I was reading The Financial Times, www.doc-advice.com
and it was a little, tiny, two-paragraph story that said,
"Mankind may be causing a mass-extinction event."
It was, like, buried on like page six or seven.
And l thought,
"This is how humanity is dealing with the issue.
"They're not dealing with it."
Check your cellphone.
If you get anywhere near this place, he scrambles the signal.
Louie, man , how are you?
Just curious, how many cameras do you have on you right now?
You mean, like, on my table or--
No, no. On your body.
On my body?
Less than seven, but probably more than two.
Okay, so, we're doing an order here.
One hat cam, two buttonhole cameras,
sports bra, one bottle cam, 5. 1 1 tac shirt with the vibration .
-Whenever you're ready. -Oh , yeah .
So you're rolling right now, so you can get the entrance.
And make sure, of course, the straps are gone.
Okay.
Your reservation's in ten minutes.
All right.
So, we ate Codfish.
Kobe beef and also some sweet shrimp.
I was raised on it.
She brought me here.
Yeah .
We try to be adventurous, yeah.
I started eating it like ten years ago.
l've been having sashimi a lot at my grandpa's.
-Oh , yeah . -We would go out.
Thank you .
This is a special tamari soy sauce from the chef.
l don't know.
Yeah, three pieces. We got it.
It's a bingo.
The owners and chef of one of America's trendiest restaurants. . .
. . .are facing federal charges tonight,
all because of what they put on customers' plates.
An endangered species.
And behind the undercover sting,
some movie makers who went right back to work.
We're making our own road here.
Pretty big, the side of the skull here, yeah.
I did four stories about extinction for
National Geographic magazine.
You go to these beautiful landscapes.
There's dinosaurs from horizon to horizon.
And you think, "That was so far back then,
"what if it's going on right now and everybody's missing it?"
Each year, about one in a million species
should expire naturally.
In the next few decades,
we'll be driving species to extinction...
...a thousand times faster than they should be.
It's difficult to estimate
precisely how many species we're gonna lose.
In a hundred years or so,
we could lose up to 50% of all the species on Earth.
I remember thinking,
"This is the biggest story in the world."
It's like we're living in the age of dinosaurs,
but we can do something about it.
A friend of mine just reported up in that area.
Roger.
The blue whale is the biggest creature
that ever lived on the planet.
Bigger than any dinosaur ever.
Just like dinosaurs, they're going extinct.
It's coming in hot!
There it is!
Look at him.
Back in the days of whaling,
they were hunted to near-extinction,
down to about two percent of their population.
Now they're getting decimated by shipping traffic.
Go for it.
He's coming up to the right.
To the right.
My hope is that if you can show people
the beauty of these animals,
there's a chance to save these things.
One of the cool things about a blue whale
is that it has the loudest song in the animal kingdom,
but you can't hear it,
because it's below our threshold for hearing.
We look out at the world through these eyes and these ears,
and you think, "Oh, that's it.
"That's everything that there is to see."
But there's this hidden world on almost every level.
What I want to do is get people to see it.
We get off the boat,
and this fisherman comes up to our interpreter
and says, "Can you give me $500?
"I found this buoy. There's a $500 reward.
"lt needs to be returned up to America."
And I said, "Just a minute.
"Let me take a look at this buoy."
And I look at it, and it says,
"Return to Chris Clark, Cornell Bioacoustic laboratory."
I said, "I know this guy."
Chris had been pioneering new ways to record whales
for 30 years.
He basically proved that these animals
could hear themselves across oceans.
And so, to me, finding that buoy
was like finding a message in a bottle.
We built these recording systems.
We dropped them in the ocean, and they record continuously.
Whales and dolphins and anything that's out there...
we try and record.
So, the first time,
I knew there was a blue whale singing nearby.
l could see it on the display, but I couldn't hear it.
So what do you have to do? You have to speed it up.
And still, the hair goes up on the back of my neck,
and it just, like-- It's like,
"Damn! That's fabulous."
As we listen more and more
around different parts of the planet,
whether it's frozen Arctic ocean
or the deepest jungles of Central Africa,
the whole world is singing.
Clicking and grinding and whistling and thumping.
But we've stopped listening.
The Cornell Bioacoustical Laboratory
has the largest repository of animal sounds on the planet.
They've been collecting them since the 1 930s.
You can think of it as a museum,
just like there could be bird skins or, you know,
beetles tacked up on a wall.
So there's this range of sounds
from the largest animal ever to live on this planet
to the tiniest, little insects.
This is a song recording
of a male 'o'o singing on Kaua'i.
These birds mate for life,
so he would be singing a duet with his mate,
where he sings, and then she sings back and forth.
Here comes the male's song.
There's no response.
Here's the male's song again.
That's the last male of a species,
singing for a female
who will never come.
He is totally alone.
And now his voice is gone.
In the brief lifetime of this collection,
70 years or so,
many of the species that were recorded are now extinct.
So the repository is a living example
of the massive rate of extinction that's happening.
There's been five major extinctions in the history of the planet.
There's the Ordovician,
the Devonian,
the Permian...
...there was the triassic-jurassic,
...and then the K-t extinction,
...the one that killed the dinosaurs.
It's very difficult to comprehend deep time.
You know, 4.6 billion years of Earth's history.
But if you take, say, the history of the Earth
and try to squeeze it into a 24-hour clock,
where does man fit on that clock?
A few seconds before midnight. That's it.
We're the new kid on the block.
What we're seeing now...
...is called the anthropocene, the new epoch.
Anthropocene means the time of humans.
