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Racing Extinction
By Mark Monroe

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I was reading
The Financial Times,
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.

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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,

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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...

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...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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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...

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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

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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.

Page 22/52
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.

Page 23/52
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,

Page 24/52
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

Page 25/52
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

Page 26/52
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.

Page 27/52
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

Page 28/52
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

Page 29/52
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,

Page 30/52
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

Page 31/52
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

Page 32/52
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.

Page 33/52
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.

Page 34/52
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,

Page 35/52
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,

Page 36/52
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

Page 37/52
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

Page 38/52
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

Page 39/52
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

Page 40/52
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.

Page 41/52
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.

Page 42/52
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,

Page 43/52
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,

Page 44/52
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.

Page 45/52
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

Page 46/52
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."

Page 47/52
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

Page 48/52
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

Page 49/52
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

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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

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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

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