Jim Tommey:
Imagine you're in an enormous room, and it's as dark as a cave.
And you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can't see anything.
You've been given one tool, a hammer.
So you wander around in the darkness, and you bump into something, and it feels like it's made of stone.
It's big, it's heavy. You can't carry it away.
So you bang it with your hammer, and you break off a piece.
And you take the piece out into the daylight.
You see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster.
So you say to youself, "Well, that's worth something."
You go back into the room, and you break this thing to pieces, and you haul it away.
And you find other things, and you break that up, and you haul those away.
You're getting all kinds of cool stuff.
You gear other people doing the same thing.
So you get this sense of urgency,
like you need to find as much stuff as soon as possible.
And then somebody yells, "Stop!"
They turn up the lights.
You realize where you are;
You are in the Louvre.
You've taken all this complexity and beauty,
and you turned into a cheap commodity.
That's what we're doing with the ocean.
And part of what Mission Blue is about
is yelling,
"Stop!"
so that each of us--explorer, scientist, cartoonist, singer. chef--
can turn up the lights in their own way.
