For a long, long time,
I contemplated the ocean without understanding it.
I could feel the immense energy of its waters.
I was astonished by the depths of its blues.
I breathed the air of the wide open seas.
But in reality, I saw nothing.
Here at Shark Bay in Australia,
the cliffs whisper to me the history of the Earth.
They are born from the life of the ocean,
a vast graveyard created by billions of skeletons of marine animals
accumulated at the bottom of the seas when the Earth itself was entirely ocean.
These organisms created the air that I breathe
and the atmosphere which protects me.
I see powerful tides carving furrows in the sand.
I don't see that this movement is the source of all life.
I see the winds shaping the dunes.
I don't see the deep relationship between the earth and the sea.
I see the salt bleaching the arid earth.
I don't see what the ocean brings to life on the continents.
I see immense prairies colonise the depths
that I have never seen on land.
But at Shark Bay, there is more than that.
Here are the origins of our story,
us, mankind.
It begins here, with a colony of living fossils,
bacteria who live at the surface of the ocean, called stromatolites.
I am a descendant of this form of life,
the most ancient known on Earth, which came into being four billion years ago.
I come from here, I come from the ocean.
And now,
facing the ocean, all I can see is us, mankind.
We are seven billion human beings.
More than the total number of people who have lived on Earth
since the beginnings of humanity.
We have shaped the world in our image.
On the shores of the ocean,
we have built vast cities where we live in our millions.
We have dug out ports, flattened islands to construct our factories.
The ocean has brought us all the mineral riches of the world.
We work materials, meld steel, cut and slice.
One hundred thousand of our ships crisscross the seas.
All that lives, all that grows on the Earth will one day pass through our iron grasp.
We even transport the forests.
We delve unceasingly into the ocean to nourish ourselves.
We have become super predators.
We have canned the entire world,
600 million containers that we can transport, thanks to the ocean.
The ocean that offered us the possibility of globalisation.
The planet is ours.
But now, where are we going?
I am becoming aware of the consequences of my power.
Overfishing, global warming,
depletion of resources, pollution,
my drive has taken me a long way.
I know this
because I am capable of understanding what happens to me.
How have I gotten to this point
where I no longer see what is around me?
To understand that, we have to return to the very beginning.
In the beginning, the Earth consumed itself,
shaken by violent convulsions.
The fusing matter was subjected to violent bombardments of meteors
coming from the solar system.
This battlefield gave rise to an atmosphere,
stormy, red with nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen.
And water vapour, which came from the galaxy.
The surface of the Earth was like an enormous bubble
heated under pressure to over 700 degrees Celsius.
Then the inferno cooled off and the vapours condensed,
producing the greatest of the terrestrial floods that occurred.
That was four billion years ago.
The flood covered almost all of the Earth's crust.
The water washed the primordial rock,
eroding it away and becoming laden with salts.
The Earth became a world of salty water.
This water was called the ocean.
An ocean planet was born.
In the Ice Age,
700 million years ago, the temperature fell.
The planet remained white for 20 million years,
then melted because of a powerful greenhouse effect
created by the carbon of the volcanoes.
Other glaciations followed, alternating with warming.
From this period
there remain vast icy regions at the north and south poles of the globe.
These regions work as coolers in an immense climate system.
Close to the Equator,
the sun heats the ocean, which seems to boil.
This contrast between the hot regions and the cold regions
generates powerful air currents.
These are the winds, essential to this story.
The winds descend, cold and heavy, from the polar regions
and collide with the hot, light air of the Equator.
These winds, curved by the rotation of the Earth,
form gigantic Whirlpools.
On contact with the ocean, these winds push the water.
They generate powerful marine currents
capable of moving millions of cubic metres of water across the ocean.
Everywhere, the ocean is furrowed by Whirlpools,
some of which spin for years.
This movement spreads heat from the surface of the blue planet.
The hot water of the tropics rises up towards the poles.
Then this water cools, becomes more dense, laden with salt,
and falls down into the depths.
The water of the depths travels further down towards the bottom of the ocean,
pushed by its own weight.
It carries with it the polar cold.