It's when the impact of humans is leaving itself as a mark
in the fossil record of the future.
65 million years ago,
there was an asteroid that struck
and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.
When it comes to the sixth extinction event,
we have no problem identifying the cause.
Humanity has become the asteroid.
We're on that tipping point now,
where it's either...
too late or just the beginning of a movement.
So, there's two pieces of whale and one piece of horse.
At the Hump restaurant,
we knew that they were selling whale meat.
But there's also something bigger going on.
We heard that the Obama administration
was in closed-doors negotiations with the Japanese
to go do commercial whaling again.
And I thought, "Well, if we could prove
"that endangered whales are being served right here,
"on the shores of America,
"we would stop that conversation."
Stop the murder! Stop the death!
Hump restaurant is to blame!
The animal-rights community took it up,
but the restaurant didn't close down.
There's this one guy I'd never heard of before,
his name is Ady Gil.
He took some gear and put it out in front of the Hump restaurant,
as people are going in.
So, what are you doing?
I'm protesting.
Yesterday, there were like 200 people here, protesting,
and l thought, you know,
somebody needs to keep the pressure on.
If you look at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes,
those are his screens, and that's all his projections.
And, so, he parks this Ferrari right next to the van,
and the owner comes out and tells Ady, he says,
"How long are you gonna be doing this?"
And he thought that I was just some hippie, you know,
gonna be here for a day or two.
I said, "Listen, man.
"I can be here for a month or two or a year or whatever.
"How long can you survive while I am here?"
Ten days later, the restaurant closes down.
To me, it was a beautiful moment.
Everybody had gone home,
and this one guy with this big, bright light,
and keeps the light shining on this subject.
Shut it down!
There are thousands of people all over the world,
willing and able and changing their careers to save species.
They go to some of the darkest, grimmest,
most unsafe places on the planet.
Let's save the shark! Let's save the shark!
Over 800 environmental activists have been killed
in just the last decade.
So these guys are doing the tough work,
and we never hear about them. They're not household names.
Shawn Heinrichs, I live in Boulder, Colorado.
You can't get any more landlocked than Colorado.
And I found out that there's this incredible ocean activist
living right down the street
who quit his job as a CFO for a tech company
so he could help save endangered species.
Shawn's doing some of the best, most groundbreaking work
that I've seen anywhere in the world.
Isla Mujeres was the largest shark-fishing island
on the east coast of Mexico.
At least 20, if not more, long-liners...
...were targeting sharks each and every single day.
Shawn helped turn this hunting ground...
...into one of the top places in the world
where you can actually go and watch sharks.
Now you have this community of ex-shark fishermen
who are making much more money taking tourists out
to swim with whale sharks
than killing sharks on long-lines.
It's just simple economics.
Shawn often works with his buddy, Paul Hilton,
an investigative photojournalist.
They can't help but to get themselves into dangerous situations.
Traveler's paradise.
Paul's a photojournalist,
like me, focused on endangered species.
He's brilliant at what he does.
Paul and Shawn try to bust rings selling endangered species.
We're gonna blow the lid off this place, right?
Shawn's pretty full-on. I love his enthusiasm.
He talks far too much when we're on assignment.
There's always that issue
of me having to go to him and say, "mate, wind it up."
I think it's the American in him.
l'm rolling. l can distract.
And a lot of the situations we go into,
it's always nice to go in as teams,
because you're going into situations where
you get caught up in the moment with the camera,
and you'll actually photograph it, and
there's no one watching your back.
Ask for the toilet. Where's the toilet?
Paul and Shawn have this technique
of... They have a camera sitting around their neck,
and most people think you have to put it up to your eye
to look through it and to shoot.
And it's actually a video camera,
and it's rolling the whole time.
So many.
And this is the Jaws, movie Jaws?
Don't push it too much, Shawn.
Okay, cool. Very cool.
I don't know about you. That's the most fins I've ever, ever seen.
How did you find out about this?
Facebook, basically.
I mean, colleagues, mates...
We just walked straight in, basically.
Wow.
How long were you there?
Ten, 1 5 minutes.
You did all this in ten, 1 5 minutes?
Oh, yeah, mate.
Yeah.
Are we almost there, Paul?
Yeah, so, it's the next block.
I didn't think that the illegal-wildlife trade
would be so overt.
You can go down streets,
and every other shop will be full of endangered creatures.
Look at this one right here.
It's not just shark fins.
It's just about everything endangered
in the world is for sale there.
With the explosion of demand in China
for shark-fin soup,
it was estimated that 250,000 sharks
are caught for the fin trade every single day.
Probably no other species
illustrates what's going on in the oceans right now
better than sharks.
Sharks predate dinosaurs.
They survived four mass-extinction events.
And just this one generation that I've been alive,
we've cut down their ranks about 90%.
I was following a group of shark finners
in Indonesia, and they were moving around camp to camp.
And, then, one morning,
I saw something reflecting off in the coral reef
in the shallow water.
And what I discovered was just horrific.
There's this beautiful tawny nurse shark,
but it had all its fins cut off.
And it was trying to swim, but it couldn't swim.
And it was heartbreaking,
'cause it's like... This is what the reality is.
This is the thing that nobody gets.
Now, are we gonna get... Any luck with us getting in there?
Okay.
Shawn has an interpreter.
I don't want to say her name,
but she's been doing undercover work in China
for several decades.
The first place she took us was a place
that they couldn't ever get into before.
Basically, the Walmart of the endangered-species trade
in Hong Kong.
Over the years,
I've actually worked really hard to get into this facility.
