Original subtitles

All life began in the deep blue sea.

Its flow and force...

...have shaped our world.

Revered, and feared...

...since humans first walked the Earth,

an immense hidden realm,

visible only in our imagination,

for hundreds of thousands of years.

Only now, are we discovering what our ocean means...

...for our world.

What we have found could change the course of

our future, forever.

Humans have always looked out at the open blue horizon

and wondered what lies beyond.

Yet it has remained almost entirely a mystery.

After living for nearly 100 years on this planet,

I now understand the most important place on Earth is not

on land, but at sea.

And today we're living in the greatest age of ocean discovery.

For many of us the world beyond the beach is still dark,

threatening, and dangerous... out of sight and most certainly

out of mind.

It's time to take the plunge, to go beneath the waves.

For once you've truly seen the sea,

you'll never look at Earth in the same way again.

In my lifetime,

our ability to see the ocean has been transformed.

The invention of scuba gear changed everything.

Suddenly, an extraordinary new world of wonder and

surprise came into view.

It wasn't long before we found a way to explore that

dark distant part of the planet.

That had remained hidden for so long.

We journeyed into the deep...

...and gazed at the bottom of the sea.

In the years that followed I could never have imagined what

we'd find, miles below the surface.

Yet, to this day, we have seen more of other planets

than we have of the ocean.

Now we are making discoveries that completely change our

understanding and could offer a better future

for everyone on Earth,

even in the waters we know least about,

those furthest from land.

The high seas or open ocean.

The last great wilderness.

It's not owned by any nation,

but shared by everyone in the world.

The open ocean is truly ours.

Its waters are the deepest and the most remote.

Much of it has still never been seen by human beings.

It's our final frontier.

Until recently, we assumed it to be a largely empty desert.

The few creatures we knew of wandering this open world

remained a mystery.

Now a new, far more connected picture,

is emerging of the big blue.

Some of these travelers such as sharks and tuna have been

tracked making enormous migrations,

across the entire planet, on an endless search for food.

And we have only just learnt how these voyagers find

their way out here,

steering along the twists and turns of particular currents.

They come together from across the globe,

at a few precious places.

Seamounts.

Submarine mountains soaring up to three miles high.

They stand in the path of ocean currents,

causing water to rise from the deep, bringing with it food.

Only now are we understanding just how important

they really are.

As pit stops and endpoints on ocean odysseys.

Perhaps most exciting of all, we have just discovered there

are nearly twice as many of these oases as we had thought.

Some 40,000 of them across the sea floor.

So the open ocean is not a featureless desert after all.

It is more connected than we had ever imagined.

Back towards the shore, closer to land,

there is a more familiar world.

This is the other great ocean realm,

the shallow coastal seas.

And this is where we get most of our seafood.

The shallow seas we regard as being owned by the nations

living on the land next to them.

These coastal countries have exclusive rights to exploit an

area within a few hundred kilometers offshore.

This shallow region above the continental shelf,

is a magical world where everything is

bathed in sunlight.

This is giant kelp,

the tallest living thing in the ocean.

Beneath its towering canopies,

we've discovered a high-rise community.

The forest needs its many residents to survive.

Sea urchins do the gardening and the kelp is kept in check.

If these gardeners get too abundant, this is the result.

Fortunately for the kelp, there are urchin-eaters too.

It's a world in delicate balance.

To have found, just off our coasts,

jungles to rival any on land was extraordinary.

It was the equivalent of discovering a new tropical

rainforest full of marvels that we had barely glimpsed before.

Scientists had no idea of the sheer scale of these forests,

or the speed at which they grew.

They border a quarter of the world's coasts,

and we are still finding more of them even now.

And only within the last couple of years have we found the

world's largest seagrass meadow.

This increased the global estimate of this

habitat by nearly half.

And we have found that ocean jungles and meadows absorb far

more carbon than the same area of rainforest on land.

We now know that together they could help us

avoid climate disaster.

In the coastal seas close to the equator lies a tropical

world of seemingly endless surprise.

The first time I used scuba gear to dive on a coral reef,

I was so taken aback by the spectacle before me,

I forgot, momentarily, to breathe!

Nothing that I'd ever seen on land had come close

to the sensory overload of so much life,

and such diversity right before my eyes.

