Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe.
SYLVIA EARLEI hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.
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As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything.
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The ocean certainly got my attention! It wasn’t frightening, it was more exhilarating.
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And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.
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Nearly all of the major kinds of life, divisions of life, phyla of animals, occur in the sea. Only about half of them can make it to land or freshwater.
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I personally have stopped eating seafood.
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I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.
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By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.
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It’s akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn’t do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?
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They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.
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I’m friends with James Cameron. We’ve spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.
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Health to the ocean means health for us.
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There’s something missing about how we’re informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.
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Large areas of the Gulf have escaped being scraped by trawls, crushed by more than 40,000 miles of pipelines, or displaced by one of 50,000 oil and gas wells drilled since the middle of the 20th century. Some places have been deliberately protected.
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When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.
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If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you’ll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment.
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In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.
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With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea.
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Everyone has power. But it doesn’t help if you don’t use it.
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We have taken the manatees out of the areas in the Caribbean and really elsewhere in the world, and this disruption to the system makes such systems vulnerable to changes as they come by, whether it’s in terms of disease or terms or global warming for that matter.
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I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They’re very efficient.
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Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.
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Is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.
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There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet.
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The sudden release of five million barrels of oil, enormous quantities of methane and two million gallons of toxic dispersants into an already greatly stressed Gulf of Mexico will permanently alter the nature of the area.
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Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative – don’t wait for someone else to ask you to act.
SYLVIA EARLE