Eat Seafood. A Little Bit. And Mostly Plants.

I met Barton Seaver about a year ago, on a TED expedition to the Galapagos Islands. We were there as part of oceanographer Sylvia Earle’s TED wish—she had brought scientists, celebrities, financiers and a few writers on board a National Geographic ship to talk about the best ways to protect the world’s oceans. During the [...]

Oceans: A Book of Life for the Seas

“Only the sea knows the depth of the sea.” So goes a line from Hindu scriptures, one that well describes the mystery of the ocean depths—and our ongoing ignorance about life beneath the waves. For thousands of years, our knowledge of the seas was limited to surface currents and the fish that we could catch, [...]

Oceans: Sylvia Earle’s Mission to Save the Blue

Over in the paper and iPad TIME magazine, I have a long story this week on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her mission to save the oceans. I’ve written about Sylvia before on Ecocentric, during our trip to Bermuda—no matter what you think about her very ambitious plan to created vast protected areas across much [...]

Monitoring Climate Change in the Oceans’ Most Studied Spot

Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece up about my trip to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS) in, unsurprisingly, Bermuda. The visit was part of a longer reporting trip I took to the island last week with the oceanographer and environmentalist Sylvia Earle, for a piece on ocean health I’ll be [...]

Oceans: Swimming Among the Sargassum

Our trip’s timing to Bermuda this week couldn’t have been much more fortuitous. We arrived just as Hurricane Danielle was running out of steam after whipping Bermuda with high waves, and Hurricane Earle to the east is likely to make conditions rough by the end of the week. But right now, as we depart on [...]

Oceans: On Bermuda

I’m on the road again—or in this case, the high seas. I’ll be spending this week in and around the Atlantic island of Bermuda with Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle—the famed American oceanographer I can best describe as America’s Jacques Cousteau. As I’ve written before, the 75-year-old Earle—who has spent her career exploring the depths—has launched [...]

TED Takes on the Oil Spill

I’m in Washington DC today to attend the TEDxOilSpill conference. As I wrote in an earlier post, TED is a California-based nonprofits that puts on conferences that connect very smart—and sometimes very wealthy—together to discuss outside the box approaches to global problems. And if there’s one problem that needs some outside the box thinking, it’s [...]