♪♪
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[ camera shutter clicking ]
psihoyos: 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 6 or 7.
and i 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?
[ camera beeps ]
less than seven, - but probably more than two.
[ laughter ]
okay, so, we're doing an order here.
one hat cam, two buttonhole cameras,
sports bra, one bottle cam, 5.11 tac shirt with the vibration.
man: 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 10 minutes.
all right.
[ indistinct conversations ]
woman: so, we ate codfish. [ laughs ]
[ indistinct conversations ]
kobe beef and also a sweet shrimp.
woman #1: i was raised on it.
woman #2: she brought me here.
yeah.
we try to be adventurous, yeah.
i started eating it like 10 years ago.
i'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.
hambleton: i 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.
psihoyos: i did four stories about extinction for
national geographic magazine.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
you go to these beautiful landscapes.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
there's dinosaurs from horizon to horizon.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
and you think, "that was so far back then,
what if it's going on right now and everybody's missing it?"
pimm: 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.
novacek: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
-- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com
captions paid for by discovery communications
[ dolphin vocalizing ]
[ cheering ]
[ indistinct radio chatter ]
man: 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!
ooh, ooh, ooh! look at him.
back in the days of whaling,
they were hunted to near-extinction,
down to about 2% 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.
♪♪
[ laughs ]
oh!
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.
it needs to be returned up to america."
[ beeping ]
and i said, "just a minute.
let me take a look at this buoy."
[ beeping ]
and i look at it, and it says,
"return to chris clark, cornell bioacoustic laboratory."
i said, "i know this guy."
[ geese honking ]
chris had been pioneering new ways to record whales
for 30 years.
[ whale vocalizes ]
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.
clark: we built these recording systems.
we dropped them in the ocean, and they record continuously.
[ devices beeping ]
whales and dolphins and anything that's out there
we try and record.
clark: so, the first time,
i knew there was a blue whale singing nearby.
i 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.
[ tape whirring ]
[ whale vocalizing ]
and still, the hair goes up on the back of my neck,
and it just, like -- it's like,
"damn! that's fabulous."
[ whale vocalizing ]
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 --
[ vocalizing ]
clicking and grinding and whistling and thumping.
[ animals calling ]
but we've stopped listening.
[ birds chirping, metal squeaking ]
psihoyos: the cornell bioacoustical laboratory
has the largest repository of animal sounds on the planet.
they've been collecting them since the 1930s.
clark: so there's this range of sounds
from the largest animal ever to live on this planet
to the tiniest, little insects.
[ 'o'o chirping ]
this is a song recording
of a male 'o'o singing on kaua'i.
[ bird chirping ]
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.
[ bird chirping ]
there's no response.
here's the male's song again.
[ bird chirping ]
that's the last male of a species,
singing for a female who will never come.
he is totally alone.
[ bird chirping ]
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.
♪♪
psihoyos: 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.
so 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?
[ clock ticking ]
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.
clark: 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.
woman: so, there's two pieces of whale and one piece of horse.
psihoyos: 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."
man: stop the murder! stop the death!
hump restaurant is to blame!
psihoyos: 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 i 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 hippy, 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?"
10 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.
[ crowd chanting "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.
man: 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.
[ applause ]
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.
heinrichs: 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.
psihoyos: shawn helped turn this hunting ground
into one of the top places in the world
where you can actually go and watch sharks.
heinrichs: 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.
[ indistinct conversation ]
psihoyos: 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.
heinrichs: paul's a photojournalist,
like me, focused on endangered species.
he's brilliant at what he does.
psihoyos: paul and shawn try to bust rings selling endangered species.
we're gonna blow the lid off this place, right?
hilton: shawn's pretty full-on. i love his enthusiasm.
he talks far too much when we're on assignment,
so 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.
heinrichs: i'm rolling. i 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?
psihoyos: 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"?
♪ da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da ♪
hilton: 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?
hilton: facebook, basically.
i mean, colleagues, mates --
we just walked straight in, basically.
wow.
how long were you there?