Everywhere I looked, at every scale,

there was something new.

One could spend days swimming above it and

never tire of the colors,

the movement, the interactions.

It's life at its most mesmerizing.

We knew that coral reefs harbored astonishing diversity

ever since we first set eyes on them.

But the reason they did so remained a mystery.

I remember reading how Charles Darwin puzzled over

how reefs form and how they can turn even the most

barren places into oases of life.

We now know their secret and it's wonderful.

Corals are animals.

But this is just part of their story.

Within their bodies live plant-like algae.

The algae use sunlight to produce the food that corals

need to survive.

As the corals grow,

they build stone castles around their

soft bodies for protection.

And in doing so, they create the planet's

largest living structures.

It is extraordinary to think that this one relationship can

turn undersea deserts into the most complex and diverse

community in the ocean.

And the closer one looks...

...the more one sees.

In this crowded world of color, there isn't a shape,

or size, that's not at home.

A greater variety of life may seem hard to imagine,

yet we keep finding more...

...and more.

These little boxer crabs have been found to wear clumps of

venomous anemones as gloves with which to defend themselves.

And the peacock mantis shrimp has the most complex eyesight

of any animal.

2,000 new marine species are being discovered every year.

From coral-crunchers and grazers,

to helpers,

and hunters.

We once believed that if you removed the sharks,

there would be more fish.

Now we are learning how wrong we were.

We're seeing that the entire reef depends on all

of these relationships.

If just one is removed, everything and everyone that

relies on this coral community could be in trouble.

There are things we have discovered about the shallow

coastal seas that directly affect our everyday life.

All eight billion of us.

Currents sweep up the walls of the continental shelf,

carrying nutrients from the ocean floor,

so creating the most productive waters in our ocean.

This makes them the perfect place for phytoplankton.

These single-celled plants flourish here in unimaginable

quantities, absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide.

We have just discovered that ocean plankton remove almost a

third of our carbon emissions.

They could be our greatest ally in avoiding climate catastrophe.

What is more, we now know that they produce more oxygen than

all the trees on Earth combined.

That is half of the air we breathe.

They are also the most important source of food under

the waves.

Yet until recently, we have been unable to see this world

in such detail.

New images such as these, reveal that billions of these

tiny battles are taking place at any one moment.

These zooplankton are the most abundant animals on Earth.

They're fuel for the biggest shoals of fish,

and almost every food chain in the sea.

The shallow coastal seas are truly the foundation

of the entire ocean.

And feed billions of us.

This age of discovery has shown our ocean to be more complex

and more delicately balanced than we could

have ever imagined.

It's revealed that this vast, mysterious world is bound to us

in ways we had never dreamt possible.

But to truly understand its importance,

we must first open our eyes to what is happening

right now...

...below the waves.

Few of us imagine this.

From the surface,

you would have no idea that this is happening.

It has remained hidden from view... until now.

A modern industrial bottom-trawler scours the

ocean floor with a chain or metal beam,

forcing anything it disturbs into the net behind.

It smashes its way across the seabed,

destroying nearly everything in its path,

often on the hunt for just a single species.

Almost everything else is discarded.

Over three-quarters of a trawler's catch may

be thrown away.

It's hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish.

An area almost the size of the entire Amazon rainforest

is trawled every year.

And much of that seabed is plowed again.

Over, and over.

This churning of the sediment unleashes vast

amounts of carbon dioxide,

which in turn contributes to the warming of our planet.

The trawlers tear the seabed with such force that their

trails of destruction can be seen from space.

Very few places are safe from this.

Including almost nowhere in my own country.

We have lived and relied on food from the sea

around the island for over 5,000 years.

Everything is so different under the sea.

There's no houses, no roads, no telephones.

It's just nature, 100%.

When I used to go scallop diving,

you would dive down to the sea bed and

just acclimatize yourself.

Things that look like plants down there are animals,

and they've been there for millions of years.

Slowly but surely, you would see a complete bed of scallops.

It's ancient, can take 100 years to grow.

The first time that I dived over an area that a scallop

dredger had just been over, it was just heartbreaking.

All sorts of animals just smashed to pieces.

It was like swimming over the Garden of Eden to

a nuclear winter.