Finally, it collides against the bottom
and returns towards the waters of the surface, where it reheats.
It takes 1,000 years for a drop of water to complete this ocean cycle.
These currents have created a temperate climate on Earth.
It is to them we owe the creation of a living planet.
When the sun is strong and the currents mount to the surface,
an astonishing phenomenon occurs,
so gigantic that it is visible from space,
a blooming, an explosion of life.
This life which appears is called plankton,
"floating life",
because it cannot move itself and drifts in the water.
This blooming gets its energy from the sun.
It occurs between the surface and the first 100 metres depth,
where the rays penetrate the ocean.
Firstly, there are tiny algae
which spread like an immense floating prairie between two expanses of water.
Just the biomass thus produced every year
represents half the vegetation of the planet.
Some microalgae resemble distant galaxies.
These are protists, very ancient organisms.
Despite their complexity,
most of them are nothing but a single cell surrounded by a silica or lime skeleton.
At this level,
the distinction between plant and animal is blurred.
Some of these green cells even have limbs which push them upwards,
augmenting their surface area exposed to the sun.
All these microalgae consume carbon and produce, in return, oxygen.
Half of the air we breathe comes from these microalgae.
The ocean is the blue lung of the planet.
This vegetable flowering triggers another explosion of life,
that of billions of herbivorous animals which come to feed off the marine prairie.
These animals measure hardly a few millimetres, often much less.
They're classed as jellyfish, crustaceans, cells, shellfish, larvae,
thousands of groups of species.
Among the most important of them are the innumerable tiny shrimps,
the krill, which graze on the algae night and day.
And the copepods,
a sort of tiny sea flea who swim by leaping, propelled by their limbs.
The copepods are hunted by all the carnivores in the plankton,
in particular these arrow-shaped predators,
voracious and armed with silicon teeth.
In this jungle, prey and predators mingle constantly
and there is always a crustacean ready to consume the preceding predators.
Each instant of life is an act of survival.
The plankton is an open book
in which we can read the history of the ocean.
During three billion years, life has evolved here,
in this marine prairie.
Some very ancient species, like the gelatinous animals,
have only evolved in the ocean.
In perfect harmony with the liquid environment,
they have an elastic body,
which allows them simultaneously to suck in food and to move.
Sometimes, they hook on to one another,
forming immense chains to facilitate moving in the current.
It looks chaotic,
but each living entity is organised down to the smallest detail.
These explosions of life eventually disappear,
devoured by a lack of resources or wiped out by an invisible enemy,
an attack by a virus.
Billions of viruses,
whose biological role is to regulate each explosion of life.
Nature doesn't tolerate excess.
All the species of the ocean are dependent on this invisible plankton,
like a long chain of life.
At the end of the winter,
the mackerel depart from hibernation in the depths of the ocean.
They come up to the surface, seeking the marine prairie.
The fish have no leader,
and yet they manoeuvre in perfect formation.
Each fish is continuously aware of the presences of its neighbours
and respects their distance.
This self-organisation is a fundamental law of the group.
It enables them to hunt as a shoal
and increases the chances of finding a rich feeding zone.
The first who finds something
can guide the others by a simple movement.
The sailfish is the fastest fish in the ocean.
It feeds on fish.
Its dorsal fin gives it exceptional stability to achieve its predatory goals.
A 100-kilo sailfish will consume in its lifetime 1,000 kilos of mackerel,
who themselves have consumed 10,000 kilos of zooplankton,
who themselves have grazed on 100,000 kilos of marine prairie.
The food chain is a hierarchy, a pyramid structure.
Some species choose to help one another.
Manta rays only eat plankton.
Their six-metre wingspan offers shelter.
In return, the smaller fish remove the host's parasites.
Others opt for the whale shark,
the largest of the fish.
This traveller crosses entire oceans in search of plankton.
It carries with it smaller fish who live off its intake.
Solidarity also has a role in this liquid immensity,
4,000 metres deep, covering two-thirds of the planet.
Sometimes, this journey is interrupted by land.
Here at Raja Ampat in Indonesia,
land appeared when the ocean retreated two billion years ago.
These limestone hills were previously at the bottom of the ocean.