10, 15 minutes.
you did all this in 10, 15 minutes?
oh, yeah, mate.
yeah.
heinrichs: - are we almost there, paul?
yeah, so, it's the next block. yeah, the next one.
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.
heinrichs: 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.
psihoyos: probably no other species
illustrates what's going on in the oceans right now
better than sharks.
sharks predate dinosaurs.
they've survived four mass-extinction events.
and just this one generation that i've been alive,
we've cut down their ranks about 90%.
heinrichs: 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.
psihoyos: shawn has an interpreter.
[ horn honks ]
i don't want to say her name,
but he'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.
heinrichs: 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.
heinrichs: hey!
hilton: what's wrong?
[ shouting in native language ]
hilton: his staff would come out and push us away,
threaten to call the police.
heinrichs: hands, machete,
kicked out the door, "don't ever come back."
[ indistinct shouting ]
psihoyos: 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.
woman: 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.
heinrichs: 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.
heinrichs: if for some reason,
we run into people - with badges and uniforms,
strip off all the...
just rip it out from under your shirt and throw it over a wall.
i'm gonna take a picture of this.
go right in. go in, go in, go in.
woman: hi.
[ conversing in native language ]
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.
[ groaning ]
yeah.
are these expensive, also?
yeah. biggest one is...
$44,800 u.s. per kilo.
no way.
psihoyos: we ended up going down the road
to another warehouse on the hong kong waterfront.
heinrichs: louie, look at this.
hilton: it must have been 10,000, 20,000 fins in one location.
this was one of the biggest facilities on the planet.
hilton: look at that. it looks like a blue.
the scale of it was just out of control.
i've never seen anything like that before in my life.
jesus.
♪♪
i feel like this world is absolutely insane.
[ dolphins vocalizing ]
i remember once diving
the northernmost islands of the galapagos,
darwin island 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 wale shark, and it grabbed this tuna,
and it brought it and looked right at me and shook it,
and it swallowed 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.
doubilet: - 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.
greenberg: the first photographs i shot,
the assignment for national geographic, 1960,
i took a total of 7 or 8 frames on 2 1/4-square film,
on ektachrome film, and butted them together.
it was the first underwater, color panoramic
ever done on the reefs.
and this was when i came back in 1989.
the beautiful barrier reef forest went to hell.
psihoyos: now i'm looking around and saying,
"well, what happened here?
it's not so far off from what happened 65 million years ago.
johnson: 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.
veron: 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.
kolbert: 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.
peacock: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
man: 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 everything going forward.
[ horns honking ]
we have many, many ways to fix this problem.
the question is, are we gonna do it fast enough?
hall-spencer: 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.
peacock: the co2 reacts with water
to form something called carbonic acid,
and each year, the ocean becomes more and more acidic.
pimm: 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.
♪♪
barton: each year, we harvest 7 to 10 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 6 billion larvae all died in a single day.
dewey: that deep-ocean water
off the coast of washington and oregon
comes into the hatchery intakes,
and they can't grow their shell.
it's dissolving faster than they can grow it.
it seemed outlandish to think that the ocean [laughs]
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.
dewey: 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.
[ cow moos ]
veron: 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.
novacek: 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.
woman: so, the contractions
are pushing this gas out from the stomach,
going through here and the one-way valve and into that?
berra: yes. and after this, we collect inside the bag.
so, how long has that bag been collecting gas?
only two hours.
brown: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
hall-spencer: i don't think it's a competition between these problems.
i don't think one could be put above the other.
it'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.
[ indistinct conversations ]
[ geese honking, ducks quacking ]
[ rodents squeaking ]
heinrichs: look at all the rodents.
[ cats meowing ]
they're like house cats.
man: look at this one. it's still alive.
a lot of doors closing.
heinrichs: 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.
rally: they're shutting down.
psihoyos: what?
they're shutting down.
man: that's crazy.
they're hiding them now.
heinrichs: oh, my gosh!
[ speaking native language ]
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.
[ speaking native language ]
the more endangered it is, the more illegal it is,
the more we have to go to the back rooms.
go straight up.
heinrichs: so, louie...
i want to show you something right here.
you're looking at a dozen manta rays
sitting right in these bags right there.