The community watched from the shore as these boats go

up and down, closer, and closer,

over and over again, just for a few scallops.

The scallop dredgers said, "We have the right to do this,

and it's completely legal."

They were taking the future out of the sea,

and the island community would be left with the wreckage.

A feeling was just of complete disbelief.

How can this be allowed to happen?

It's difficult to try and explain to people just exactly

how abundant it once was here.

Just how much has been lost?

-The idea of bulldozing through a pristine,

rainforest causes outrage,

yet we do the equivalent underwater thousands

of times every day.

Ancient seagrass meadows, plowed into silt.

Delicate, 100-year-old sponge gardens,

that once sheltered bustling communities,

destroyed in an instant.

Surely, you would assume it must be illegal?

But it is not only legal, but actually encouraged by

the laws of today.

Bottom trawling is still allowed in many so-called

Marine Protected Areas worldwide.

And perhaps even more astonishingly,

it is subsidized by governments.

$20 billion are spent every year supporting overfishing

on an industrial scale.

Vast factories now travel the seas.

They work day and night.

Further and faster than ever.

It seems nowhere is off-limits.

Even the open ocean.

Lines of baited hooks 50 miles long reel in

millions of sharks every year.

We have now killed two-thirds of all large predatory fish.

Walls of nets hundreds of meters high,

leave few survivors.

Sharks and turtles survived the extinction of the dinosaurs

but may not outlive this.

The change is simple.

We once fished a few places near shore to

feed our communities.

Now we fish everywhere, all the time.

And I have lived through this change.

There are tales from 400 years ago,

of coastal waters,

"so thick with fish, boats could barely move through them."

No-one alive today has known the abundance of a

truly wild ocean.

There are now simply fewer fish in the sea.

Wherever we look, in every part of our ocean,

the evidence is clear.

Many sea bird colonies are starving and in the final

stages of collapse.

Every year more nests fail.

It's the same story of change in every ocean of the world.

Before, we were working in harmony

with the ocean.

Then everything changed.

Where the trawlers fish is where we fish.

We see them closer to shore.

Our nets used to be full.

We see different, different, different types of fish.

Today?

No.

The bigger size are gone. They are no more.

Even the smallest, the smallest ones,

we are after them because there's no fish.

These days, when I throw, I catch plastic.

To even throw a line, your hook and line,

you bring out plastic.

We depend on fish.

It's where we get our resource from,

to support our children to go to school, to feed our family.

It belongs to us.

Without the ocean, there's no community.

When the trawlers take away the last fish,

my heart will be so heavy.

Three billion people rely on

our ocean for food.

But ships sent by a few wealthy nations are starving

coastal communities of the food source they have

relied on for millennia.

This is modern colonialism at sea.

Some 400,000 industrial vessels now hunt in

every corner of the ocean.

Nowhere is too far or too deep.

Even the most remote parts of the planet are no longer safe.

Almost every animal in the Antarctic relies on

just a single species.

A small red crustacean.

Antarctic krill.

For whales, fish, and penguins,

krill is the most important source of food

throughout the Southern Ocean.

The trawlers have reached Antarctica.

And they are also here for the krill.

With so few fish left in the ocean,

we are now seeking other prey in the furthest

corners of our world.

These are some of the biggest factories on the sea.

They suck hundreds of thousands of tonnes of krill

into vast nets.

It's then boiled and processed for fish farms,

health supplements, and, most recently, for pet food,

all on board the ship.

How can wildlife compete with this?

Some claim this is sustainable.

But we may now be removing the foundation of

an entire ecosystem.

We have drained the life from our ocean.

Now, we are almost out of time.

Indeed, the ocean is in such poor health that I would find

it hard not to lose hope, were it not for the most remarkable

discovery of all.

The ocean can recover faster than we had

ever thought possible.

It can bounce back to life.

For if left alone, it may not just recover,

but thrive beyond anything anyone alive has ever seen.

We can be sure of this beyond any doubt,

because it is already happening.

For over 200 years, this area was fished

intensively with nets and traps.

With their predators removed, urchin numbers exploded.

Soaring kelp forests were transformed into a barren world.

With little left to catch, the decision was made to stop all

fishing across nearly three hundred square miles.

It would be a marine reserve or 'no-take zone'.