Like at Shark Bay in Australia,
they are made of billions of plankton skeletons,
piled up in the geological era when the ocean covered the planet.
With the receding of the waters,
erosion sculpted the rock into an elaborate graveyard,
a labyrinth of 1,500 islands of fossilised plankton.
The Raja Ampat Archipelago
is at the heart of a region rich in biodiversity.
Fourteen hundred species of fish live here,
and a quarter of all marine species.
Coming into contact with these emerging lands,
probably struggling against exhaustion and hunger,
some plankton abandoned nomadic life and settled here.
That was 500 million years ago.
A revolution in the ocean.
This family of plankton created the coral reefs.
Coral is a creature we rarely actually see by day.
What we see in the daytime
is the calcareous skeleton which serves as its shelter,
a skeleton that resembles a tree, branches or leaves.
To survive in these waters scarce in nutrients,
coral shelters an alga within it which feeds by day on sunlight.
The algae have thus become the driving force of the construction,
aiming to occupy the best place in the sun.
Each coral struggles against its neighbours to gain more light
at the speed of a few millimetres per year.
This petrified forest
is the most densely populated ecosystem on the ocean planet.
A veritable oasis.
You can hide here, and hunt here.
Each has its own territory.
Everything about life here is organised.
Even the colours of the fish represent camouflage or seduction.
Like a marvellous marine city, crowds pour in through the gates.
They come from far away to get rid of their parasites
because only the reef offers enough diversity to guarantee that kind of service.
Millions of years of evolution have enabled each species
to find a place and a role in this coral metropolis.
The scorpion fish camouflages itself,
while the spider crab lets itself be colonised by shellfish
and becomes invisible when motionless.
Or you can hide.
As in every cosmopolitan city, life in the reef is not spontaneous.
There are codes, rules of social life to be respected
if you don't want to end up in your neighbour's stomach.
Concealment becomes an art for these octopi,
capable of changing the colour and structure of their skin
to deceive their attackers.
Despite the risks of this collective existence,
many species use the reef as a nursery.
Of all the ocean,
it is still the place that offers the best chance for raising a family.
Cuttlefish protect their eggs by hiding them as deep as possible
in the branches of the coral so that other fish cannot eat them.
But for how long? Prey and predators are so close.
The tentacles of the anemones are poisonous, even deadly.
Only clown fish can live among them.
They immunise themselves
by rubbing against the tentacles from a very young age.
This natural vaccination
then enables them to use the anemone as a refuge.
For those who do not know the reef,
this marvellous city is in fact full of dangers.
The xenid is not a flower, but a coral without a skeleton,
an animal that traps the plankton in its tentacles.
At night, the reef is even more dangerous.
The living part of the coral, the polyp,
is invisible by day, but appears at night.
This gelatinous creature is a distant cousin of the jellyfish.
It also hunts with its tentacles.
Immobile in the reef,
it relies on the marine currents to bring its prey.
Too bad for those who float too close.
Its tentacles immobilise everything that touches them
by injecting a deadly poison.
Sometimes, even a digestive sugar so powerful
that it can digest living things.
The reef is a dangerous predator.
Once trapped, the victim cannot escape from these arms,
which pull it slowly towards the mouth, where it will be digested.
Once a year, at exactly the same time, at the spring full moon,
an extraordinary event occurs.
The reef enters its reproductive phase.
By millions, they release male and female gametes.
Fusing together, they give birth to larvae.
The larvae of future coral reefs.
This release of eggs happens only once a year.
It lasts for only a few hours,
and it depends on perfect synchronisation between all the corals of a given species.
The larvae are dispersed by the current
for several days and nights before landing further away.
They leave to conquer a new territory.
Those which survive fix on the new walls of the deep sea
to perpetuate the immense coral city which gave birth to them.
It's a constant expansion.
For 500 million years,
the coral have been growing, dying and growing.
Their construction has built an empire visible from the skies,
the biggest living construct of the planet.
All the fauna of the ocean
is linked to these oases of life.
In Polynesia, the grouper make a long voyage
to come and lay their eggs on the side of the reef.