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.
hilton: 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 i started watching them cutting out the gills.
the gills are missing. where did they put them?
where did they take the gills?
heinrichs: 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?"
hilton: 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.
heinrichs: 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 15 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?"
announcer: 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?
heinrichs: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
richards: 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.
psihoyos: let's do this one coming at us.
[ indistinct radio chatter ]
3...2...1.
i mean, it's disgusting, but it's beautiful.
psihoyos: so, let's just go up left here.
stepanek: 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.
[ train whistle blows ]
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 was actually killing the planet.
this looks like a big parade of crap, doesn't it?
just filth.
[ siren chirps ]
yep.
oh.
so, what are you working on, buddy?
come on in. i will show you.
is this your flux capacitor?
psihoyos: it's close.
oh, right here, actually.
i can spin this. you see this?
it's just carbon dioxide.
i mean, what, the government hiring you?
whose doing it?
you just doing your own thing or what?
-it's like a science project. -yeah. just a science project.
science project?
johnson: 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.
worm: 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.
man: 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.
[ applause ]
worm: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
worm: 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.
veron: 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.
psihoyos: 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.
[ birds chirping ]
clark: it's like having a symphony.
and one by one, you just pluck
each of the instruments out of the orchestra...
[ bird chirping ]
...till your last voice is there.
[ chirping stops ]
and then it's gone.
♪♪
heinrichs: 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.
ome of the world's we can't afford to keep makirarest amphibianskes,
are inside that trailer.
i've heard up to half of all frog species
could be gone in the next 20 years.
man: yeah.
there are 7,000 species of amphibian,
and they're all endangered.
photo ark'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 treefrog --
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 photo ark 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.
goode: 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.
i 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.
schwartzberg: why would we want to do anything to disrupt
something that took billions of years to evolve?
[ wind whistling, ice cracking ]
woman: see how the trees are all falling into the lake?
and they're doing that because the permafrost
in the ground is melting.
psihoyos: 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.
in fact, we can light those methane bubbles on fire.
psihoyos: schoolkids 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."
[ camera shutter clicking ]
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.
oh!
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.
psihoyos: 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.
johnson: we do know from the fossil record
that even pre-human climate changes could happen fast.
i'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?
veron: 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.
♪♪
heinrichs: 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.
[ man singing in native language ]
we realized if we were gonna deal with the manta issue,
we had to go to ground zero.
[ laughter ]
[ sheep bleats ]
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 their sore joints and stuff.
we sat down to meet with the kepala desa, who's the chief.
hilton: initially, they weren't very welcoming.
they didn't want us to stay.
heinrichs: but ultimately, we managed to talk our way onto
one of the fishing vessels.
heinrichs: ask them how they caught it.
[ all shouting in native language ]
see it?
[ man shouts indistinctly ]
hilton: a couple of hours into the fishing trip,
they saw this black figure on the surface just cruising.
[ conversing in native language ]
paul, left.
blood starts to color the water.
[ men singing in native language ]
heinrichs: over the course of an hour,
this thing struggles for its life.
it's big.
[ conversing in native language ]
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.
[ all conversing in native language ]
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
would be wiped out.
hilton: 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?
♪♪
goodall: 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.
psihoyos: about two decades ago,
the baiji dolphin was extremely vulnerable.
there was hundreds of them left.
i 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 i 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.
in my lifetime [voice breaking] they went extinct. so...
we always think that there's gonna be somebody else
around to save these animals.
sartore: 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.
sartore: from 150 to 20,
so it's getting harder every year to find the bird, huh?
[ birds chirping ]
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.
psihoyos: there, you got him, you got him.
right there.
sartore: you'll never phase out an elephant
or a panda or a rhino.
[ camera shutter clicking ]
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 of audubon.
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.
munter: whoo! there he goes.
[ birds chirping ]
psihoyos: to me, photography isn't just about showing
somebody how beautiful something is.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
it's a weapon.
[ camera shutter clicking ]
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?"
threlkel: 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.
