About why we need to stay positive about the future of our oceans

You’re famously hopeful and inspiring.

But in the face of things like the worst El

Niño we have ever faced, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere having passed 400ppm some time ago, how do you maintain your optimism? Where do you get this reservoir of hope from?

The greatest reason for hope is knowing what the problems are. As never before, we have insight into knowing that the oceans are in trouble and therefore so are we. Imagine if we didn’t know? We would continue doing the same stupid things, or things that we did in ignorance that now look stupid in retrospect; nobody really understood that we could extract 90 percent of the tuna, swordfish, sharks and so on, or that even if we did all these things, it would matter.

Now we can see that what we do to Nature, what we do to the ocean, what we do to the sharks and the tuna and the whales, the coral and the kelp forests, the seagrass meadows, we are doing to ourselves. This is our home and we really have shown capacity to destroy. We know how to kill; we have to do a better job of caring.