It's a huge meeting for this normally solitary community,
who come to the lagoon seeking shelter for their reproduction.
But this meeting is also attended by marauding grey sharks.
In the course of their lives,
groupers start off female, then change sex and become male
once they are above a certain weight and age.
They leap forward, mixing their sperm.
The females, weakened by laying, make easy prey.
The sharks attack.
They will massacre many of the grouper,
but this predation, paradoxically, is vital for the grouper as a species,
who will otherwise reproduce too fast and become too numerous.
Here again, nature does not tolerate excess,
there's always one predator waiting just above another.
Hammerhead sharks are fearsome hunters.
Evolving 20 million years ago, these animals are super predators.
Their hammer-shaped head acts like a fin and promotes agility.
The position of the eyes, very far apart, gives them 3D vision.
They hunt the fish and other sharks.
It's as if the cycle of predation governed the evolution of species.
And here's where we appear in the story.
Here we are, people.
The last link in the chain of life,
we have no predator above us.
We began here,
on the other side of the mirror of the ocean.
We occupy the land which emerged.
Very long ago, to protect ourselves,
we built villages like those that still exist at San Blas in Panama.
We can't swim like the fish,
so we conceived boats to cross the oceans.
And then we built a world
like nothing any other species had built before us.
To build our towns, we constructed bridges between islands,
we conquered the ocean via the land.
We learned to dig through mountains,
change the course of the waters and even create islands.
We built an empire even bigger than the coral cities.
Our walls, our enormous towns, can be seen from the sky.
Through our intelligence, we, weak humanity, became really very strong.
Rich or poor,
half the people of our world live less than 100 kilometres from the water.
Almost the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa
is concentrated on the coastline.
Just the city of Lagos in Nigeria has 17 million inhabitants.
More than 100,000 people live in the shantytown on the shore.
The population that migrated here has no place on land,
so they turn to the sea.
Our population is constantly growing.
We are more than seven billion.
Every second that goes by,
there are two more people on the planet to be fed.
And we are hungry,
so, naturally, we turn to the ocean to feed us.
Three billion human beings depend directly on marine resources.
For almost a billion people,
fish represent their only source of animal proteins.
The ocean is key to our survival.
Four million of our fishing boats set out each day to attack the ocean.
The majority are just little boats like these,
which unload each morning on the coasts of Senegal.
Our fishing has been since the beginning a family craft,
practised and transmitted from generation to generation.
Although it's a dangerous profession,
when people can't feed off the land, the poorest turn to the sea.
Worldwide,
including indirect employment and families,
fishing sustains 500 million people.
Here, I see the abundance of the ocean.
The ocean brings us other food.
Since the very beginning of our history,
we have gathered wild seaweeds on the shore.
They have existed for three and a half billion years.
We learned to cultivate the sea as we came to farm the land.
The seaweed needs only six weeks of growth before harvest.
It requires only sunlight and the movement of the currents.
Today in Bali in Indonesia,
we cultivate seaweed and extract from it a nourishing gelatine.
This farming today produces 15 million tons of seaweed,
exported all over the world.
Brown, green and red seaweed serve all purposes,
medicine, cloth, fertiliser and food.
We trace out small portions of sea
and transform estuaries into private concessions.
More than 500,000 hectares of the globe are dedicated to cultivation of seaweed,
supporting a million sea farmers.
In South Korea, in the Wando Archipelago,
over 200 islands have converted to farming seaweeds.
These magnificent expanses are immense nets spread out in the sun,
which are used to dry the harvests.
Of the 30,000 species of seaweed which grow in the sea,
only around 50 are edible.
Here, we grow kombu,
large seaweeds which can grow to three metres in length.
In Asia, this seaweed is a basic food source.
These sugar-flavoured leaves contain proteins, mineral salts and vitamins.
We have been fishing for 40,000 years,
constantly improving our fisheries and our nets.
Fishing became an industry.
It's no longer a question of family, but of investment and technology.
To increase our catch, our fishermen formed fleets.
What changed everything is the invention of the deep sea trawl,
a large net with a funnel-shaped opening like the mouth of the whale shark.
Our nets are so large that some measure 40 kilometres.