So has Paul and so has his friends.
And we've managed to maybe step in the door for 30 seconds.
Hey!
What's wrong?
His staff would come out and push us away,
threaten to call the police.
Hands, machete,
kicked out the door, "don't ever come back."
Here's what we'll do.
We have a car waiting with all the stuff in it.
I brought along a couple of colleagues from the Hump bust.
Heather Rally, who does undercover work for us.
And Charles Hambleton,
who's sort of my director of covert operations.
In the alley here, on the right-hand side?
We invented a cover.
We pretended like we were on a culinary tour
and we were looking for exotic product.
I think we stick to plan.
We're going as culinary tourist interests of Mr. Sawyer,
and we're all here, learning and taking pictures of culinary.
You can get into about as much trouble
as you can possibly get into
with a buttonhole camera in China.
If for some reason,
we run into people with badges and uniforms,
strip off all the shit.
Just rip it out from under your shirt and throw it over a wall.
Go right in. Go in, go in, go in.
Hi.
We're starting a business where we want to sell seafood.
We have a seafood shop.
Well, back where we do it,
it's mainly tuna and marlin and swordfish.
They want to see something more exciting.
'Cause the Chinese traveler and the Asian traveler
has become big business now. It's more than 50%.
We should go. We should probably go.
No, no, no.
-This is nice. -Yeah.
I need to go to the bathroom bad.
There's the bathroom.
Oh, thank you, thank you.
Yeah.
Are these expensive, also?
$44,800 US Dollar per kilo.
No way.
We ended up going down the road
to another warehouse on the Hong Kong waterfront.
Louie, look at this.
It must have been 1 0,000-20,000 fins in one location.
This was one of the biggest facilities on the planet.
Look at that. It looks like a blue.
The scale of it was just out of control.
l've never seen anything like that before in my life.
Jesus!
I feel like this world is absolutely insane.
I remember once diving
the northernmost islands of the Galapagos,
Darwin lsland and Wolf Island. You know, islands that
Darwin actually never had been to before.
It's the land before time.
I mean, it's like land before humans got there.
And I remember this giant whale shark came by,
and then a pod of dolphins came by.
You know, this is back when you shot film.
And the whole frame was just filled with wildlife.
And this dolphin came swimming from behind
the front of the whale shark, and it grabbed this tuna,
and it brought it and looked right at me and shook it,
and it swallowed it, tail first down its throat.
And I thought, "You know,
"this is when you want 37 pictures on a 36 roll of film."
It's just magical, absolutely magical.
As underwater photographers,
photojournalists really,
we're documenting a time and a place
that in the future may not be there.
And the clock is moving.
The first photographs I shot...
...the assignment for National Geographic, 1960,
I took a total of.. .
...seven or eight frames on two and a quarter square film,
on ektachrome film, and butted them together.
It was the first underwater, color panoramicever done on the reefs.
And this was when I came back in 1 989.
The beautiful Barrier Reef forest went to hell.
Now I'm looking around and saying, "Well,
"what happened here?
"It's not so far off from what happened 65 million years ago."
Extinction is often being driven by...
...direct human activity,
things like habitat destruction or overfishing.
And then there's global climate change,
which is happening in a different way.
So we have these sort of dual things,
like the direct hand of man,
and the indirect hand of man in the change of climate.
Climate is controlled by the oceans.
The oceans are the big guy. They're in control.
And the oceans now are slowly changing.
And that is the danger we face today.
A mass extinction is driven by a change of the environment...
...and we are changing the environment precisely
along the lines that can trigger off
one of these great catastrophes.
There's been five mass extinctions,
and they've had different causes,
but there's been one common factor in all.. .
a massive increase in carbon dioxide.
And we've never had a carbon-dioxide spike
like what's happening now.
We are burning through the fossil fuels laid down
over hundreds of millions of years.
Really reversing geological history, basically.
And we're doing it really, really fast.
In the Gulf oil spill,
about 4.9 million barrels of oil were spilled.
That represents about a quarter...
...of what we use every single day in the U.S.
You look at an event
like the Gulf oil spill, and you think,
"This is the biggest environmental catastrophe
"in America ever."
But that spill is nothing compared to the damage
caused by us doing everyday things
we don't even think about.
And I'm more guilty than anyone.
The worst thing you can do to the environment
is make a film about it.
This looks really cool.
We did a carbon assessment
of the first two years of production.
And I was horrified at how much energy it takes to do what I do.
Sweet. We're gonna turn this one on.
We're at the point where we're making our lives
a lot better for us,
but we're doing it at the expense of
of everything going forward.
We have many, many ways to fix this problem.
The question is, are we gonna do it fast enough?
What we know at the moment
is we're driving this out of control...
...and the ocean's chemistry is changing really rapidly.
Scarily fast.
When we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
it doesn't all stay there.
Between a third and a half gets absorbed by the oceans.
The CO2 reacts with water
to form something called carbonic acid,
and each year, the ocean becomes more and more acidic.
If you want to know what that does,
get a seashell and drop it in,
...you know, a glass of vinegar.
A whole variety of creatures will simply
dissolve into the acid ocean that we have created.
There's massive death in the oceans.
It's already started.
Well, it's not only started, it's well underway.
Those are larvae?
Yeah. See the little...
The brown smudge?
Yeah, yeah.
Each year, we harvest seven to ten billion oyster larvae...
...that we send out to growers throughout the Pacific northwest.
I still remember the day all of the larvae essentially
in our entire hatchery were on the bottom of the tanks.
So around six billion larvae all died in a single day.
