061 You are Sylvia Earle’s right hand. Could you share with us any experience or lesson you have learned from her? I can say lots of things about Sylvia. The truth is that it is a privilege for me to be able to work with her. She is an incredible woman, I never get tired of listening to her. Her way of thinking... There is something that I love and that is that she is very positive but she is also very critical and makes a criticism that I always say “It is what is necessary, not what is possible”. Usually we end up negotiating with ourselves but we actually have to talk about what is necessary for the planet. That is vital. What I love about her is that she always sees the glass half full. Hence, when we talk about the blue tunnel in the Pacific. We know that there is less than 1% of its historical population left and she always says “The bad news is that we have lost more than 99%, the good news is that there is still 1% left”. It all depends on how, as we have all the elements to build again and give nature a space. Everyone is capable to work for nature. We should start by getting to know it more. Treating it better and spending much more time in natural places. In every country on the planet there are natural areas and small places that you can enjoy. It is also important to connect with those things that leave an imprint in one’s life. Everyone has a favorite place, a place they love, a place they would defend, and I think we have to defend those places because we are losing more and more of them and we are not able to rebuild. Once you lose that, there is no going back. It is time to change that mentality and be able to treasure those ecosystems that are incredible and have marked us in our lives. It is the best way to get closer and that can be done from all sides. Photo: Jennifer Hayes & Taylor Griffith. What discoveries about the ocean have surprised you the most? The ocean keeps surprising me constantly. There are thousands of things I still don’t know and Sylvia is always teaching me. It seems that one of the most impressive things is the fact that there are species that can communicate thousands of miles away and can also smell hundreds or thousands of miles away. There are more species on the planet that live in the darkness of the ocean than on the entire planet itself. There are places in the depths that we could be finding new species every hour and that we still have a long way to go to understand. I love that mystery and at the same time I love that we can’t control everything. We don’t know everything. How can society be involved in ocean protection and conservation? Firstly, society has to know the importance of the ocean. We look at the sky and see its blue colour and people take it for granted. The blue sky was generated by life in the ocean. The ocean is the largest producer of oxygen and the largest carbon sink. It is the place where there is the greatest diversity on the planet and it is where life on the planet came from. No matter where you are, you are connected to the ocean. If you had to give a piece of advice or a life lesson to someone what would you tell them? I am not very good at teaching but when I drop off my children them at school I always tell them: “Be respectful and be happy”. I believe that if we use those two premises around us and with all the people we communicate with every day we all could be happier. At the end of the day that is what we all want. WHAT IS YOUR RECOMMENDATION FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE FIELD OF CONSERVATION & THE ENVIRONMENT BUT DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START?
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