Mission Blue Page #4

seeing, and you're, like,

"Oh, my God, this is what I wanna

do with the rest of my life."

- Is that what happened?

- I already knew.

In the water, anyone

can be a ballerina.

You can stand on one finger.

You can do... back rolls.

You can look as if you are... the

most graceful creature in the world.

And along the way you see all this...

this galaxy of life.

You know, it's

just exhilarating.

If I can do it... you can do it.

I'm not Superwoman.

I'm not big and muscular.

My mother, at 81... put on a mask

and flippers and took on the ocean.

And then she would tell people,

"If you are 81, don't wait any longer.

Just do it."

Thousands of delighted visitors

are discovering the fun of a

Florida Gulf Coast holiday.

From the time I was a

child, seeing Florida,

what I thought was just

wonderful wilderness...

watching it change

before my eyes.

The Tampa Bay area

is one huge resort

with gleaming new

hotels and motels.

To watch Tampa Bay

getting dredged,

taking what was a marsh and then

putting a parking lot there,

putting a housing

development there.

Watching the Weeki Wachee

River as a witness,

this crystal river... that starts

with a spring like a morning glory.

You look down, you see this blue throat

that just seems to go into infinity,

and then it spills out into a

river that goes off into the Gulf

in this water that's so clear it looks

like there's no water there at all.

And then development along the edge,

just clouding that amazing water.

The trees were starting to

turn brown around the edge

and all the grass was dead.

It was...

that kind of

experience, a witness.

I saw the before.

I saw the after influence of what

we can do to the natural world.

The Gulf of Mexico is this

extraordinarily wonderful,

productive, magnificent place

that had the misfortune of being

right on top of a ton of oil,

and being the sewer for the people

of the United States of America.

Call it the price of progress.

For six decades, big agriculture

and industrial farming

have affected the Gulf of Mexico

from hundreds of miles away.

A little less than a third of all

the corn grown in the entire world

is grown in Iowa, Nebraska,

Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota.

That productivity is due to

the application of humongous

quantities of nitrogen fertilizer.

All that fertilizer runs off the land,

makes it into the Mississippi River,

comes down the river...

fuels extraordinary population

explosions of phytoplankton,

the stuff dies, it rots.

When something rots,

it uses up oxygen,

and then anything that is alive,

like crabs, little tiny fish,

they can't hightail it

out of there, they die.

They die from no oxygen.

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