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 EARLEYou don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it.
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Green’ issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.
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I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.
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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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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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The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong response that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place.
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People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.
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Health to the ocean means health for us.
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When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.
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I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
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Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.
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I am not in any hurry to grow up.
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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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America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.
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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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Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.
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We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.
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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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Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss.
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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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To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It’s not just a cost to the people who live there. It’s a cost to all people everywhere.
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I love music of all kinds, but there’s no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.
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We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
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We did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.
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It’s a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.
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In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.
SYLVIA EARLE