Ocean conservationist

Amna Nawaz: Free diver and ocean conservationist Hanli Prinsloo has spent her life helping others connect with the ocean and understand our responsibility to care for it.

Here, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on protecting what we love.

HANLI PRINSLOO, Ocean Conservationist: Something I love sharing with people is that our bodies are 70 percent water; 70 percent of the surface of our planet is ocean. Our tears have the same salinity as the ocean. We are water.

And I truly believe that we protect what we love and that, when something we love is threatened, we act. I grew up on a horse farm outside Pretoria in South Africa, and my childhood consisted of riding horses bareback, climbing the tallest trees, catching frogs, and listening to owls at night.

I had two rules, come home before the sun sets and don't die. Some of my earliest memories are of wanting to be a mermaid, exploring the dams on the farm, the rivers, that stillness of being below the surface.

Free diving came to me later in my life. Free diving is when you go down on one breath and swim underwater holding your breath. In my mind, the penny dropped, and I was like, that is what I have been wanting to do.

There's a small village on the southeastern cape of the Baja Peninsula called Cabo Pulmo, where the jackfish that school there are about this size and there are thousands of them. And when you get in the water, you just see this ball of silver underneath you. And as you dive down, it opens up and swallows you.

And suddenly you can't see the surface of the water, you can't see around you, you can't see the bottom, and you're surrounded by this swirling, living cloud of fish. It feels like I've dived into the center of our world, of our planet and become something other than myself.

The ocean has not been a place for everyone in South Africa. And in 2010, I started the I Am Water Ocean Conservation Foundation, wanting to share the ocean with more than the few who get to go into the water.

And for many of the young children we work with, it is the first time anybody in their extended family have had this experience. And it's empowering. My dream is to instill in my children some of the wildness I got to experience as a child, whether it's the fascination and reverence of an inchworm on a plant in our garden or the absolute majesty of a kelp forest soaring from the bottom to the surface.

I want them to always remember that they are wild.

My name is Hanli Prinsloo, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on protecting what we love.

Amna Nawaz: As always, you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.