That deep-ocean water
off the coast of Washington and Oregon
comes into the hatchery intakes,
...and they can't grow their shell.
lt's dissolving faster than they can grow it.
It seemed outlandish to think that the ocean
could be acidified enough to cause these kinds of problems.
It just seemed like something from the distant future
and nothing we ever had to pay attention to.
The rate of change that we're seeing in the ocean
and the change that it's gonna create in our food chain...
it's gonna be dramatic, and it's gonna be in our lifetimes.
The things that we're used to eating
may not be available anymore,
and we may need to transition to, you know,
eating jellyfish or something like that.
Start a new trend.
It sounds a bit silly,
"Change your diet and save the planet"
But if humans could become vegetarians now,
you would make a massive difference.
By far and away,
the biggest factor in terms of this mass extinction
is destroying natural habitat or converting natural habitat
into land for food.
The more dependent we are on meat, milk, and eggs,
the greater the CO2 and methane emissions.
Cattle and Brahmanas of all kind
produce methane as a byproduct of breaking down grass
and other things that they feed on.
So, the contractions
are pushing this gas out from the stomach,
going through here and the one-way valve and into that?
Yes. And after this, we collect inside the bag.
So, how long has that bag been collecting gas?
Only two hours.
Methane is something like 22 times more potent
as a climate-changing gas than is CO2,
so it doesn't take very much methane to make a difference.
A cow can basically fill up a 55-gallon garbage bag
full of methane every day.
One cow's not a problem, but now we have 1 .5 billion of them.
And it's an incredibly inefficient way of producing food.
Three-quarters of agricultural land is used just to feed livestock.
When you factor in everything,
the clearing of the land for grazing, feeding,
and transporting, livestock causes more greenhouse gases
than all the direct emissions from the entire transportation sector.
I don't think it's a competition between these problems.
l don't think one could be put above the other.
lt's like saying, "well, is global warming
worse than ocean acidification?"
Or, "Is fishing all the big fish in the sea worse than polluting it?"
I think it'd be foolish to try and single out
any one of them to say this is how we're gonna
fix the planet's problems.
We need to fight them on all fronts.
Look at all the rodents.
They're like house cats.
Look at this one. lt's still alive.
A lot of doors closing.
Lights going off.
That's scary, man.
Yeah, we're definitely not welcome here.
In 2003, the government clamped down on the wildlife markets
across southern China, so things started to go underground,
so operating in early hours of the morning.
And it's horrific.
They're shutting down.
-What? -They're shutting down.
That's crazy.
They're hiding them now.
Oh, my gosh!
This is a market that had to switch places twice that year.
Oh. What are they doing?
I mean, they know they're not supposed to be doing
what they're doing.
That's hardcore.
The more endangered it is, the more illegal it is,
the more we have to go to the back rooms.
Go straight up.
So, Louie,
l want to show you something right here.
You're looking at a dozen manta rays
sitting right in these bags right here.
When you consider that each of these animals
has one pup every couple years,
you're looking at literally an entire generation wiped out,
just in these bags.
A few years ago, I started noticing species of
manta and mobula ray lined up in the streets
in areas that used to be predominantly shark ports.
And it was really confusing to me, because I understood
that you can't use their wings for shark-fin soup,
and the meat from these rays is very pungent.
It's not worth the time of bringing in
these huge, heavy animals.
I couldn't believe when I walked in.
There's just giant, oceanic mantas all lined up in a row.
And just wanted to know what was going on,
and then l started watching them cutting out the gills.
The gills are missing. Where did they put them?
Where did they take the gills?
And it came down to this.
It was an old cultural remedy in a very small, coastal town
in southern China, and that was over 50 years ago.
And that had largely disappeared,
but I think it was just following the Sars outbreak,
somebody got it in their mind that
"Hey, we're running out of sharks.
"What other products can we move into the pipeline?"
The gills of manta rays ended up
in all the traditional Chinese medicine stores
and the dried-seafood stores.
I remember my first encounter with a manta in the water.
It's something I'll never forget.
I'm sitting in the water, and then just out of the blue,
this manta ray does this huge flyby, right past,
and then goes back into the blue.
And then I'm just left breathless, waiting.
Just recently, we were in Bali.
At the end of the last dive, everyone's out of the water.
And I look down,
and this one manta comes right underneath me
and then just stops, and it hovers,
and it's about 1 5 feet down, and it just-- It's not moving.
And I'm like, "That's interesting."
I look, and there's fishing line tailing off the top of its body.
And the first thing I did is I swam down.
I snipped the line off the top of its head,
right just above the hook.
And swam up.
She didn't swim away.
She was just hovering right underneath me.
So I swim back down to her one more time,
and I put my hand gently right on the front of her head,
and I put my hand on the hook,
and I slowly worked that hook right out of its top jaw.
And I thought, "That's it.
"You know, she's gonna swim off now. She's been saved."
I look down, and she's circling right under my feet.
So I swim back down to her one more time,
and I put my hand right next to where the injury was,
as if sort of rubbing it and saying, "Hey, listen.
"You're gonna be okay."
And I put my head right next to her eye,
and I just remember her eye moving back and forth
between my mask, looking at both my eyes...
and realized that she knew I was trying to help her.
Often, people say, "How can one person make a difference?"
What if you could see how shark-fin soup is made?
If you could see how each year,
up to 70 million sharks are killed to end up in soup,
could you still eat it?
I shared the footage of a live, finned shark
in Indonesia with WildAid,
an organizer that has been working on shark conservation
in China.
The film went to over a billion people in Asia.