Or 25 miles.
Then entire factories took to the sea.
We use probes, radar, and focus all our ingenuity
on hunting down marine life.
Every year, we fish 90 million tons of wild fish globally.
Half this amount is fished by only 1% of our fishing boats.
Our trawlers, our seines, our nets are so huge
that we no longer choose what we're taking.
We take whatever comes
and sort it later according to the market value of the fish.
Alaska pollock, Atlantic herring,
we just scoop it all up.
There is no limit to our predation apart from the fish quotas fixed by scientists.
But who can prevent us from exceeding them?
Worldwide, 80% of commercial fish stocks
have been declared fully exploited or overexploited.
Our fishing has reached a ceiling. We are at a biological limit.
How could we have gotten to this point?
Our intensive fishing sacrifices millions of fish.
These are the waste, the rejects of the catch,
or just the fish that got crushed to death in our nets.
Fish killed for nothing.
As the stocks near the surface run out,
we rake further and further, deeper and deeper.
Our trawlers now go down more than 3,000 metres.
We blindly fish a fauna we hardly know.
The fauna of the abyss, that lives in the dark, alone and hungry.
In the abyss, the light gradually disappears.
Life flourishes around this absence of light, and what a life.
At around 100 metres deep, the ctenophores.
These gelatinous creatures possess luminous organs
to frighten off their enemies.
Still deeper, 1,000 metres below the surface, in the ocean twilight,
we find the siphonophores.
These are the largest kind of plankton.
Some measure up to 50 metres.
Their organs are not spread out, but grouped together.
On one side, they have their stomachs,
on the other, the swim bladders they use to float.
Between the two, they deploy a net to trap any food which falls from the surface.
Descending into the abyss is like travelling back in a biological time machine.
There are maybe 2,000 species of abyss-dwelling fish.
A terrifying bestiary.
Viperfish that can eat things larger than themselves.
Gulper eels that gobble everything which passes.
Survival is tough at 1,500 metres deep.
At around 3,000 metres, there is no more light.
It's the kingdom of the vampire squid, a prehistoric cousin of the squid.
The vampire squid has blue blood laced with copper.
Its enormous eyes detect slight variations in contrast above it, towards the surface.
Its vision is entirely adapted to the shadows.
The sedimentary plane, uniform and grey,
seems to stretch out of sight and span lit by the camera.
When we approach this spongy marsh, we see carnivorous sponges at work.
When waste touches the bottom,
crabs, eels and carnivorous sponges gorge on it.
Invisible in the mud, billions of bacteria break down what remains of the living.
Here, species live more slowly,
sometimes to 150 years old,
because of the extraordinary pressure at minus 4,000 metres,
at the bottom of the sea.
Oxygen is scarce.
And yet, here we are. In this world we hardly know.
Here we are because we're afraid of running out.
We're looking to feed our addiction to oil.
The ocean seems to be made of water.
But in reality, it's an alliance between life, chemistry and geology.
All the wastes, corpses,
particles of seaweed which come down from the surface,
each tiny cell of the ocean finishes its life here in "marine snow."
For millions of years,
dead plankton loaded with carbon has been building up at the bottom of the seas.
It piles up in thick layers and gives rise to these rocks, which we call limestone,
and which emerge in peaks at each lowering of the sea level.
Sometimes, this heap of corpses doesn't transform into rock,
but rather slowly melts down into an organic substance, viscous and black.
Oil.
It exists everywhere, almost, on the seabeds and on land,
where the ocean once covered the planet.
We began by pumping out the shallow deposits.
But these reserves are already running out,
and we seek further and further, deeper and deeper.
We're now exploring deposits drilling up to 7,000 metres deep.
The last reserves of oil tomorrow
will be found in the most inaccessible zones of the sea.
These flames are plankton burning, life burning.
We have 20,000 oil rigs on the world's seas.
Every year, we burn the equivalent of a million years of laying down of plankton.
Our industrial revolution has cost the planet 100 million carbon years.
We transport two billion tons of oil every year on board our supertankers,
which are the biggest mobile constructions that exist.
Oil is the main source of energy for our civilisation.