[ applause ]
psihoyos: 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.
♪♪
psihoyos: if we would have just had, like, a whale going by,
and then it jumps off into some other building.
threlkel: it'd be beautiful.
i still love the idea of sharks on wall street.
what do you think?
yeah. no problem.
[ laughs ]
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 l.e.d.s,
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.
i 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.
psihoyos: 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.
[ cheers and applause ]
munter: it can't just be the environmental activists
that care about getting off of fossil fuels.
everybody has to become a part of it.
psihoyos: i heard that there's this racecar driver
that was an environmentalist in a sport
that traditionally doesn't care about the environment,
so, like, a living contradiction.
munter: when i go to the sports-marketing companies
and i say, "can you help me find sponsors?"
and then i 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...
[ scoffs ]
"i don't know how you want us to help you."
announcer: leilani munter has just passed five cars
in the last lap and a half, and she is real impressive...
munter: 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.
[ cheers and applause ]
thank you.
psihoyos: 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.
i 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 [laughs] 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. we'll take one.
[ laughs ]
♪♪
man: it's pretty quick.
is this gonna go that fast with 105 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.
threlkel: 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.
[ whales vocalizing ]
whoa! suddenly, there's just this amazing sound.
you can't hear that?
[ whales vocalizing ]
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.
munter: incredible.
psihoyos: 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.
man: so, that's legal.
that's legal?
until you push that.
[ laughter ]
that works, right?
munter: that's legal.
okay, it's ready to go, boss.
psihoyos: my feeling is that
by bringing nature to the city,
we're hopefully able to inspire people
to actually help save these creatures.
the only law that we really had
to protect endangered species is cites.
cites is the convention
for international trade of endangered species.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
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.
woman: 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.
[ train brakes screeching ]
heinrichs: 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 2013 cites meeting.
so, what i 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.
hilton: i think we live in a very visual world.
imagery is very powerful.
'cause you can walk into a room,
they might speak 15 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.
psihoyos: 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.
[ siren chirps ]
man: so, what are you filming in the vehicle?
munter: oh, it'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?
[ laughs ]
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.
[ cheers and applause ]
yes!
♪♪
heinrichs: 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.
[ speaking foreign language ]
now, whether it works -- that's the next step.
♪♪
[ laughter ]
heinrichs: - [ speaking foreign language ]
lamakera.
[ laughter ]
[ conversing in foreign language ]
"there's our village."
[ cheers and applause ]
[ laughter ]
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.
[ man speaking native language ]
[ laughing ]
hilton: 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.
whoa, whoa, whoa. something's up in the air.
oh, nice.
goodall: 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.
[ gate squeaks open ]
[ whales vocalizing ]
[ wolves howling ]
[ birds chirping ]
[ "walk with me" by arak plays ]
[ insects chirping ]
[ animals calling ]
♪ away from ♪
♪ one million miles away ♪
♪ from home ♪
♪ away from ♪
♪ one million miles away ♪
heinrichs: 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.
[ 'o'o chirping ]
[ chirping stops ]
psihoyos: i know it all sounds overwhelming.
but if we start with just one thing, we can start a movement.
[ "one candle" plays ]
♪ two hands ♪
♪ spreading 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 ♪
♪ don't stand there in the dark ♪
♪ together, we can ♪
♪ light our candles and stand ♪
♪ for those who came before man ♪
♪ don't stand there in the dark ♪
♪ better to light one candle ♪
♪ than curse the darkness ♪
♪ better to light one candle ♪
♪ than curse the darkness ♪
♪ we need to ♪
♪ give thanks, for they have given ♪
♪ listen ♪
♪ to all the songs they're singing ♪
♪ we can do something or do nothing ♪
♪ so come now ♪
♪ strike the match, let's do this ♪
♪ together, we can ♪
♪ take my hand ♪
♪ don't stand there in the dark ♪
♪ together, we can ♪
♪ light our candles and stand ♪
♪ for those who came before man ♪
♪ don't stand there in 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 ♪
[ "manta ray" plays ]
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