Terry Lilley IS everything wild. As a biologist, endangered species manager, cinematographer, diver, activist, and wildlife advocate, Terry reflects philosophically about the interconnections of humans, animals, and nature.

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Your positive imprint.

What's YOUR P.I.?.

Today's guest is biologist, endangered species

manager, cinematographer, diver activist, and advocate.

Terry is able to educate and bring awareness to the changes to the

coral reefs, wildlife populations, landscapes, and so much more.

Terry's legacy is to bring not only awareness to the preservation of our

natural world, but the active engagement by humans to save the environment.

Terry welcome to the show.

It's so good to see your smiling face over there in Hawaii.

Aloha from Hawaii.

Thank you for having me.

It's nice to get up out of the water and dry out for a little while.

Well, I'm glad you're drying out here at your positive imprint and

sharing, and you've already shared so much in the many, many years

that you have worked with wildlife.

And so I'm just thrilled to have you share with what is happening today

and some of it certainly can be devastating news, but there's always hope.

We always want to look for the positive and look for hope.

Oh absolutely.

You know, Catherine, I was very blessed as a little kid and I look

back at it now and wow, why did I get such good parents that had me?

When I was two years old, my father taught me to surf

and I've been surfing ever since.

When I was four years old, my father literally picked me up at

the beach, place me in a pond with two, six foot long sharks and s...

said,, swim around get to know 'em.

They're your friends.

And my mom and my dad, basically for my entire younger life

let me live out in nature.

And what that taught

me, is a lot of positive things.

And I say this a lot in my school classroom programs.

As long as there's DNA left on earth and the earth is

spinning, there is always hope.

Mother nature will find a way and I live by that and really believe it.

And my motto is very much oriented to firsthand observation.

Yeah, it's one of the reasons why I like living in Hawaii because Hawaiian

culture was built on firsthand observation for the last 1800 years.

So I like to be in the water, be with the animals, be with the surf,

learn from them, and then share those experiences, especially with

the children in our local schools.

Well, that's so remarkable and definitely such a young

age, which is your legacy, which is your parents' legacy, right?

I don't have ocean obviously here in New Mexico, but we have the wilderness and

I have so much enjoyed the time that my parents brought us out into the wilderness

and taught us not just survival skills, but like you were saying, learning about

the animals, the behavior, nature, mother nature, and how it affects,

how it can affect us and how it does affect us in really everyday life.

Many guests have said, everything is connected.

I would hope that people take the opportunity to go out and be with nature.

Learn and then go enjoy.

Lots to be said for mother nature.

What I like to teach everyone is looking at the earth as your own body.

Okay.

The earth is one big living, growing, changing organism.

It's not a bunch of little parts like the African continent or Asian continent

or Pacific ocean or Atlantic ocean.

Those are simply parts to one single body.

If you want to stay healthy as a human and you've cut off your

finger, well, you might bleed so that may affect your heart.

Okay.

If you take drugs that ruin your brain, well, that's going to

affect your bloodstream and your skin and your limb your ability

to move and so forth and so on.

Same with the earth.

All of the oceans are interconnected with this flowing energy.

This energy is interconnected with the energy on land and all the

animals from the bumblebee to the hummingbird are directly connected to

the dolphin, whale and sea turtles.

And on earth, all of these energies are shared as one living single.

And if you don't take care of heart of your body, the rest

of your body's going to suffer.

In the past 300, 400, 500 years in the human race they tried to look

at the earth as little teeny parts.

Okay.

What are we doing in Africa?

What are we doing in south America?

What are we doing in the Himalayas?

And what are we doing in the bottom of the ocean in the Pacific?

But it doesn't work that way because everything's interrelated.

Even in Kaua'i where I have my school classes, I have a class of

12 year old kids in the class and I teach us interspecies communication.

How do you get the phone number of a shark of a sea turtle and how you can be on

land and call the animals and communicate and talk with them whenever you want to.

Just like you could with your cell phone, talking to your friends

on the other side of the country.

And so being out and living with animals then in my storytelling and what I like

to do more than anything is share how the animals behave, how they think, how they

move, how they eat, how they reproduce and how that energy is connected with

the rest of the energy on the planet.

And I'm doing incredibly detailed studies.

I just thought.

From the sea of Cortez, the Gulf of California and Mexico doing

a Marine life steady there.

And the very same species of Marine life in the sea of Cortez

also lives on the Galapagos islands, 3000 miles to the south.

And we've now discovered that on surface currents all around the

world, those same surface currents.

The Hawaiian Sanders did to be able to take their baka sailing canoes

and go from Tahiti to Hawaii.

