plastic problem, because I see a lot of people are like, “Oh, I need the cheaper sensor. I need to deploy, you know, 50,000 little balls out in the ocean to take real world data.” But then what happens to them at life end?

So from a manufacturing perspective, I always, you know, all my team here, we always think about, okay, we're going to build something. What happens to the life end, and how can we make sure we recover it, and that we build for adaptive reuse or we build for recyclability of the product? So it's not just sort of build more sensors, but build correctly, and so that we don't become just kind of another…

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Problem. Liz: …Source of pollution.

Olga Schmidt

Part of the problem. Exactly.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Exactly.

Olga Schmidt

And doctor Earl, you have supported the idea of recognizing ecocide as an international crime, which carries a strong moral message. So where do you personally see the line? When does environmental damage stop being a mistake of civilization and become something that can be called a crime against life, and what needs to be done to prevent crossing that line?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We face challenges of our own making. Wales cannot fix these problems. They didn't cause them. We did. And we have to figure it out. And I don't have straightforward answers, but I do know that we need to address them, but it starts with knowing that you've got a problem, right?

Olga Schmidt

So there should be consequences.

Liz Taylor

Oh yeah. For right now, you know, wildlife trafficking, which essentially is illegal fishing, is wildlife trafficking.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

And legal fishing.

Liz Taylor

And legal fishing is almost as bad. But, you know, the consequences are very, very low. And if you think about the ties that any kind of particularly illegal fishing activity has to other kinds of crime. So it can be arms trafficking, human trafficking, drug trafficking. Those things always are sort of are always kind of tied together and especially the human trafficking aspect. We've done a lot of work with Ian Urbina in his Outlaw Ocean Project, and he's very succinctly documented that, that there are people who have been literally kidnapped from small villages, small island nations were assured a job as a nanny, or assured a job as a gardener somewhere.

And they get there and they find themselves out on a fishing vessel for years at a time and no contact with family. If they stop fishing, if they aren't doing the job, they throw them overboard. And they've got footage of people being thrown overboard and shot at sea because they weren't doing the slavery work of fishing. And it's a shocking problem. And, you know, it comes back to your table as catch of the day. And people just don't have a clue as to the huge impacts that it has.

Olga Schmidt

Where it comes from.

Liz Taylor

Where it comes from. And there needs to be accountability. There needs to be, you know, a policy that's very direct and.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Straightforward.

Liz Taylor

And straightforward that there are consequences for these kinds of activities.

Olga Schmidt

In the context of protecting life in the ocean, could you describe the role your project Mission Blue and DOER Marine play today?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Well Mission Blue was not meant to be another larger organization, but rather something that could be supportive of the concept awareness to make people understand the nature of the danger we're currently in. It's growing, despite my wish that it not be yet another large bureaucracy of some sort, but we now have people in 116 countries. A lot of volunteers, some who are engaged with compensation—the idea being that they can be catalysts for change in a positive way, to be a voice for nature, to identify places that they know and care about and are willing to commit to taking from wherever they are to move to a higher level of protection. Ideally fully protected, as in you'd expect of a national park.

But any place, wherever it is to get from, wherever they are to improve circumstances, that's the goal. And it is happening. Sometimes with success, engaging others, working with others to move to full protection of a place that matters for whatever reason. All places matter. There's no part of the planet that is superfluous. So anything that people can do anywhere obviously helps. And in some ways, the Hope Spot concept is inspiring others to be aware that they can make a difference, even if they don't formally fall within these areas that are outlined, Esri StoryMap with GIS technology. There is.. company is Esri. Esri is a GIS-based organization taking information and layers of information.

We've done this for each of the Hope Spots so that it provides bases around the world, like field stations that already are and increasingly will be gathering information that can be shared. And given the new technologies that enable going beyond where divers and most information has been gathered in the first 100m or so of the ocean. Working with DOER, with submersible technology at least creating a model in French Polynesia during the coming year. A model that is again giving back something that can be financially productive but at the same time nature positive in terms of the results.

Liz Taylor

Right. So that is kind of the template of the model that we're working on in French Polynesia with the Tetiaroa society and the Tetiaroa Hope Spot. And then, you know, yes, bringing submersibles, yes, we're bringing new kinds of training to the community, new jobs, new education and the capacity to take all that GIS data out there and load it up into one platform with Tanzle so that we can see big trends. What's going on with turtles in Tetiaroa? What's going on with turtles in the Gulf? What's going on with animals everywhere?

