Writer and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster's recent films include "SoLa, Louisiana Water Stories," which has been making the rounds of film festivals and conferences since the fall of 2010. The film focused on the llives of Southern Louisianans whose lives depend on the sea, its filming concluded with the BP spill in the Gulf making it evermore relevant. His most recent book is OCEANS, The Threats to the Sea and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide. An anthology of original essays by some of the world's most intriguing ocean thinkers and doers, the book is companion to the new Jacques Perrin/DisneyNature film OCEANS, which both came out in the U.S. on Earth Day April 22.

His film,  "Terra Antarctica," documenting a six-week long exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula by sail and sea kayak won "Best Ocean Issues" award from the Blue Ocean Film Festival; "What Would Darwin Think? Man v. Nature in the Galapagos" was awarded "Best Environmental Film" at the Vancouver International Film Festival. A six-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council, his 2007-2008 Antarctic expedition was the final in his OCEANS 8 project, which over the past decade has taken him and his teams around the world by sea kayak, including expeditions to the Aleutian Islands, Vietnam, French Polynesia, Chile/Argentina/Bolivia, Gabon, Croatia and Tasmania. Seeing the world from the seat of a sea kayak over the past decade has given Bowermaster a one-of-a-kind look at both the health of the world's oceans and the lives of the nearly 3 billion people around the globe who depend on them.