On these surface, currents are little slicks of water, fresh water, and they

blow around the surface of the ocean.

And in these slicks are eggs and larvae and babies of Marine life.

So you may have a pollution problem in the sea of Cortez where they're

killing certain species of dolphin

and distinguishing other types of fish species, but what a lot of people don't

realize that these animals reproduce and their babies may not hatch, or settle down

to the seafloor until they get to Ecuador.

There's currents across Northern California and Northern Pacific

are going from north to south.

Then we went down to Peru and there a humble current in Peru,

that's going from south to north.

And then we went to Indonesia and there a current in Indonesia

going all the way across the Pacific to the Galapagos islands.

So what we're even understanding now because of DNA studies that when you

look at the Pacific ocean, all of these animals are intermixed and they all share

energy and they all share the same DNA.

And so as a populace on earth, we need to look at somewhere like the

Pacific ocean as an entire body.

What happens in one part of the Pacific is directly going to affect what happens

in the rest of the Pacific ocean and through DNA, modern cameras, satellite

imagery, underwater 4k movie cameras

we now can make it really fun to teach all of this information to the school kids.

They're not just going to the beach because uncle Terry wants them

to learn about the reef below, where they surf that out here at

Pipeline on the north shore of Oahu.

They get to go to the beach and grab a drone helicopter and an underwater

drone submarine and a movie camera

and they get to go out with me and live with the animals and for themselves,

see how interconnected we all are.

And get to know these animals in a very personal way.

Like you would, the dogs and cats in the neighborhood.

So it's really fun.

And the whole idea here is to teach kids to have fun, and then to

have this very detailed learning.

Absolutely.

I think if we can teach the interconnectedness then as children

grow older, they look at the world around them with more mature eyes, an

understanding that everything they do as well, and everything that humans do

will connect to whatever is happening in the world, or can be the cause of

whatever is happening in the world.

I think your words of teaching your words of wisdom are certainly spot

for what we want to help provide as far as wisdom for the future in

preservation.

, when we were kids growing.

And my dad was one of the surfers in California we didn't know what

the surf was going to be like until we walked down the beach that day.

There was no surf line, no forecasts, no weather forecast.

So we really didn't know.

Now, if you go in and watch professional surfing contest, anywhere in the world,

they're monitoring the weather on the other side of the ocean and they're

tracking storms off Japan or Tahiti or way on the other side of the Pacific to know

when the surf is going to hit Hawai'i.

So the young surfers right now and divers and younger kids are really realizing

that, wow, our surf here in Hawaii is interconnected with the weather in Japan

and the weather in the Philippines.

And so they're starting to look at their earth through their eyes of

surfing as being totally interconnected.

So all of a sudden , if I want to go out and have some good waves and have

a healthy beach just sit on in a pretty ocean in a coral reef, then I need to

care about what's going on in Japan or the Pacific Northwest or Ecuador.

And so this is the kind of learning right now that I've got 16,000

hours with national geographic

under water studying Marine life.

Then going to 23 different countries around the world and studying marine life,

talking with the animals that live under water in Indonesia and the Galapagos and

The Bahamas, they all know each other.

These animals around the world

they know what the other one's doing, what the ocean is doing all around the planet,

because their survival on earth that spins and weather changes and currents change,

everything's changing all the time.

Their survival is being able to connect with the other

animals all around the world.

Now it's not so strange.

I'm connecting with you and you're in New Mexico and I'm in Hawaii.

We don't even have the same time on our watch.

But we're learning from each other.

We're teaching each other.

And we're understanding the world in a little bit better

way by doing this podcast.

So what I hope to through my movie series is to teach kids all

around the world that they have that interconnection with nature.

You're born with it.

The kids understand computers.

I say that everybody has their own password to the

internet, infinite knowledge.

You and me and every yeah, you and me and everybody on earth has their

own internal password to know what the rest of the planet is doing.

You can know what the whales are doing in the Pacific Northwest.

You can know what the octopus is doing in Maui.

You can know all about the intricacies of animals around the world, because you

have an internal password to connect with that ultimate knowledge on this planet.

And so teaching older people how to reconnect with nature and to redefine that

internal password so they can do a better job at interconnecting with the planet.

Kids automatically have that interconnection.

So showing how to build on it, then we can turn the planet back into one functioning

living system instead of a bunch of little parts that are being operated differently.

That's going to be the future of saving our planet.

You can't have the Chinese military practicing underwater microwave weaponry.

And then the United States being off the Philippines and practicing

underwater, laser torpedoes, these are all conflicting energy.

That throws the earth out of balance, the dolphins and whales and sea turtles.

