SYLVIA EARLE : Call Of The Sea

You have to love it before you are moved to save it,” says Sylvia Earle, the marine biologist known as “Her Deepness” since the time in 1979, off the coast of Oahu, when she was cut loose from a submarine and walked freely on the ocean floor, 1,250 ft. beneath the water’s surface. The object of her affection requires love of a special magnitude and magnanimity. One has to concede at the outset that the ocean is too vast, deep and secretive to be completely known. It is capable of casual murder and filled with structures that make Picasso’s dreams seem ordinary. More demanding still, it does not need you. Nothing on land can live without the ocean, yet the sea can do fine on its own.

At the same time, it defines and characterizes the earth–one flowing body of water, with different names and climates, and covering almost 75% of the planet. The oceans encompass 97% by volume of all the earth’s living space. Nearly half the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the sea. The thing is in our forgotten history and our chromosomes, which may explain why people stare at the ocean with such sweet, vacant yearnings. Stare long enough, and you can embrace the whole world with your eyes. Even then, you are taking in only the surface.

Led by Her Deepness, I traipse along the western edge of central California, in the region called Big Sur, which begins in the south with William Randolph Hearst’s monument to the search for happiness, at San Simeon, and extends 90 miles north to Carmel. Earle has enlarged our purview to include the Monterey Bay area 12 miles farther northwest, so that we are able to look at Elkhorn Slough off Moss Landing and Monterey Canyon. This underwater chasm, as huge as the Grand Canyon, reaches out 45 nautical miles to the foot of the continental slope, and down 9,600 ft. At the top it ripples black, like a tarpaulin on a baseball field in the rain. Below, it contains life-forms that range from the silver machinery of sharks to jellies in fringes like Victorian lampshades, the color of fire.

Big Sur is the place that brought John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Ansel Adams and Robinson Jeffers to their knees. Any one of the elements is overwhelmingly impressive on its own: the killer cliffs pitched to the Pacific; the creased hills; the redwoods; the thick, gray knots of the cypresses; the rocky balconies from which one may look down on eagles; the naked, stranded rocks; the steep and carpeted Santa Lucia Mountains; the tide pools; the life in the tide pools.

“It was here at Big Sur that I first learned to say Amen!” wrote Henry Miller. From the Point Sur Lighthouse, Earle looks out at a long breath of fog over the water and says, “I love life.”

She is a small-boned, fearless woman with a kid’s keen face, deep brown eyes set far apart, and a jaw of character, like the young Katharine Hepburn’s. Sometimes the alertness in her eyes and the quick, broad smile are disconnected. At the age of 63, she is at the bottom of her field–scientist, explorer, advocate. This year she is explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, which has a $5 million grant from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund to launch the five-year Sustainable Seas Expeditions project. As its leader, Earle will use a new, highly maneuverable submarine to study the waters of the 12 national marine sanctuaries.

She was captain of the first team of women to live beneath the ocean’s surface; the five aquanauts spent two weeks in an underwater laboratory off the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1970. She has gone on at least 50 expeditions and spent more than 6,000 hours undersea, including a record-setting solo descent to 3,000 ft. in a submersible craft known as Deep Rover. In the 1979 dive that gave her the royal nickname, she became the mirror image, and the equal, of the moonwalkers.

In her book Sea Change and before legislators and others in power, she argues that the ocean gives us a 4 billion-year-old legacy–the living history of the world–and that we are blithely squandering our inheritance by way of pollution and overfishing. What is more: there is so much left to see in the oceans. The few existing manned submersibles can reach only half their depth. The benthic, or bottom-dwelling, plants and animals represent the least-known ecosystem on the planet. Earle feels personal responsibility for the ocean’s future and safety. She takes fish personally. She once bumped into “a grouper with an attitude.”

All this she discloses as we drive the ledge of the coastal highway, the road chipped into the mountains by convicts in the 1930s. She gives me wrong driving directions time and time again. I begin to understand why she spends so much of her life avoiding land.

What I am able to see on this chunk of the Pacific is a minute fraction of what there is to see. At Point Lobos in Carmel, the mist creates false mountains over the water. The waves are humped like porpoises. Kelp, giant forests of seaweed by which Darwin was enthralled, shows only at the top. These plants, which can grow at a rate of 20 in. a day, reach down 100 ft. to granite reefs. The kelp is tethered by stipes-stems, structures that connect the base, or holdfast, to the leaflike blades. Gas-filled floats at the base of the blades keep the fronds standing upright.

