I find the lure of the unknown irresistible.
SYLVIA EARLEIt’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?
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.
SYLVIA EARLE -
A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.
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No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
There’s no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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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For heaven’s sake, when you see the enemy attacking, you pick up the pitchfork, and you enlist everybody you see.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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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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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There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet.
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Ocean acidification – the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid.
SYLVIA EARLE