80% who were surveyed who saw it
said they were either gonna quit eating shark-fin soup
or drastically reduce their consumption of it.
Remember, when the buying stops, the killing can, too.
As a still photographer,
I can see the power of an image.
It was transformative.
But I think it's in our DNA to take care of future generations,
and if you can find that way in,
you can reach people really quickly and change them.
The human eye is so limited.
We see only a tiny, little sliver
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It's like if you owned a grand piano in your house,
but you could only hear one note on it.
Normally, carbon dioxide gas is invisible to the human eye,
but certain wavelengths of infrared will be absorbed
by gases like CO2 or methane.
So that's what's going on here.
This camera has a very particular color filter on it,
enabling us to visualize the CO2 gas
that's coming out of our noses and mouths.
We had two cameras.
One camera that sees what your eye sees,
and the other, what the fossil-fuel companies
don't want the rest of the world to see.
The carbon dioxide world.
Let's do this one coming at us.
Three, two, one.
I mean, it's disgusting, but it's beautiful.
So, let's just go up left here.
-On the left here? -Real slow here.
Where these guys are gonna be, a slow creep.
Slowly, slowly, slow down.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly.
Wow.
Just about everything that we do emits carbon dioxide,
from the way we heat and air-condition our houses,
the way we do our transportation systems,
whether it's planes, trains, or automobiles.
Just about everything pumps out vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
But you can't see it.
To be able to see this hidden world was like
you were let in on this magic trick,
but the magic trick that was actually killing the planet.
This looks like a big parade of crap, doesn't it?
Just filth.
Yep.
So, what are you working on, buddy?
Come on in. l will show you.
Is this your flux capacitor?
It's close.
Oh, right here, actually.
I can spin this. You see this?
It shoots carbon dioxide.
I mean, what, the government hiring you? Whose doing it?
You just doing your own thing or what?
-lt's like a science project. -Yeah. Just a science project.
Science project?
In many ways,
our generation is the one with the last hand on the throttle
that just pushes that throttle down.
We're putting so much carbon dioxide
and so much methane into the atmosphere,
it's quite possible, if you think about it...
...that the baby boom generation itself,
is the single most impactful generation
of mammals this planet has ever seen.
In the anthropocene, we're changing every parameter.
We're changing the geology of the planet.
We're changing the chemistry of the ocean.
The anthropocene means that
what happens to this planet is now in our own hands.
When you take any drop off the ocean anywhere
and you look under a microscope,
there's so much beauty there on this tiny scale,
this miniature architecture
that I never tire of looking at.
Our first speaker is Boris Worm,
and he's published a number of important
and controversial papers in recent years
on the decline of phytoplankton.
When I give a talk on plankton, I say, first of all,
let's take a breath, and let's take a second breath,
and then contemplate the fact
that that second breath came from the ocean,
because it was produced ultimately by phytoplankton,
which produce half of the oxygen we breathe.
We're aware that we are changing the ocean at a global scale.
There's multiple human impacts,
ranging from fishing to climate change and acidification,
implying that no part of the ocean is free from human impact.
Using satellite imagery and other data...
...Dr. Worm determined that we have may have lost
40% of plankton production in just the last 50 years.
It's happening primarily as a consequence of climate change,
and there is a lot of controversy,
because it's a big question.
And if this plankton decline pans out to be as dramatic
as we think it is, then that would be a big deal.
Your life depends on the oceans breathing.
And, in fact, animals could only exist on land
after plankton in the oceans had produced enough oxygen
for them to live by.
We have this illusion that it's the big things
in the environment that count.
But if you lose the small things...
Everything else fails.
It's like there's this incredible web
where we're all connected,
and if you take out one little thing,
let's say like plankton,
everything, the whole web collapses.
It's like having a symphony.
And one by one, you just pluck
each of the instruments
out of the orchestra.
Till your last voice is there.
And then, it's gone.
It's out of order when globally,
most of the world's fighting to protect these species,
and he's taking 600, possibly even more, every year.
That's the processing plant.
Paul found this guy, Mr. Lee,
one of the biggest smugglers of endangered sharks in the world.
They had three protected species of sharks- basking sharks,
great whites, and whale sharks.
Well, like I said, if I had a possible business opportunity
to buy omega-3 oils from him.
What do I need to know about fish oil?
Say, "Look, we need 1 00% confirmation
"that it's a good product," and, then, yeah, ask for samples.
I'm just gonna play it, like, a little bit angry, defensive,
and you're gonna try to pacify me.
Where am I operating out of in the U .S.?
l'm gonna say Brooklyn.
Wherever. That's your call, mate.
Shark oil is being used for omega-3,
but these sharks he's trading are endangered
and protected in China and internationally.
The only law that we really had
to protect endangered species is CITES.
CITES is the convention
for international trade of endangered species.
And there's only a few hundred animals
that are actually on that list.
And part of the reason is because
the people that control CITES
are actually in the trade of selling them.
Ahead of this CITES conference,
a new decision-making mechanism
to set up a centralized system...
for the resumption of the international trade
in elephant ivory.
The economy's been down.
lt's taking a while to get people interested.
Obviously, Mr. Sawyer's very interested.
Can we take a very small sample back of...
Just to let you know, last time, he did give me some, and...
I need to test it though.
We need to have my people test it.
I don't know who your lab is.
I'm sorry, l'm sorry. This will be my lab.
Can l just borrow Louie for one second?
You have to talk. Just one second, Louie.
Just they want... They want to know about...
I just want to make sure that five years from now,
we don't have problems with people saying,
"Oh, we fished out all the whale sharks."