And all the sharks are trying to tell people right now and show people we

need to get back in balance with them.

And we get that into this interconnection and start doing away with these man-made

energies because they're very destructive.

And so we have to get back into being taught by wildlife and the marine life

on how to be better stewards of this planet.

And when we do, I think we're going to find that everyone's

going to be healthier.

Everyone's going to be happier.

We're being bombarded by 50,000 impulses, a second.

Radio waves, microwave sound waves.

All these transmissions humans are making.

People are finding it harder and harder to meditate these days because of that.

They're being bombarded by so many unnatural energies that breaks that

connection between you, the earth, you and nature, you the ocean and

you to the dolphin or the whale.

It breaks the natural bonds and the natural communication

between all living systems.

I had a guest on Andrew Bracken who works with farmers in

Africa, and these farmers are having to figure out what types of seeds to plant.

Well, my gosh, you've been planting seeds for hundreds of years.

So what's the problem.

The problem is climate change.

The seeds that they've been planting don't work anymore.

Climate change is causing this, yet those farmers have

a minute carbon footprint.

Right.

And so, like you say that connectedness is breaking.

The only way you're going to understand change

is if you get immersed in it and become part of it.

We did a study with Scripps Institute in Kauai, out at Tunnels

a place I know you like to go to.

It's called the acoustical footprint of the reef.

we put this high-tech equipment out on the reef that recorded every

sound on the reef for two weeks.

3 trillion sounds in one little part of the reef in two weeks.

We have the sound of the coral polyps talking to each other.

We have the sound of the lobsters talking to the crabs.

We have the sound of the sea urchins talking to the whales.

So earth has been built on a lot of data, a massive amount of data.

It's not just climate change in that word itself that is causing the disconnect.

Climate change is very simple.

Humans are causing earth changes to accelerate.

These are changes been going on for billions of years, but they take a

million years to happen versus a hundred.

So the more humans cause an accelerated climate change, the more interconnected

humans are going to have to be with their environment to deal with these changes.

And there is no training scientifically, that's going to

teach me how to deal with a change in any different part of the world.

Everything is changing.

The great white sharks are changing.

The nudibranchs are changing.

The crabs are changing.

All the animals on earth are changing.

So the only way we're going to deal with that is to go out, be with nature

spend time to understand the changes, to know which direction to go.

When certain seeds don't work anymore there's other seeds that are right there

that are just ready to be planted in the ground that are going to grow like mad.

If the coral reefs were healthy we have a sea level rise in Hawaii

that's about a quarter of an inch maybe to a half an inch a year.

Now the coral reef can grow at four to five inches a year..

So as sea levels rise, if you understand the reef and you nurture it, the coral

reef will rise and that will offset the problems with the sea levels cause a

coral reef is mother nature's natural underwater, seawall, same with the kelp

forest off California, Pacific Northwest.

But the problem is, is that humans have lost their harmony with their coral reef.

They've lost our harmony with the kelp forests.

If there's a change happening then you can start assimilating and feeling

those changes and know what to do.

So humans have to grow up here as a bottom line.

The whales lived on earth for 20 million years.

They started in the ocean, they gravitated to the land and

they went back to the ocean.

And whales and dolphins

they don't live as a single individual.

They live in a harmonized as a group, all together, acting as one.

That's why dolphins can heal each other.

That's why one dolphin, a thousand miles away from the other

dolphin knows that it's sick.

That's why every dolphin in the pod knows when a female dolphin becomes pregnant

because they all live and act as one.

So when there's a change, they can harmonize with that change and figure

out how to change along with it.

The earth is not dying or falling apart.

It's not going anywhere.

We're enclosed in an atmosphere here.

We're not losing parts of the earth up to Pluto.

But we are creating all of these manmade and women made energies.

Aside from going out and sitting in nature what

else can children and adults do who may not live near nature?

They live in urban areas.

What can they do to help the world to reconnect?

That's a really, really great question.

I've been all around the world.

I've been to almost every continent on earth now and underwater

and trying to figure that out.

Nature is everywhere no matter where you are.

I went to New York city.

I did some interviews and some movies in downtown New York.

You can sit up on the top of a apartment complex find nature very well.

There's Paragon Falcons flying around in New York Senora.

Uh, and nesting on top of the high rise buildings.

So wherever you are at get outdoors and get away from electronics

and spend some peaceful time.

We're on electronics right now.

It's doing something good with this podcast.

We can't get away from electronics completely because that's

how we communicate together.

Okay.

But you don't need to be calling your phone or texting your

buddies 75,000 times a day.