But pulling all those elements together, kind of in this community action model so that you do get the data, but you've got to bring the technology in that to help us get the data and to give people those direct experiences. And the submersibles are, of course, the most impactful piece of technology that we have…

Dr. Sylvia Earle

The most, yes.

Liz Taylor

Because, you know, Sylvia's done it. She's taken sort of the president of or the environmental minister of Ecuador down into the submersible and he's kind of apprehensive and looking around in the bubbles in the water coming over. And then he's got the big smile and he comes down, and then out of nowhere, a Mola mola comes through and kind of gives him the side eye. And he's like a small child. He's like, “Oh my God!” You know, he's just so excited. But but that's the fundamental change that can come with those direct experiences and as she says, with knowing comes caring. And so the more information we get, the more experiences.

Olga Schmidt

Absolutely.

Liz Taylor

And the more we can show people, the more we can level up into thinking about how we take care of the planet as a whole.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I would like to see Mission Blue, and certainly the DOER with more submersibles. I'd like to see this seriously scaled up. And when I suggested I think I used the word bureaucracy, I don't mean to imply that all the conservation organizations are bureaucracies. They're not. But they get… I'd like to see the people who are on site, given the resources (Liz: Yes.) needed to be able to explore, to gather knowledge and share it. We need to change the way people think about the value of the ocean. Working everywhere at every level we can to just awaken people to how fortunate we are in the 21st century to do what none of our predecessors could even imagine.

But we need people to understand that this does take.. if we really want to speed it up, we need resources to deploy in all these places where people are on the ground actually living the problems and looking for solutions. And if we can’t make this happen just in the next five years or so, this is the speed that we need…

Liz Taylor

Yeah, we honestly.

Olga Schmidt

Need to move at a very fast speed.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Because we need to speed scale.

Liz Taylor

And move quickly.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We're seeing a world really going in this direction. We need to shift it and tip our behavior, our understanding, our laws that are perverse and sometimes favor because nature has a zero accounting base. It's understandable that we have taken ourselves in this direction, consuming nature as if it will always be there. We need to think, “Look, here's the evidence. We're consuming the world.” (Olga: Facts.) We need to shift to understand nature. Official life has to be worth more than a dead fish, a whale alive, a thousand year old tree, or even a hundred year old tree. It's taken such an investment. There are values that we need to consider.

Maybe turning that tree into board feet of lumber after some consideration may be the right thing to do, but maybe we just need to step back and think, “Here we are. Nature is declining because of us. What can we do? Land and sea. How can we communicate problems and solutions? How can we inspire people to get out of their shell to get out of the thinking that there's nothing we can do. ‘We might as well just enjoy ourselves.’”

Liz Taylor

That's right. It's a terrible attitude, isn't it?

Olga Schmidt

No, but that's actually…

Dr. Sylvia Earle

I can do something. Everybody can do something. Nobody can do all the things that need to be done. But if people take the power they have and put it to work.

Olga Schmidt

Yeah, it's like we're all drops in the ocean, but together we make a whole ocean, right?

Liz Taylor

Right. We make the whole ocean. And I mean, I love seeing people come through. And I've seen kids particularly. They're all over, you know, buy nothing marketplace. They're bartering, they're exchanging. They're not just going out to the local big box store and buying the next, you know, (Sylvia: Cool thing.) cool thing, but they're looking, they're doing more thrifting, they're doing more buying used goods and refinishing them. So there is kind of a turn in attitude that we're seeing that it's not just about, you know, running to the furniture store, but you could go and find (Olga: Something) some vintage piece, right? And kind of buy something that has some meaning or some history to it.

Olga Schmidt

Reuse.

Liz Taylor

And reuse so that reusing, the adaptive reuse and then using less, being more strategic in buying goods, if you're going to buy something, make it a really durable good.

Olga Schmidt

At ALLATRA Global Research Center, an important question for us is how to ensure that scientific knowledge does not remain confined within professional circles. We aim to connect research, public communication and policy dialogue through reports, films and expert discussions. From your perspective, what helps science truly reach society and policymakers so that knowledge becomes not just information, but action?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Historically, at least in my lifetime, scientists feel that they pay a price if they step out of their lane and communicate with policymakers or the public at large. A shift in attitude is happening where grants that are given to support science sometimes include encouragement to take that knowledge that surely communicates it to your fellow scientists, but make provision for making the public aware of the significance of what you're doing. So it's changing, perhaps because of the overall awareness of the importance of making known climate science, not just to your fellow scientists, like, “Oh, that's cool. You found out what? Great. Let's go have a beer.” But to tell people in a language they can understand…

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Olga Schmidt

Yes.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

…without compromising the truth. You need to have ways of expressing the nature of discoveries without exaggerating and without losing the significance. So I think it's moving in the right direction. We're not there yet.

