National Geographic Pristine Seas Project

Protecting the Ocean’s Last Wild Places.

- Jimmy Langman

He got a doctorate in ecology from Aix-Marseille University in France, comparing marine life inside and outside a small no-take marine reserve on the Costa Brava. National Geographic explorer-in-residence Enric Sala, 48, originally from Girona, Spain, then went to work for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. There, he helped design a network of marine reserves for Baja, Mexico, and did research dives in places like Cuba, Belize and Brazil to study fishing, pollution and climate change impacts in the ocean. But he increasingly began to feel that the science he was doing was all for naught. “One day I realized I was just writing the obituary of ocean life. I felt like the doctor who tells the patient how she is going to die - with excruciating detail - but without offering a cure.”