If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.
SYLVIA EARLESince the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
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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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I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.
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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.
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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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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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I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
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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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All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.
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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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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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They have curiosity. ‘Who, what, where, why, when, and how!’ They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.
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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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You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
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The fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.
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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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Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe.
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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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Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat.
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I’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.
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It’s mainly the high-end luxury market now that drives much of the fishing in the sea. It’s not feeding the starving millions. It’s feeding a luxury market.
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I 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.
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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.
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Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you’re lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you’re in a healthy ocean.
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Take away the ice and snow, increase the temperature by even a little, and the realm that makes their lives possible literally melts away.
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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.
SYLVIA EARLE