MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER: Claire Nouvian

Claire Nouvian is a writer, filmmaker and environmentalist who dedicates her career to raising awareness about the distant and vulnerable deep sea. Deep below the surface of the sea lies an unknown and unexplored world, comprising 99% of the living habitat on Earth, inhabited by vampire squids, lanternfishes, and millenary coral reefs. Our last frontier, the vast ocean depths harbor millions of species still unknown to science. Yet this world is threatened by deep-sea fishing and global warming, and species go extinct unnoticed. Out of mind, out of sight. But the deep sea has an ambassador, Claire Nouvian, a young French woman who is reaching out to educate and inspire a global audience, and to help preserve this treasure trove before it is too late.

In 2007, Claire Nouvian was chosen as one of Jacques Cousteau?fs heirs by Ge?Lo Magazine, and a ?s guardian angel of our planet ?t. Ge?Lo acknowledged her outstanding passion and motivation to protect the deep sea. Yet her discovery of the deep sea was serendipitous. In 2001, Claire visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, where she saw a film with spectacular images of out-of-this-world creatures that lived to 4000 meters depth. Fascinated by that new world, she searched for documents and books that would answer her innumerable questions about the deep sea; to her dismay, there was none. In technical publications, however, she found that the ocean?fs depths had been exploited industrially for almost 30 years, with no regulation at all. Deep coral reefs 10,000 years old disappear within minutes under the crushing wave of a fishing trawler. This is the collateral damage of a fishery that employs only a few hundred ships in the world but which is destroying a unique global natural heritage at unprecedented speed.

This personal discovery prompted Claire Nouvian to start a crusade to ensure deep-sea biodiversity would step out of the shade, using as many media channels as possible. Between 2002 and 2005, she wrote two award-winning documentaries for Arte , the Franco-German educational channel. She founded the nonprofit association BLOOM, which aims at protecting the deep sea through public awareness campaigns. She also developed a school curriculum to introduce school and high-school kids with notions of vulnerable oceanic ecosystems. And she achieved a personal dream, diving to 1000 m depth in the Atlantic Ocean on the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible during a scientific cruise of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.

The tipping point of her deep-sea career arrived in 2006, when she published the book ?s The Deep ?t (Fayard / The University of Chicago Press), the first visual encyclopedia of the deep sea, which also features accessible chapters to introduce readers with the vast diversity of deep-sea ecosystems and phenomena. The book was praised by the international press and has won several awards . It has already been translated into six languages (with a Japanese translation in the making), reprinted four times in the United States, and sold over 100,000 copies in a record time. Sylvia Earle, Explorer-in-Residence of The National Geographic Society, wrote ?gThe Deep is the most stunningly beautiful book about the sea ever produced...?h

In November 2007 Claire opened an exhibit Into the Deep that she curated at the Natural History Museum in Paris (from Nov 21, 2007 to May 8, 2008). This is the first public exhibit to show a large variety of deep-sea species as well as unpublished photos and videos. The exhibit is planned to travel to Asia, America, Europe and Africa in the coming years. To complete her message to the public, she is now developing a script for a feature film on the deep sea as well as a guidebook of recommendations for a global governance of marine resources.

Claire is an explorer of the biological limits of our planet, down to the darkest abyssal realms; and also an explorer of the human capacity to wonder about nature, which she is using to inspire people to care about the deep sea. A citizen of the world (she has lived in several countries and speaks six languages), she engages in scientific seminars and public talks worldwide. She collaborates with international non-governmental organizations, and has recently been named by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) their Ocean Ambassador.