-Yeah. -Okay.
1 00%. 1 00% whale shark.
Yeah.
We walked up the steps and looked into
the processing ground.
And there was whale sharks chopped in bits all over the floor,
so we just walked in and started photographing.
Then, we sent out a press release to the world's media.
It went viral. We had National Geographic,
Time magazine, the BBC.
It just went everywhere.
The Chinese government are doing a lot, at the moment,
for endangered species.
They're burning ivory.
They've banned shark-fin soup at government banquets.
And things are really moving in the right direction.
Bye-bye.
-Bye. Thank you. -Bye-bye.
So I just hope they can be proactive with Mr. Lee.
We are down about it,
but maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah.
It's really easy for us to look east and say,
"You know, look what China's doing.
"They're destroying the planet. They're polluting everything.
"They're wiping out species."
But the west is already doing an incredible job
of massively depleting and damaging the environment
and taking out a lot of threatened species.
What's happening in China now is they're going through
the same growing pains that we did.
But when we went through our growing pains,
there was only a billion people on the planet.
With China going through its growing pains,
there's over 1 .3 billion people in China alone.
We've already pushed so many vulnerable species
and the environment to the brink.
We can't afford to keep making the same mistakes,
because there will be nothing left.
Some of the world's rarest amphibians are inside that trailer.
I've heard up to half of all frog species
could be gone in the next 20 years.
Yeah.
There are 7,000 species of amphibian,
and they're all endangered.
PhotoArk's my 20-year attempt to photograph
every captive species on Earth.
One guy's desperate attempt to get people to care. That's it.
There he is.
The very last rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog.
Very last one.
Chytrid fungus wiped them all out in Panama, so he's the last one.
That's it.
When he's gone, they'll be extinct.
Can we lift his chin up a little bit for me, please?
Perfect.
This is his big moment.
A lot of times, these pictures I do
are the only national coverage these animals will ever get
before they go extinct.
This is it. This is their one chance.
I really hope the PhotoArk isn't just some sort of
an archive of the things we lost, but instead,
it's a chance to get people interested,
look these animals in the eye, and fall in love with them.
There's only 330, 340 species of turtles,
and half of them are under threat.
If the temperature rises on the planet just a few degrees,
they're very susceptible to extinction.
So, this is really the last line of defense,
keeping animals that are extinct in the wild
in a captive situation.
l think you could compare something like this,
or nature in general, to the finest works of art...
...on the planet, and in my opinion more than,
you know, the best Picasso, Matisse, Warhol.
Life wants to flourish.
DNA wants to go forward.
We need to be part of that.
Why would we want to do anything to disrupt
something that took billions of years to evolve?
See how the trees are all falling into the lake?
And they're doing that because the permafrost
in the ground is melting.
In the Arctic,
in these cold regions around the planet,
underneath the lakes, underneath the oceans,
there's vast, vast quantities of frozen methane
that's been in there for millions of years.
This lake has a lot of methane bubbling out of it.
ln fact, we can light those methane bubbles on fire.
School kids know about the extinction event
that killed all the big dinosaurs,
but paleontologists, you know, the connoisseurs of this,
they look back at the Permian extinction.
That's the biggest extinction in the history of the planet.
Almost all life on the planet disappeared.
It's called "The Great Dying."
You know, the K-T is pretty obvious.
That was caused by a meteor, but what the hell killed
all the animals on land and sea back at the Permian?
And now they're coming around to thinking,
"It was probably methane."
So, the Arctic's getting gradually warmer,
and the methane that's been locked away
for millions of years, is starting to come out.
When all this gets going,
we will have, what we call, a runaway effect.
That's runaway climate change, and that's unstoppable.
Are you all right?
The only way to tackle the methane problem,
is to reduce CO2 emissions,
because that's what's warming the Arctic,
letting this methane bubble up.
You know, the great irony is, like, the oil companies,
they see the melting of the ice as an opportunity
to go up there and drill more holes for oil.
And what we don't realize, it's underneath that,
that's what people have to worry about.
We do know from the fossil record
that even pre-human climate changes could happen fast.
l'm not talking millions of years.
I'm talking three years or four years.
Way less than a mortgage,
Less time than it takes for your kid to go through college.
And what if the world's temperature
goes up six degrees in three years?
It will lead to massive death in the oceans.
When the oceans start dying like that,
the planet can't function as it used to function.
And when that happens, life everywhere fails.
That is a mass extinction.
There's this remote island in Indonesia.
It's right at the tip,
where the sea comes sort of crashing into this channel,
and through this quarter are whales and dolphins
and all kinds of animals.
And at the tip of this island is this village called Lamakera.
There's no place on Earth that we know of where more manta rays
are being killed than in that single village.
We realized if we were gonna deal with the manta issue,
we had to go to ground zero.
These are manta rays.
They make, like, sets of 20 or 40,
and they're about $20 a set,
and you get a couple of sets off a manta, maximum.
And then you get about $500 to $600 from the gills.
Those are gills. You can see the end of it.
All the cartilage will be sent to China
to be crushed down into pills for glucosamine sulfate
for the sore joints and stuff.
We sat down to meet with the Kepala Desa, who's the chief.
Initially, they weren't very welcoming.
They didn't want us to stay.
But ultimately, we managed to talk our way onto
one of the fishing vessels.
Ask them how they caught it.
See it?
A couple of hours into the fishing trip,
they saw this black figure on the surface just cruising.
Paul, left.
Blood starts to color the water.
Over the course of an hour,
this thing struggles for its life.
