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 EARLEHold 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.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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Any astronaut can tell you you’ve got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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 -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.
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 -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.
SYLVIA EARLE -
No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
SYLVIA EARLE -
No water, no life. No blue, no green.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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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We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
SYLVIA EARLE -
I’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.
SYLVIA EARLE






