It isn't too late to shift from the swift, sharp decline of ocean systems in recent decades to an era of steady recovery. There is time, and there is a growing awareness, which is the best way to counter indifference. People who know might care.

We understand that we must make peace with nature - that our lives depend on it.

When you are a child you learn your alphabet, your numbers, but increasingly, we must learn from the earliest stages that the highest priority has to be to maintain the world as a safe place for humankind.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

Since I began exploring the ocean in the 1950s, 90 percent of the big fish have been stripped away. Tuna, sharks, swordfish, cod, halibut, you name it, the numbers have just collapsed. Also, about half of the coral reefs are gone, globally, from where they were just a few decades ago.

Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.

The oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle - all of these are linked to the existence of life in the sea.