“My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.”

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.

They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers.

Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon – it’s a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.

Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.

As if the ocean somehow doesn’t matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean.

With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea.

I personally have stopped eating seafood.

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.

And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

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.

That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning.

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet.

They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.

For heaven’s sake, when you see the enemy attacking, you pick up the pitchfork, and you enlist everybody you see.

The Arctic is an ocean. The southern pole is a continent surrounded by ocean. The North Pole is an ocean, or northern waters. It’s an ocean surrounded by land, basically.