This energy propels us beyond all limits.
In their gigantic holds,
these ships are carrying a part of the bio-geological history of the ocean.
With this revolution, our lives have changed.
That of the planet also.
We need our ships so much
that we have cut America in two to link the seas.
We created the Panama Canal,
a slash of 80 kilometres right through the jungle.
Every year, 13,000 ships can go faster and further.
A ship crosses the mountain every 45 minutes.
To feed the locks of our canal,
we created an enormous lake, Lake Gatun, which stocks rainwater.
When the rains are scarce, the canal risks technical failure.
Stocks of raw materials, gas, factory ships, transport of vehicles, cruise ships,
an infinite diversity of vessels.
We transport three quarters of our merchandise by the ocean routes.
The admiral ship of all our boats is the container ship,
ships carrying thousands of identical metal boxes.
The riches of the world which power our factories
produces new wealth, which gives us the means
to transform our villages into immense cities.
Here in Panama City, there was only jungle.
Today, money is flowing in tides.
Rotterdam, Durban, San Francisco, Singapore,
our ships weave a web between the continents.
The ocean brings together our towns into a single world.
All the sea routes converge on Asia.
Of the top 50 ports in the world, 11 are in China.
And the most important is Shanghai.
It's located at one end of a 34-kilometre bridge,
on an island in the open sea which was razed to build a freshwater port.
It's the biggest port in the world.
On the kilometres of quayside,
giant cranes unload every year 30 million containers,
which will be exchanged, re-routed, stocked.
Who knows where our boxes are going and what they contain?
Container transport is like a game,
of empty boxes to be filled, and full boxes to be emptied.
We have 600 million containers circulating on the ocean.
They are the key link in the world we have created.
The ocean made globalisation possible.
The demand is so great
that our fleet of container ships has tripled in under 10 years.
Three thousand cargo ships are currently under construction
in the shipyards of Korea, China and Japan, which provide 90% of the world's production.
Everything here is oversized.
Gigantic yards employing more than 10,000 workers
cut and extend the existing ships.
We assemble ships over 400 metres long,
the area of four football fields.
This relentless growth of the ship industry
is only responding to another industrial need.
The world's factories have moved here.
The ocean has enabled the globalisation of our industries.
A single ship can bring an entire forest to our factories,
which transform it into paper, planks, furniture, manufactured products.
China is the world's top importer of logs.
Thanks to the oceans, no forest is safe.
Over 500 million tons of raw materials arrive in Shanghai every year by sea.
Supplies of crude steel, coal, wood, copper,
all the scarce minerals that we take from the planet.
Right around the port zone, our factories melt steel,
to produce a new chemistry for other factories
which construct, assemble and wrap products
destined to be exported all over the world.
The life of seven billion people is connected to this part of the world.
What can these fishermen catch here,
in the waste from the factories and at the heart of this dehumanised world?
Our tentacular towns sprout like mushrooms.
Shanghai is a symbol of our headlong rush.
Twenty-three million people are living in the Shanghai megalopolis.
Over 6,000 buildings have sprung from the earth.
Twenty thousand new building sites are in progress,
a frenzy of construction climbing towards the sky.
Every country in the world dreams of having the growth rate of Shanghai and China.
Our cities are spreading beyond the land,
but owe their fortune to being at the gates of the ocean.
Planet ocean has become our planet.
But if we were wrong?
The ocean that we came from seems so far from us today.
In barely 200 years,
we have violently disrupted four billion years of the natural history of the world.
We no longer see the beauty of life,
but only what it can do for our species, what it enables us to produce.
Everything that lives around us suffers from our existence.
We leave footprints everywhere we go.
They say these sperm whales are dreaming, head downward.
Maybe it's us that's dreaming,
thinking that we can carry on in this frenzy of growth
without any consequences.
One hundred thousand of our ships crisscross
the seas of our planet unceasingly.
The more our needs grow, the more numerous our machines become.
No matter what we do,
our industrial civilisation is destroying the natural world around it.
The risk of pollution has become a threat to everything that comes near us.
Our gigantic motors burn tons of petrol and oil by the hour.