Put your phone down, go out in the ocean and say hello to a

dolphin and a sea turtle and learn how to communicate naturally.

We don't have to change the world.

We do that by changing ourself.

Such words of wisdom.

I want to share something.

We live in a really small part of New Mexico

at the bottom of a huge, 10,000 foot peak.

Of course, being in the mountains, we have deer bear, coyote,

everything, and skunks.

We have a skunk and adorable.

I love him.

So anyway, one year, many years ago, Our dog, we were sitting on the porch

and we have, spindles on the porch and a doe came by with her twins.

And the DOE walked up.

Okay, honey, should we move the dog?

No, just let's just let the animals do their thing.

So the doe stuck her nose through the spindles and Maka went over and

stuck her nose there and they talked and they licked and they touched.

And then after that Maka walked down the stairs and she has twins.

Deer will kill your dog.

And she walked down the stairs and the doe left her twins with Maka.

And then she just went under the tree a little bit farther away where she browsed.

Every day that doe would come by and look for Maka.

We'd let Maka out.

And the dove would leave her, her fun.

It is just incredible, whatever they said to each other.

The beautiful thing about that, Catherine, animals out

there interconnect with each other and they try to interconnect with humans.

And it's the human that has put up that barrier, where they

don't want to interconnect.

And even over, you know, for the last thousands and thousands of years.

Indigenous cultures learned how to use their third eye.

They, they knew how to stay open to animal energies and how to connect with animals.

So let's start learning from the animal world and let them re-teach us

how to be in harmony on this planet.

They've been here a lot longer than we have, and they've been very successful.

such interesting, uh, outlook, of wisdom and

positivity and hope.

People often sit there and say, Terry, how do you keep such a good

attitude with all of these problems?

Well, you know what?

Nine out of 10 times, I go scuba diving

I see some of the most amazing creatures on earth.

So the bottom line is, that I'm out there every day.

90% of what I see on this planet is still incredibly

beautiful, incredibly connected.

And , you may see events that are happening that are really bad.

I mean, they're bad.

We got to deal with them.

Storms, famine, drought, fires, hurricanes, all this kind of stuff.

Uh, and they're increasing in numbers.

That's obvious.

Okay.

But.

You got to realize it's still 90% of the earth is incredibly beautiful.

The animals are still in harmony with each other.

And so we don't want to get overwhelmed with all the negatives and stop

looking at all the positives.

So it just it's it's up to all of us, you know?

Yes, yes, it is.

It is.

Terry, this has been inspiring and eyeopening because over the last several

months I've have an eye issue and, and it's brought me down really bad.

So, but I, I love doing the podcast because people like you bring me back up

and bring the positivity and hope back.

And so.

What last inspiring words and you've been incredibly inspiring, but what last

inspiring words do you want to share to help engage people to become active?

That's a great question.

And I can only just talk briefly about myself.

Okay.

I never tell anybody what to do or any of that kind of stuff.

I just go out and do it.

And hopefully they want to follow along because they see it's positive.

, I almost died of a heart seizure a couple of years ago.

Was pronounced dead.

So I got electrocuted while scuba diving under a military ship

using electromagnetic weapons.

Um, so I was pronounced dead twice in my life with no chance of living.

I've had hip surgery back surgery, neck surgery, uh, and about broken

every bone in my entire body.

And so today I got up early, I did look at the news.

I did do some editing and.

We're doing electronics on the podcast, but the second we get off

I'm going for a scuba dive, and going to spend a couple hours under water.

And then after that, hopefully I'll probably surf for a little while and

then go out and watch the sunset and have a glass of wine on the beach.

And by the end of the day, I like completely forgotten

about all my problems.

So if I could just ask people, if they would just put down the cell phone,

put down the computer, go outdoors, sit in your garden and talk to the

butterflies . You'll find really, truly that many of your problems that you

have in life and illness will go away if

you do that.

And the harmony you create on that is going to help harmonize the planet so

we can all build together a little bit better future for Mother Earth.

Terry Lilley, it has been a joy.

Next week's show is going to be again, Terry Lilley, we're going

to talk about his professional work under water around the world

his cinematography and Marine life.

Terry Lily, I can't wait to see you in Hawaii very soon.

And thank you very much for having me on the show.

It's really feels good to share little bits and information about nature.

That's why I was kept alive on this planet.

That's why I was born.

The animals are talking through me to remind you on

how to behave on this planet.

And I'm just their voice

well, you are

a great voice and you are everything wild, wild in nature that is.

And thank you so much for bringing awareness to the changes around

the world, but also engagement and getting people active and educated

because advocacy is education.

. Yes.

Aloha, your positive imprint.