Olga Schmidt

Yeah.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. And it is kind of all those things. And as you said in your original TED talk, you use everything at your disposal. You know, be it, you know, books, films, you know, music, any kind of media, whatever you're good at.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Whatever.

Liz Taylor

Like you.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Like working with you.

Liz Taylor

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Be the voice.

Olga Schmidt

We're really trying and our big thing is, as you said, putting scientific knowledge into information that is accessible to every person that people can read and understand what it means.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Should be plain.

Olga Schmidt

So that they… yes, so they can understand what's going on with our world, with the human nature, with the biosphere, and so on. Because sometimes these researchers are written in such a language, it's very hard to understand and to see what's going on, and you're not going to read it. Even scientists and scientists are so divided, so separated. You know, one studies one field, another studies another field. But we need, you know, a scientific community that works together because as we talked about, it's, you know, we all live on one planet earth. Everything is interconnected and interrelated, and we need to make sure all the science is, you know, in one database that's accessible to all so that we can study it.

Liz Taylor

Right and be able to then, you know, make better decisions.

Olga Schmidt

Better decisions.

Liz Taylor

Better.

Olga Schmidt

Yes.

Liz Taylor

And not just think about how can we exploit this? Or how can we get more fish per hour? (

Olga Schmidt

Exactly.) How do we really do a more credible job of looking after our life support system? And just to finish off, if you had the opportunity to address the entire world today, people of all professions, nations and perspectives: scientists, parents, teens, decision makers, and those just learning to see the ocean with their hearts. What is one thing you would ask humanity to finally understand right now?

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Protect nature, especially the ocean, as if your life depends on it. Because it does.

Liz Taylor

That's how we… we always say that. But it's very true. You've got to protect the life support system, protect water, protect, you know, the land, protect nature.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Watch what you eat.

Liz Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Watch what you wear.

Liz Taylor

Yeah. Watch your personal choices. And, and when you, you know, find something that really works for you, you've shown that one Patagonia fleece in your closet you've kept for 25 years. Embrace it. Wear it. Tell the story, you know, that you're still wearing it after all this time. You know, don't fall to the fast fashion.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Set a trend.

Liz Taylor

Set a trend.

Olga Schmidt

Set a new trend.

Liz Taylor

Yes, set a trend and share it.

Olga Schmidt

And, you know, we just want to thank you so much. I just want to thank you for inviting us here today, for this interview. We're so happy to be here, the whole team is excited to meet you, and you, Liz. Thank you for setting this up. And we're really grateful to learn from you.

Liz Taylor

Yeah, we've really enjoyed speaking with you guys and really look forward to, you know, continuing the conversation.

Olga Schmidt

Yes. Thank you so much.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Thank you. That's so beautiful. The whole world.

Olga Schmidt

Doctor Earl, we're so happy. Thank you so much for inviting us here today. We are so pleased to meet you. You are truly an amazing woman, an amazing person that has done so much for this planet. And doctor Earl, on behalf of ALLATRA and our international community of people from many nations, it is my profound honor to present you with the Honor of Humanity Medal. This medal is presented in recognition of your historic and monumental contribution to ocean exploration, marine science and the protection of Earth's living seas. Through your lifetime of pioneering research, scientific leadership, and ocean conservation, you have served humanity, the Earth, and the future generations.

And please accept this medal as a symbol of our sincere gratitude and respect for your extraordinary service to the Earth and to all life.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

Thank you for this beautiful recognition that I'm not sure that I deserve. I'll keep trying. There's so much to do. We're right on the edge of the greatest era of exploration. And taking care of this little blue place that sits right in the center.

Olga Schmidt

You are truly amazing. And we are honored and we have a lot to learn from you still.

Dr. Sylvia Earle

We all have a lot to learn from the ocean. Sure. But thank you. And thanks for what you're doing to make people aware of the magnitude of the problems we face. Because it's only when you know that there are problems, that you can find solutions and you're doing both. Thank you.

Olga Schmidt

Thank you so much.