Once protected, the predators could begin to recover.

Balance was restored.

In just five years the forests were once again flourishing.

And with them, a thriving, bustling neighborhood.

Safe from fishing, the animals had time to grow big.

And the larger a female spiny lobster can grow,

the more eggs she can release.

As the larvae disperse,

they begin a journey into the unknown.

Leaving the safety of the kelp,

many are carried by currents into the open sea.

Lobster larvae may travel for thousands of miles,

even crossing international borders.

They keep moving for almost a year,

developing and growing along the way.

Those that survive the journey,

return to the coast to begin their adult lives.

And the chances are that when they finally settle,

they are outside the no-take zone.

This is how lobster populations spill into unprotected waters,

reviving fisheries far and wide.

Initially it had almost no effect whatsoever.

And then the spillover started to happen.

Eventually, it turned into something that was very

hard to ignore.

On one particular day,

fishing on the edge of the reserve,

we pulled up the trap of my career.

The most I'd ever seen in a trap.

One for the record books right there.

It was an ecstatic moment,

and it was an eye-opening moment

I think every fisherman I know will acknowledge the fact

that the reserves are working.

It's an amazing thing to see how abundant the species is.

There's a bit of magic in there, that's for certain, you know.

The 'no-take zone' is literally

overflowing with marine life.

If we just let nature take its course,

the sea will save itself.

Huge predators, not seen for decades,

have returned once again.

Even giant black sea bass, once assumed lost forever,

now finds shelter among the fronds.

Recovery like this is possible anywhere.

Even in the most overfished part of the most overfished

sea on Earth.

Fish populations in the Mediterranean have almost

completely collapsed,

a third have already been lost.

Yet even here there is still hope.

When a tiny reserve was established off the

coast of France, it erupted back to life.

Even the biggest fish are making a comeback.

This is the result of fully protecting less than 1%

of the Mediterranean.

But this is just the beginning.

If protecting a small portion of the sea from fishing has

such a large effect, imagine the potential power of doing

this across much larger areas.

Now for the first time this century,

we don't need to imagine, we can see for ourselves.

It is literally a place of our ancestors.

What we would call a "wao akua."

a realm of the gods.

Papahanaumokuakea is the largest fully protected area,

land or sea, on the planet.

Those calls for protection came from native Hawai'ian fishermen

and elders.

Without it, there would be no moli, no Laysan albatross.

Their home is the entirety of the vast Pacific Ocean.

They are seers of the sky.

They see more of the planet than almost any creature.

But they depend on tiny little spits of land in order to breed.

Those of us who come from voyaging and way-finding

traditions could only watch them in wonder.

Over years, each pair develops their own language.

By dancing together they reaffirm their bond.

Moli are the longest living known species of bird

on the planet.

It's hard not to look at this moli chick and wonder

"What will it see, in the next 60 years?"

Thanks to the vision of the elders and the Hawai'ian

fishermen who first charged us with taking

better care of this place,

they have gone from near extinction to the largest

albatross colony in the world.

Now, 14 million seabirds return each year.

It is a pu'uhonua, a place of refuge.

Why it's important to protect really big areas is for

migratory species to be the voyagers that they are.

They need a lot of space.

People said it couldn't be done.

But due to the protections of Papahanaumokuakea,

tuna can reproduce and spread into neighboring areas,

where populations have increased by 54%.

Spillover is basic biology.

When we first set out to protect what is now

Papahanaumokuakea, the people would ask us,

"What are you protecting it from?"

and our answer was,

"That's the wrong question.

It's about who and what are we protecting it for?"

Protecting the ocean doesn't mean being anti-fishing.

The goals of healthy fisheries and conservation are the same,

more fish, more abundance, more health of the ocean.

-Until now, it was assumed that no protected area could

be big enough to help fish species that migrate

over long distances, such as yellowfin tuna.

This place has shattered that assumption.

For when we create a nature reserve on land,

we mostly protect the life within it.

But we have discovered that when you do the same

in the ocean, the effects of these reserves

spread far beyond their boundaries.

The waters outside fill with life again.

Wherever we have given the ocean time and space,

it has recovered fast and on a greater scale than we

dared to imagine possible.

And it has the power to go even further,

to defend against the greatest threats of our time.