It's big.
And I'm looking at this, and I'm going,
"God, I can't do this."
He just sticks in the brain of this animal,
and it just freaks out.
And I actually watched its soul just disappear in front of me,
and then it went limp.
Paul, hurry.
No, no. Don't panic, don't panic.
As we're going towards the village,
an armada of boats start streaming past us.
And they're all triangulating on this group of manta rays
that have come into their waters.
And the first thing they do is start hacking into the gills.
With the advent of traders providing diesel-powered engines
and a supply chain all the way out to China,
they transitioned very quickly to a full-on commercial outfit.
And it's only a few years before the manta rays
will be wiped out.
They realize the numbers are dropping.
Even if we weren't here, they realize something has to change.
What are their children going to be doing?
They're gonna have nothing left.
It's just losing a bit of magic, you know?
The world, without that species, to me, it's empty, you know?
In 200 years,
people will look back on this particular period
and say to themselves,
"How did those people at that time just allow...
"...all these amazing creatures to vanish?"
But it would be very little use in me or anybody else
exerting all this energy to save the wild places,
if people are not being educated
into being better stewards than we've been.
If we all lose hope, there is no hope.
Without hope, people fall into apathy.
There's still a lot left that's worth fighting for.
About two decades ago,
the Baiji dolphin was extremely vulnerable.
There was hundreds of them left.
l mean, I thought, "Well, there's enough out there.
"Somebody's gonna do something to save this animal."
This animal, it wasn't just the last of its species,
it was the last of an entire family of cetaceans.
So l thought, "Humans, somebody, somewhere,
"has got to go out and save these animals.
"They have to, because they're dying off."
They're all gone now. They went extinct.
ln my lifetime they went extinct. So...
We always think that there's gonna be somebody else
around to save these animals.
This field is one of the last places on Earth
where you can see a Florida grasshopper sparrow.
And there's fewer males singing every year.
We're roughly around 20 sparrows a year.
From 1 50 to 20,
so it's getting harder every year to find the bird.
Did you hear something?
That's a grasshopper sparrow.
Phase-out is a term you hear sometimes by zoo-keepers.
When a species is no longer viable in captivity,
they think about phasing it out.
Just kind of slip off into extinction.
There he is.
There, you got him, you got him.
Right there.
You'll never phase out an elephant
or a panda or a rhino.
But, you know, if it's a small, brown bird,
how are you ever gonna get people excited about that?
My pictures of the sparrow ended up on the cover ofAudubon.
And when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service saw that,
they went from allocating $30,000 a year
towards the grasshopper sparrow...
Looking good.
...to about $1 .3 million this year to try to study it
and turn things around for this bird.
There he goes.
To me, photography isn't just about showing
somebody how beautiful something is.
It's a weapon.
Remember what Ady Gil was able to do with that little projector
in front of the Hump? What he was able to achieve.
I thought, "Well, how can we scale this up?"
When we dream, we don't dream inside of a box.
We dream inside of worlds.
Early photographs were circular.
Even early TVs were circular.
But to make more out of the medium,
there was a decision made to crop it into a box.
And the box has a lot to do with the way we think.
My way has always been blowing up the medium
into a million pieces...
...and letting it become something else.
Travis has done projections on iconic buildings all over the world.
My fantasy would be to take the work
of my photographer friends at National Geographic
and amplify their message by orders of magnitude.
If we would have just had, like, a whale going by...
...and then it jumps off into some other building.
It'd be beautiful.
I still love the idea of sharks on Wall Street.
What do you think?
Yeah. No problem.
80% of the greenhouse gases that are caused by cities
are caused by commercial buildings.
Tony Malkin, the guy that owns the Empire State Building,
probably the most iconic building in the world,
and he's greened it.
Everyone had written off the Empire State Building
as outmoded and obsolete.
We retrofitted 6,500 windows,
replaced all the lights with LEDs,
redid the heating and cooling systems.
From that, we actually saved $4.4 million a year.
The best way to move the needle,
when people are talking about the environment,
is the bottom line.
l like to project into the woods.
Try to see the whole building?
Yeah, we'd see the whole building.
And we could also, like,
the mobile idea, where we can mount projectors
onto trucks and just drive with them.
That would be cool.
Travis had drawn up an illustration
of a mobile projection vehicle.
Just looking at the plans,
it opened up a whole new world of possibility.
It can't just be the environmental activists
that care about getting off of fossil fuels.
Everybody has to become a part of it.
I heard that there's this race car driver
that was an environmentalist in a sport
that traditionally doesn't care about the environment.
So, like, a living contradiction.
When I go to the sports-marketing companies
and l say, "Can you help me find sponsors?"
And then l give them the list of people I won't work with--
No fossil fuels, no oil, no coal, no meat,
no people who tested on animals, no fur, no leather.
They just look at me like...
"I don't know how you want us to help you."
Leilani MUnter has just passed five cars
in the last lap and a half, and she is real impressive...
Sometimes, I have an environmentalist say,
"Well, if you were really an environmentalist, you know,
"you'd be racing a bike."
And the problem with that is then I wouldn't have
75 million people paying attention to my sport.
Thank you.
You look at a guy like Elon Musk.
He builds reusable rocket ships to supply the space station.
He's the biggest installer of solar in America,
and he built the best-rated car ever made, and it's electric.
Leilani knew Elon Musk.
l think we are currently doing something very, very dumb,
which is to run this experiment on how much CO2
the oceans and atmosphere can hold.
In order to have a future that does not result
in an environmental catastrophe,
followed by economic collapse,
which is what would occur if we didn't get off oil.
