Letter From the Editor, May 2011
Tunicate From the Sea of Japan Kevin Schafer/Getty Images Two years ago, I sat with roughly 1,500 fellow attendees of the annual TED Conference and listened as one of the world's greatest explorers explained why we must stop plundering the oceans and start protecting them-immediately. "Business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone," the explorer said. "Imagine the ocean without fish. Imagine what that means to our life-support system." "We have to do everything possible, and we have to do it now."There's a decent chance you've heard of Sylvia Earle, the author of that talk, but it's quite possible you haven't, because in this culture oceanographers aren't astronauts; even a great scientist who's led at least 50 expeditions and spent more than 6,000 hours underwater is never going to have the name recognition of...