Speech Delivered by James Cameron
At the Celebrity Sailboat Race to Save Coral Reefs
To Benefit the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation
June 2, 2001

"Seen from space ours is a blue planet, not a brown one. It is a planet of water, and though we are creatures of the land, we depend on the seas for our survival.  The phytoplankton in the seas create the majority of our oxygen and remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. They also act as the bottom of a vast food chain from which we harvest a large percentage of our food.

Our destiny is interlocked with the destiny of the sea.  If the seas die, we die. 

In the past couple of years I have been privileged to get to know a group of people who are studying the lessons of the sea, and acting upon what they are learning. I met Gaie Alling at the Mars Society conference in 1999, where she was presenting a paper on closed system biospheres for human life support in space. I was doing research for a film project about an expedition to Mars, and I wound up interviewing her, and travelling to Santa Fe to meet her colleagues in the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation.  They impressed me as a dedicated group of scientists who were putting themselves on the line to protect and to understand Earth's ecosystems.

It also turned out that in addition to Gaie's interests in space, she was a diver and

a marine researcher who had travelled the globe gathering data on coral reef

ecosystems. So as fellow divers, we traded sea stories, and she told me tales of

the brave ship Heraclitus, the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation's research ship,

with its crew of dedicated young volunteer researchers sailing distant seas to

gather data on the health of coral reefs. I became fascinated by this group of

people who had committed themselves so wholeheartedly to the noble cause of

saving the oceans, and I pledged to help them however I could.

I was in Singapore recently with Jean Michel Cousteau and we paid a visit to the

Heraclitus while it was in port there. The crew invited us to dinner and we spent a fascinating evening hearing about how they work, and tales of adventure on the

high seas as they braved storms and pirate infested waters to gather data in

seldom studied places. They seemed almost like a priesthood to me, in the way

they had dedicated themselves to a belief and a cause, and forsworn the usual

motivating forces of our materialistic dot.com world.  Their idealism and

self-sacrifice were inspirational to both Jean Michel and myself. Despite their

idealism, the folks at Planetary Coral Reef Foundation are solid researchers, and

they are out there in the real world everyday, getting their hands dirty, both

gathering the data necessary and putting into effect a real plan.

The first step to protecting the oceans, and specifically the fragile coral reef

habitats, is to know exactly where they are, who lives there, in terms of fish and invertebrate populations, and what condition they are in. To this end the RV

Heraclitus has travelled around the globe three times since its launch in  1976,

gathering hard data in remote places, data which allows the PCRF team to piece

together the jigsaw puzzle of baseline data where the reefs are, what species

exist in each, and over time which reefs have remained healthy and which

have not.

Sadly, the trends are largely negative.  Wherever they go they are seeing

bleaching, the signature of stressed or dying coral, and reduced diversity.  The

reefs are dying at an alarming rate.  Thirty-eight percent of Florida's coral reefs

have died in just four years. We think of the oceans as vast and endless, but

human population is concentrated mostly along the shore and the life-sustaining

biomass of the seas is concentrated over the shallow continental shelves, directly

adjacent to the toxic outflow of our industrial civilization so we cannot help

but have a tremendous and direct impact on the web of life in the seas.

The coral reefs are the rainforests of the sea, the seat of its biodiversity, and the

strongest indicator of its health. 

Rising water temperatures caused by global warming, as well as industrial and

organic pollution, are major factors in coral death.   Overfishing denudes the reefs of life, and the highly destructive dynamite and cyanide fishing practiced in many third

world countries kill not only the fish but the reef itself.

I sat in my office a few weeks ago and listened to the head of Scripps

Oceanographic Institute tell me that the oceans have about 10 years.  What he

meant by that was that in the next ten years we could lose the battle to preserve

diversity of life in the seas as we now know it. I made a decision that day to push back some of my movie projects, and to focus for a while on the oceans, to do what I

could do as a film-maker to remind people of how important this fight is.

So I've teamed with Jean Michel Cousteau to make a TV series and a trio of

Imax 3-D films, based on a three year round the world voyage of underwater exploration, which is starting this summer. The series is called Ocean Challenge,

because it is a challenge we all face, and because in my mind the sea challenges

us, not only to understand its mysteries, but to learn how to live harmoniously

with it.

I have been a scuba diver since 1969, and I have dived all over the world, on

some of the most beautiful reefs.  I have been privileged to see wonders marine

life with its profusion of colors and forms beyond human imagining.  I desperately

want my children and grandchildren, and all future generations to be able to

experience these wonders but that may not be possible. I've seen with my own

eyes the destructive effect we are having.

Every hundred million years or so a comet or asteroid hits the Earth, and 80 or

90 percent of all species on the planet vanish overnight. Well, human civilization

is like a comet impact in slow motion.  It's in slow motion relative to the scale of

our lifetimes, but to nature it's an eye-blink. Right now species are dying off at a

rate a hundred thousand times faster than normal evolution. Millions of

undiscovered species remain to be identified in the oceans but we will kill half

of them before we will even have a chance to give them names.  We are the mean

old comet this time, we are the Armageddon. 

Human beings live in denial most of the time.  They deny to themselves that

anything bad can happen to them. The passengers on Titanic didn't think

anything bad could happen. We are on a ship right now, voyaging through space

a ship both vast and grand, and yet also, like Titanic, fragile and complex. And

we are the first species in history to be at the helm of that great blue ship. And

on this ship, if we hit an iceberg, there are no lifeboats.

The Planetary Coral Reef Foundation is doing something about it, but they need

our help.  They have a very sound plan to use satellite technology to get global

baseline data on reef health, and to correlate that data with ground truthing from

their own research vessel and from other researchers. Only with the data in hand,

and with the problem quantified and understood, can the alarm be made clear and

credible enough for people to demand that their governments take action. And

we must take action now to preserve a biological heritage which has been

created over hundreds of millions of years.

We are the most economically powerful nation on Earth.  If we can't afford to do

this, how can we expect people in China and Brazil and Indonesia to do it? 

We are the most technologically advanced nation on Earth.  If we don't figure

 this out, and set an example by doing so, who do we think is going to do it for

us?

We are here today, by definition, because we are friends of the sea.  I want you

all to do what you can, by supporting Planetary Coral Reef Foundation, certainly,

but also in your lives and in your work, to accept the stewardship role and

become warriors for the ocean. But all that doesn't mean we can't have fun.  So

today, in addition to raising some much needed funding, we're going sailing. 

I want to point out that I am not a sailor.  I have never sailed.  My motto has

always been give me something with a throttle a jetski, a powerboat, a fast car,

a helicopter.  Now recently I've come to realize that my energy squandering

testosterone driven ways have to change, just as our culture is going to need to

change, and so here today we will see wind power at work a powerful

sustainable source of energy which does not require us to blacken the horizon

with oil derricks. 

So I'm going to learn to sail today, and it may not be pretty but it is a measure

of my dedication to the cause, and to Gaie Alling's persuasiveness, that I am

here today to flail about publicly.

So I apologize to my unfortunate team members in advance for hampering

your chances for victory. "