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.

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

We are not only warming the ocean and the planet as a whole, but we are also acidifying the ocean and changing its chemistry.

We want to think of ourselves as truly special creatures that are unique in the universe and, well, we are. And we have that capacity to wonder, to question, and to see ourselves in the context of all of life that has preceded the present time, and all that will go off far into the future, one way or another.

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

We don't have to be that greedy generation that just continued to take down the underpinnings of what makes the planet work in our favor.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.