When corals experience heat stress,

they evict their plant partners and turn ghostly white.

During filming, the temperature of our ocean rose

higher than ever before.

A devastating heat wave travelled across the planet,

transforming even the largest and most

established tropical reefs.

As far as we know, these reefs have never looked

like this before.

These Elkhorn corals in the Caribbean...

...were some of the last.

We are likely here to be witnessing the extinction of

species before our very eyes.

This was the biggest global mass bleaching event

in recorded history.

If the warming continues, the corals never recover.

They're smothered by algae... and die.

Nearly all coral reefs are predicted to disappear in the

next 30 years.

You could be forgiven for thinking there is no hope

left at all.

But there is.

In just a few places, strict protection from fishing

has allowed armies of grazers to thrive.

They hold back the smothering algae,

giving the corals a chance to recover.

These are baby corals,

new life emerging from the wreckage.

In some places,

entire reefs have come back to life.

Protection from fishing has made these the most resilient

reefs on the planet.

This is the power of protection.

It is the same story in every ocean of the world.

If I asked you, "How much of the ocean is truly protected?"

What would you say, 20%?

At least ten, surely?

The answer is less than 3%,

in practical terms, none of it.

Many of the Marine Protected Areas that do exist are

exploited using destructive forms of fishing,

and are barely safe at all.

To save it from collapse, scientists have said we must

fully protect at least a third.

For it to work it should be, for the most part,

along our heavily fished coastlines.

And the area we choose should also include those

magnets for life out in the open ocean, seamounts.

If we can protect areas on land,

where the entire human population requires

space to live,

surely we can do it in the sea.

Restoring the ocean is for everyone on Earth.

In front of us is a chance to protect our climate,

our food, our home.

After a lifetime of filming the natural world,

I cannot remember a more exciting opportunity

for our species.

This could be the moment of change.

Nearly every country on Earth has just agreed, on paper,

to achieve this bare minimum and fully protect a

third of the ocean.

Together, we now face the challenge of making it happen.

Without the ocean, simply put,

we wouldn't exist.

The planet will go on.

The question is, will we be part of it?

I like to compare our fisheries to having

an apple tree in the backyard.

Do you want to pick all your apples in one day?

No, you want to go out and you want to pick a few apples.

You want to take what you need.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't

catch fish, eat fish.

And fishermen should be able to make a living.

But they shouldn't be able to do it in a way that

is just breaking everything.

Our community survives because

of the ocean.

The ocean gives life, the ocean gives life.

-Success on a global scale is possible.

I've seen it myself once before.

The pattern was familiar.

Once whaling became industrialized,

it took just 100 years until nearly all species were

pushed to the edge of extinction.

The blues, the largest of them all,

were pursued until only 1% remained.

I remember thinking that was it, there was no coming back.

We had lost the great whales.

Finally, lawmakers acted on public pressure to ban

commercial whaling.

What followed was beyond our wildest dreams.

The number of humpback whales in the South Atlantic tripled

in just ten years.

And scenes like these of fin whales in Antarctica were

unimaginable just 50 years ago.

Even the greatest of our ocean giants,

the blue whale,

hunted to the very edge of extinction,

has begun to return.

I would never have imaged that in just over a decade of

whaling being banned, I could encounter one myself.

I can see its tail just under my boat here

And it’s coming up, it’s coming up!

There!

Only in the sea can you get such huge size as that

magnificent creature.

Now we are forging a new relationship with

these gentle creatures.

A blue whale born today...

...could live for over 100 years.

If we apply the same foresight to save her home as we once did

to save her species, then she will witness

a remarkable recovery.

Through the course of my life,

we have been on a voyage of ocean discovery.

And what a journey it has been.

When I first saw the sea as a young boy,

it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and

mastered for the benefit of humanity.

Now, as I approach the end of my life,

we know the opposite is true.

It is my great hope that we all come to see the ocean not

as a dark and distant place with little relevance

to our lives on land,

but as the lifeblood of our home.

I'm sure that nothing is more important.

For if we save the sea...

...we save our world.

♪ In the end, it's just love ♪

♪ In the end, it's just love ♪

♪ Love ♪

♪ In the end, it's just love ♪

♪ In the end, it's just love ♪

♪ In the end, it's just love ♪