We spit out polluting materials in all directions into the air and the ocean.
In the polar regions, the permanent ice cap is melting
as a result of global warming.
There are no factories here, no machines,
and yet this heating up is caused by our own carbon emissions.
Fossil energy, the oil we need for our civilisation,
is causing the ocean to overheat.
But the melting of the Arctic has another, more serious consequence.
In the North, the melting of the permanent Arctic ice caps
is revealing open ocean.
The waters absorb the solar heat that the ice used to reflect back.
This phenomenon is amplified.
The ocean itself is accelerating the warming.
In Greenland, as in the Antarctic,
the glaciers which cover the protruding land are made of fresh water.
Their melting sends streams of fresh water into the salty sea.
The great circulation of marine currents
that flow around the globe and regulate the climate
is gradually blocking up.
What will be the consequences?
In human memory, no such change has ever been experienced.
So we can't know.
Over 20,000 kilometres away, very far from the polar regions,
climate change is already having an effect.
It's invisible from the surface.
To see it, you have to dive to a reef in the tropics,
like on the edge of the Blue Hole in Belize,
the second largest coral reef in the world.
Corals are highly sensitive to changes in temperature.
A difference of less than one degree for a few weeks is enough to kill them.
Only a reef of white skeletons remains.
These white areas are spreading.
Scientists are very worried.
A quarter of corals on our planet have died in the last 50 years.
The immediate problem is not their death, but rather the impact of their disappearance.
Dying, they leave nothing behind. The marine oasis becomes a desert.
Further out to sea, the immensity of the ocean hides other facts.
After the coral, it's the state of health of the plankton which becomes critical.
Scientific missions are multiplying on this ocean
that we are just beginning to discover.
They're trying to understand what is going to change in marine life.
The life that feeds us.
It seems that the plankton, the base of all the food chains,
is moving toward the polar region where the waters are still temperate.
In 50 years, it has moved 1,200 kilometres further northwards.
This redistribution of plankton is already having an effect on marine life.
Every year, cownose rays migrate
between Brazil and the temperate zones in search of food.
Every year, the journey takes them a little higher, a little further north.
Global warming is disrupting the ecology of the ocean.
With this change, our fishing territories are also changing.
But I know that we can't stop ourselves from fishing.
In Chile, where a quarter of the world's tonnage is fished,
the sea supports thousands of traditional fishermen and their families.
Many are heavily in debt to pay for their boats.
Commercial species are becoming scarce,
so they are turning to what remains.
We didn't eat Chilean sardine and Peruvian anchovy in the past.
But now we fish over 10 million tons of them per year.
Extraordinary pressure on a single species,
the only one remaining in these waters.
Right along the coast of Chile,
a powerful current rises up from the bottom of the ocean.
It's still rich in plankton, and the sardines are abundant.
This is an upwelling current.
It churns the water, bringing nutrients.
Seals and birds come to hunt the small fish, which gather around these rising waters.
The Chileans fish with a seine,
a very long net that closes over 40 tons of catch.
Five hundred thousand fish in each net that a machine sucks up into the hold.
Though sardines only live a few years, they reproduce rapidly.
These blue fish are the last still holding out in this world.
We don't eat these fish. We catch them to make fish meal.
Fish meal which feeds farmed fish.
In total, 25 million tons of sea fish are raised every year,
most of the production coming from Norway and Chile.
We only raise species with high market value,
sea bream, salmon and bass.
Four kilos of wild sardines are needed to produce one kilo of farmed fish.
Our fish farming is an industry based on a wild resource.
And when there are no more sardines, what will we do?
As our resources run out, we go further and further.
The high seas are a free zone.
Two-thirds of the ocean belongs to everyone, and so to no one,
and so belongs to the first to use it.
Off the coast of West Africa,
rogue ship-owners send poor fishermen to pillage the last zones rich in fish.
On their ramshackle boats, these men are abandoned,
with rations arriving once a month, if they're lucky.
Men in boats that seem to have no value for anyone.
In Mauritania,
the port of Nouadhibou has become a graveyard of pirate fishing ships.
Hundreds of boats seized off this coast, abandoned wrecks,
probably already replaced by other ships.
