I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.

The ocean is our life support system. No blue, no green. It's really a miracle that we have got a place that works in our favor.

There is not a well-funded campaign among scientists to say, "Look, here's the evidence. You can read it yourself. Here are the facts. We're not making this up."

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.

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.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.

Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.