Surrounding the kelp is a dense and delicate garden of tentacled plants that sway in unison, like backup singers. Pink, orange, rose, green, lavender. Plants with Einstein’s hair, plants with Don King’s and Phyllis Diller’s–all kept graceful by the water. The garden is vertical as well as horizontal. On its floor sea stars crawl on their bellies like fat recruits in basic training. Above them swim the gulping bells of the jellies. In the intertidal zone limpets and other mollusks graze on algae in the rocks. Cancer crabs attack hermit crabs. An anemone divides to reproduce and becomes its own sibling. On the surface the kelp flattens into canopies, 3 ft. thick, that weaken the waves and provide otters with hammocks, where they snooze and eat.

Otters! Is there anything in nature so ridiculously content? Not enough that they wear leather sleeves; they are their own dining rooms. From the shore I watch a few of them do the backstroke while cracking clams open on their chests. They wrap themselves in leaves so as not to drift away while sleeping. First Russians, then Americans killed them for their fur, and they became almost extinct by the early 1900s. Declared endangered, they now number more than 2,000 along California’s central coast. Earle tells me she once saw an otter opening clams with a Coke bottle.

On the swampy inlet of Elkhorn Slough, we putter about with Andrew De Vogelaere from the National Marine Sanctuary in Monterey. The wetland is home to lingcod, halibut and surfperch, a plate-shaped fish that looks like its own fossil. Clams hide in the algae, using a muscular “foot” for digging, and sticking their siphon “necks” out to the world overhead. Mud-flat crabs scuttle across the shoreline. In deeper water, anchovies swim in schools like clouds of silver. All live in the tense company of thousands of birds–avocets, curlews, Caspian terns, plover, brown pelicans, herons, sandpipers, killdeer. Dowitchers use their beaks to tweeze snails out of the mud. Otters are in otter heaven. One catches me admiring as it munches on a clam and registers its absurd annoyance before diving away.

About 200 harbor seals sleep in the slough in the daytime and dine in Monterey Bay at night. Sea lions bark with their Harpo’s horns, and bask in the mud flats. They look like giant seedpods with innocent faces. De Vogelaere tells us that the enormous snub-trunked elephant seals are returning to Big Sur. Two were brought in at the start. Now there are 4,000.

“They’ve taken over Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco,” he says.

“It’s justice,” Earle says with a smile. “They were here first.”

The next day Earle, Joanne Flanders from the marine sanctuary, William Douros, superintendent of the sanctuary, and I go out five miles to Monterey Canyon. We catch sight of humpback whales, including a mother and baby, moving along like dark, partly surfaced subs and feeding on dense and frantic krill, tiny crustaceans. The humpback grows to a length of 45 ft. Its head is a flat shelf; two fins extend below the body at the eyes. One whale swims close to the boat and does a flamboyant in-your-face with its fluked tail before descending. When a whale goes under, it leaves a “print,” a large oval of water on the surface, calm as cellophane.

Dolphins go by in motorcycle-gang formation at a distance from the boat. Three of them break away from the others to get a closer look at us, and find nothing worth seeing. Dolphins have individual signature whistles. Orcas click in distinctive dialects. The humpbacks we see make no sound for us, but their complex songs are said to cover the key range of a piano.

Out here in open waters are larvaceans that weave their mucous nets in the shape of human heads, comb jellies, barrel-shaped salps and 30-ft.-long siphonophores, close relatives of the Portuguese man-of-war. Without advanced nervous systems, brains, eyes, all these creatures are nonetheless resourceful and self-sufficient, able to hunt and defend themselves. Some exist in chains of organisms, their lines free yet connected, like Saul Steinberg drawings. They feed by using tentacles or their mucous nets and drift along in undreamed-of forms–now a bracelet of liquid diamonds, now a neon trapeze, now a clown’s ruffle, now a bishop’s hat that can collapse itself when it needs to kill.

Here too are the suckers, the cephalopods–chambered nautilus, cuttlefish, octopus and squid. They communicate with light and color, and they can make art of reproduction; the squids create egg cases in the shape of white translucent fingers.

Most beautiful and mysterious to me is the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell. Its body is salmon colored, its eyes blue–no ordinary blue, but blue that defines the color, the first blue, the blue open eye of the sea. Once thought extinct, it can turn inside out, and hide in a cloak of itself. If one doubts the range of nature’s imagination–or sense of humor–picture a Vampyroteuthis staring into a self-created darkness, 3,000 ft. below the surface, while nearer shore, an otter snacks at the top.

“I want you to meet a fish,” Earle says to me. Without a submersible handy, we take the easy way and visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, directed by marine biologist Julie Packard. Her Deepness takes to the place like a five-year-old. She leads me from exhibit to exhibit, dividing her attention between my education and anyone else staring at a fish. To a girl in pigtails eyeing a flounder she says, “See? He’s looking at you too!” Earle is one of those dangerous people whose buoyant charm can make people do preposterous things. At a mere signal of her hand, I find myself on all fours, crawling through the toddler entrance to the exhibit for children.

