Berkeley Talks

In this Berkeley Talks episode, renowned marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco discusses how a persistent narrative that the ocean is “too big to fail” has led to its degradation. While many now believe its problems are “too big to fix,” Lubchenco explains why we need to embrace a new narrative: That it’s too central to our future to ignore.“There is a historic narrative about the ocean, one that has framed the way people have talked about the ocean and have treated the ocean for almost all of human history,” Lubchenko told the audience at a UC Berkeley event in March. “The ocean, for thousands and thousands of years, was seen as so immense, so endlessly bountiful that people thought it must be infinitely resilient and impossible to deplete or disrupt.”But now, she said, the impossible has happened — “it’s depleted, it’s disrupted, it’s polluted, it’s warmer, it’s more acidic, it’s deoxygenated" — and we need to create a new narrative, one that acknowledges that a healthy ocean is central to a just and prosperous f