I'm a marine biologist
here to talk to you about the crisis in our oceans,
but this time perhaps not with a message you've heard before,
because I want to tell you that if the survival of the oceans
depended only on people like me,
scientists trading in publications,
we'd be in even worse trouble than we are.
Because, as a scientist,
the most important things that I've learned
about keeping our oceans healthy and productive
have come not from academia but from fishermen and women
living in some of the poorest countries on Earth.
I've learned that as a conservationist,
the most important question is not, "how do we keep people out?"
but rather, "how do we make sure that coastal people throughout the world
have enough to eat?"
Our oceans are every bit as critical to our own survival
as our atmosphere, our forests or our soils.
Their staggering productivity ranks fisheries with farming
as a mainstay of food production
for humanity.
Yet, something's gone badly wrong.
We're accelerating into an extinction emergency,
one that my field has so far failed abysmally to tackle.