Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.
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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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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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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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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You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
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I am not in any hurry to grow up.
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The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder.
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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.
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If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you’ll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment.
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Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.
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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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My first encounter with the ocean was on the Jersey Shore when I was three years old and I got knocked over by a wave.
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Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher – and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences.
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On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis.
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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