“I brought my mom here before she died, to show her what kept me going to the ocean,” she says. We come to a shovelnose guitarfish, named for obvious reasons. A grouper rows by, sculling with its pectorals. We take in the synchronized swimming of sardines and the pensive patrol of a leopard shark. She points out mackerel gleaming in the light. “I have been diving in shallows like these with the moon overhead,” she says. Only half kidding, she adds, “I consider them all to be holy mackerel.”

She is not always the easiest person to be with, especially at meals; one loses one’s appetite for fish. She can rhapsodize about an Atlantic bluefin tuna until you not only regret every piece of bluefin sushi in your life; you also begin to see the tuna her way–as the lion of the deep. “They are perfectly adapted to their environment,” she says. They can travel thousands of miles, sometimes at 60 m.p.h. And they are built for speed; their fins retract into slots in their sides. She notes they are also responsible citizens that, by producing “zillions of eggs,” feed other animals. It is our species’ feeding that she complains about. At Tokyo fish markets a single bluefin goes for as much as $75,000. The Western Atlantic population is down to 10% of its 1970 levels.

I ask her what the attraction of her life’s work is. The scientist in her is drawn to “the place where the history of life actually can be found, not in fossils but in living creatures that represent life as it has been, perhaps, from the beginning of time.” The privilege of her vocation is “like having a chance to dive into your own circulatory system and swim around and see how it all fits together.”

The environmentalist in her cites the interdependency of sea and land. The redwoods in the region not only collect the moisture that comes to them as fog, but they also create a suitable habitat for other life. “Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss,” she says. “If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you’ll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.”

“We’re just doing our thing,” she says, “living, but living without the awareness of connections between what happens to the oceans and what happens to us.” It has taken 10,000 years to face up to the fact that “we cannot make a living on a sustained basis from terrestrial wildlife. Not to say that we didn’t try. We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.” Her worry now is that people are altering the ocean. If you want to eat fish, grow them, she argues, offering support for the burgeoning aquaculture industry–in which such delicacies as salmon and trout are raised in aquatic pens–as long as the pens themselves do not despoil the coastline.

As of 1995, 22% of recognized marine fisheries were overexploited or already depleted, and 44% more were at their limits of exploitation. Nontarget fish are swept up in the process. Dredges and trawls destroy habitats–Earle calls the invaders “bulldozer equivalents”–as they drag the ocean floor.

Another threat comes from man-made fertilizers, which wash off fields into streams and eventually into the ocean. This spurs the harmful overgrowth of algae and the spread of toxic microbes that can kill fish and cause human health problems, such as liver and kidney ills and amnesia. Billions of fish died along the Middle and Southern Atlantic coast in recent years because of suspected pollution from upstream sources. On a tour of the land area around Big Sur, my guide from the California Coastal Commission, Lee Otter (yes), noted as a caution and as a fact that “something always lives downstream from something else.”

Earle notes that the world’s decision makers are as culpable as the smaller fish. “How about the people in the Soviet Union who authorized the dumping of nuclear subs and other radioactive waste, the use of rivers as open sewers, the taking of endangered whales when other nations agreed to abstain?” she says. “Or decision makers in the U.S. who gave the go-ahead years ago to reroute waterways in South Florida at great expense–a decision that has now been reversed, at great expense?”

Some of her suggested solutions to these problems are enchanting, if unlikely, such as her urging citizens to take a two-by-four to complacent politicians. A less picturesque solution is volunteerism–getting the public to clean beaches, lawyers to work pro bono for the environment and so forth. The third solution is knowledge. “Far and away the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance,” she says. “But we can do something about that.” After recent explorations of the galaxies, she concluded that all we really know is that the earth is unique. “The future is here,” she says, “this aquatic planet blessed with an ocean.”

Our last day together, she is asked to sit for a photograph at the shore near Point Lobos. She hops from rock to rock, settles and stares out. What does she see? What does anybody see who gazes longingly, devotedly on that great wet wilderness? Melville said that people find their souls in the ocean. That may have been his way of paying tribute to our microbial past. Out there does some poor fish imagine its evolutionary future? If people work to preserve the sea, will we also save our souls?

I doubt that Her Deepness is thinking about any of that. You have to love the ocean before you are moved to save it. She stares out at her world where tuna roar, groupers have attitudes and the Vampyroteuthis infernalis stares back with its God’s blue eye, and winks.

For more about the environment and its champions, visit our Heroes for the Planet website at time.com/heroes