The pirate boats gather in the least watched zones,
like the African sector.
Out at sea,
the illegal ships transfer their cargo onto authorised ships
to be able to sell their catch legally on the international markets.
Some estimates rank this illegal fishing at 26 million tons of catch,
a quarter of the global total.
Profit rules the seas.
In the sea, 90% of the biomass of the predators has disappeared.
One of the last of them, the Atlantic bluefin tuna,
is on the verge of extinction.
Nevertheless, it is fished legally in the Mediterranean,
one of the last refuges of this species, which comes here to reproduce.
The tuna are captured in a very large net which shuts like a pen.
The catch is towed back alive, then fattened up in a farm
before slaughter, then sold on international markets.
These fish are a luxury resource.
A top quality tuna can weigh 300 kilos
and be sold for over 500,000 euros.
Corruption and lies are everywhere.
The tuna fishing fleets benefit from millions of euros of European subsidies.
We respect no quotas,
we don't take any precautions at all for the preservation of the species.
At this rate, the tuna will be extinct within a few years.
We deplete this common good
because it belongs to no one and it brings in a lot of money.
And tomorrow, what will we have left?
Today, there are 400 marine areas which have been declared dead,
empty of resources, or even incapable of sustaining life.
Other species are proliferating.
Jellyfish have existed on Earth for almost a billion years.
They have survived all known types of extinction.
Red tuna were one of their predators.
The disappearance of the tuna destabilises a millennial balance.
All over the ocean, scientists and fishermen are noticing more and more jellyfish.
The ocean is becoming a mass of gelatine,
and this imbalance is a trap waiting for us.
Far from the land, far from where I live,
the ocean is hiding from us another fact.
The currents are dispersing our chemistry,
the pollutants of our industrial creation across the whole globe.
More than 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre on average
across all seas.
What is killing these birds comes from my home,
even though I live thousands of kilometres from here.
We tip six billion kilos of plastic waste per year into the sea.
Plastic, which doesn't decompose, but which micro-fragments.
What these birds are eating, the fish will eat,
and in turn I will eat
as we delve into the ocean for our fishing, for our fisheries.
Polluting the ocean to this point means poisoning ourselves.
The ocean is so vast that we came to believe it had infinite resources.
We were wrong.
The ocean planet in reality has only a limited capacity for renewal,
which we have to learn to manage.
That's why, since the dawn of time,
everything that lives on Earth respects rhythms and limits.
That's the origin of the famous law of natural equilibrium.
For myself, I want to stay on the Earth.
I want to have a place tomorrow on our living planet.
For a long time, I watched these fish.
I think I am a little like them.
I evolve through consensus, in a group.
Even if I understand what's happening to us,
I can't just choose to radically change the way things are going.
But maybe our shared awareness will trigger a chain reaction
and save our species.
I want to believe that we can react in time.
Twenty years ago, in Rio,
people came together for a major conference on the future of the Earth.
That was in 1992.
In that year,
our political elites voted for 2,500 recommendations
for protecting the planet.
I believed that was the symbolic beginning of a new era.
But it was only the beginning of a long road.
Since then, what has happened?
There have been other conferences, other Earth summits,
with very little result.
The risk of unpopular decision,
competition, corruption, passivity, have prevented any action.
But we, humanity,
have made an enormous leap forward in the last 20 years.
Our awareness has evolved.
We are worried about the issue of the environment.
But that's not yet enough.
Time is catching up with us.
At this rate, we are headed for catastrophe.
What's striking is that we don't see what's happening.
Even at the heart of this city facing the ocean,
the disgusting pollution means we cannot go into the sea.
We had to build a pool to swim in the most beautiful bay in the world,
the bay which has become dangerous to our health.
In Rio, like everywhere in the world,
we built a colossus, a symbol of eternity,
as if to protect ourselves.
He contemplates the ocean, but what can he do for us?
No religion, no belief will save us.
It's not a time for believing in the promises of heaven.
Only our intelligence enables us to foresee and prepare our future.
We can still change direction.
There's still time to imagine a humanist and responsible stewardship of the planet.
To remain on our ocean planet.