That's why we have to have electric cars.
I think we want to put in an order for a car today.
Excellent. Well, take one.
All right. Go ahead.
Yeah.
It's pretty quick.
Is this gonna go that fast with 1 05 pounds on it?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I mean, the focal length on it is crazy,
but you'll be able to shoot really far with it.
You can zoom hundreds of feet from something
or like 1 ,000 feet and scale it.
Thousands of feet with this?
Yeah.
About how far will these project?
A mile.
Now, I'm building one for you guys
that's three times louder than this.
Suddenly, there's just this amazing sound.
You can't hear that?
We've taken inspiration from ocean creatures, like plankton,
cuttlefish, that use the light as a communication device
or a camouflage, and added an electro-luminescent paint job.
lncredible.
With the mobile projection,
we can go anywhere we want with it.
We can take it to the highways. We can take it to big buildings.
We can take it to the streets.
And we'll be able to project CO2 emissions in real time
out of the projector of the back of the vehicle
while Leilani's driving.
So, that's legal.
That's legal?
Until you push that.
That works, right?
That's legal.
Okay, it's ready to go, boss.
My feeling is that
by bringing nature to the city,
we're hopefully able to inspire people
to actually help save these creatures.
There's a lot of species that need protection.
Most species that are deserving never get listed.
After a four-year campaign,
we finally managed to get mantas on the docket
at the 201 3 CITES meeting.
So, what l want to show you here is a video
that shows what we're doing.
Most people say, you can't beat money.
You can't beat politics.
You can't beat those things with just hope and inspiration.
We have to make it socially unacceptable
to consume these animals.
I think we live in a very visual world.
Imagery is very powerful.
'Cause you can walk into a room,
they might speak 1 5 different languages.
But you show them a photograph, people get it. They understand.
"Supping on conservation soup."
There we go. There's the Hong Kong rooftop.
Copy that. Let's just go for it now.
-You got your seat belt on? -Yeah.
Let's take a right.
Just keep on going, keep on going.
Good.
So, what are you filming in the vehicle?
lt's a light on top of the vehicle.
So, what are you documenting?
Yeah. And we're getting shots in industrial areas.
Why industrial areas?
The reflections on the car look prettier.
You might want to do it somewhere else.
What if we photograph your smoke?
That's not smoke.
What is it?
That's steam.
So, if we film your steam, is that okay?
No.
I want people to understand that we're the only generation left
that can save these animals.
There's no other future generation that we can count on to save us.
It's us.
Yes!
The only way you're gonna effect change
in a remote community like Lamakera
is to present an alternative.
With the CITES victory,
we succeeded in getting manta rays listed for protection,
which led to a national ban on all fisheries for manta rays
throughout all of Indonesia.
In fact, it's illegal to even harm one,
and it can result in up to a year in prison.
That law, it creates new possibilities.
Yeah. That's our theater. Yeah. Projector.
And, then, where is the electric?
And in the world of conservation,
those small opportunities and those small doorways that you open
often lead to those breakthrough moments.
Now, whether it works, that's the next step.
Lamakera.
There's our village.
We want them to get an entirely new view,
that the stuff they go out in the water
and they see every day and they stick a spear in
is worth far more alive than dead.
The concept of converting this hunting culture
to a tourism culture, on the surface, seems pretty daunting,
but we show them the success stories that we've had in these other areas.
Places in the world that had very little
and now are thriving.
These kids are gonna be really influenced by this,
and they're gonna be the guides of the future.
We're just bringing a message.
It's really up to them.
Something's up in the air.
Oh, nice.
We can make this happen.
As we face more and more animal extinctions,
we need more and more of these indomitable spirits.
And we need more people to understand it's worth doing.
The small choices we make each day
can lead to the kind of world that we all want for the future.
Away from
One million miles away
From home
Away from
One million miles away
There was a reverend in Japan.
He had a statement which really struck me,
and it was "Better to light one candle than curse the darkness."
There's so many people who sit back and say,"We're screwed,"
or, you know, "Why bother?"
But you know what?
That candle, that candle means something,
because with that one candle,
maybe someone else with a candle will find you.
And I think that's where movements are started.
I know it all sounds overwhelming.
But if we start with just one thing, we can start a movement.
Two hands
Spirit give me two hands
Humans
Humans making humans
Mountains
Maybe we can move them
Come now, together we can do this
Together, we can
Take my hand
Now I won't stand around the dark
Together we can
Light your candles and stand
For those who came Before man
Now I won't stand around the dark
Better to light one candle
Than curse the darkness
Better to light one candle
Than curse the darkness
And breathing
Give thanks for they have given
Listen
To all the songs I'm singing
We can do something or do nothing
So come now
Strike the match, Let's do this
Together, we can
Take my hand
Now I won't stand around the dark
Together, we can
Light our candles and stand
For those that came before man
Now I won't stand around the dark
Better to light one candle
Than curse the darkness
Oh, better to light One candle
Than curse the darkness
Oh, better to light one candle
Than curse the darkness
Oh, better to light One candle
Than curse the darkness
In the trees
'Tween the leaves
All the growing
That we did
All the loving
And separating
All the turning
To face
Each other
I divide
In the sky
In the seams
'Tween the beams
All the loving
And separating
All the turning
To face each other
Without
Biodiversity
I'm nothing
Means like
I never
Existed
Without my heart
With no reflection
I cease to exist
And my children
Are dying now
Inside me
My children
Are dying now
Inside me
My children
All I love
All I know
All I've known
I am dying now
Inside me
My children