Our Project

Encouraging divers to travel and travelers to dive.

Founded by writer Carrie Miller and diver Chris Taylor, our project—Beneath the Surface Media—uses storytelling and dive travel (traveling both land and sea) to inspire and encourage conservation through exploration.

Exploring both underwater and on land is the most holistic way of experiencing a destination. It helps us better understand the interconnectedness between the green and blue.

Our book, A Diver’s Guide to the World, was written for those explorations—for ocean travelers. It’s a different kind of guidebook, written for divers who like to travel, travelers with an interest in the underwater world, or divers traveling with non-diving companions.

Ocean

This phantasmagorical blue expanse covers more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface. It is the Earth’s life support system, supplying half its oxygen. It also holds wonders uncounted, from extraordinary sea creatures to submerged landscapes—coral gardens, forests made of kelp, ancient lava flows, and meadows of sea grass.

Diving the ocean is like being a traveler on a new planet. Every dive brings awe, inspiration, and acute awareness of the ocean’s fragility and importance.

Travel

Travel is essential. We are explorers by nature and wanderers at heart, and it is in our DNA to journey.

Travel connects us. It helps us to see things differently. It’s soul-food. Most importantly, it reminds us how extraordinary our wonderfully weird planet is. How special and fragile it is.

There’s no getting around the fact that travel is a burden to the planet. However, overtourism and under-tourism are equally problematic, and both exact costs on the environment.

Right now, tourism is the only juggernaut powerful enough to challenge unsustainable, extractive practices like mining and overfishing. Sustainable tourism (done in the right way) places an economic value on protecting places and species, which is what we need most right now—to guard our precious biodiversity and remaining wild places before they’re gone forever.

It’s okay to enjoy traveling—we just have to do things differently.

Stewardship

We need to be stewards of the planet, not passengers. We have an amazing opportunity to do things differently going forward, and every decision each of us makes contributes to what our world is going to be.

Travel can help with that. Jacques Cousteau was insistent that “we must go and see for ourselves”. He understood people are stronger advocates for things they have seen and experienced directly. We call that conservation through exploration, and that first-hand experience is a powerful motivator to care, to engage, to be inspired to learn and do more.

We hope our project encourages you to go and see for yourself. Explore the best you can, with eyes and mind open, and marvel at this perfect planet of ours. There is so much that is good here, from science to sharks, kindness to kingfish. From small steps to giant strides, each of us can embark on our own individual journey to become better caretakers—stewards—of this wonderful green and blue planet we call home.

Let’s make it game on, not game over.