Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal

Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)

Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.

Nouvian’s journey began in 2001 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where she was blown away by an exhibition of “Mysteries of the Deep.” She couldn’t believe the beautiful creatures she was seeing were real and not some computer generated 3D aliens. She set out to tell the world this stuff exists, making a documentary and book.

Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling.

Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.

But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.”

Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.