I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
SYLVIA EARLEWe have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive – and thrive. ‘Harsh’ to us is ‘home’ for them.
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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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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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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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Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe.
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Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.
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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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Everyone has power. But it doesn’t help if you don’t use it.
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There are some who would like to see the oil rigs removed right down to the ground once their job is done, and there are others, and I count myself among them, who think that once they are in place they begin to be adopted by life in the ocean as a habitat.
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Health to the ocean means health for us.
SYLVIA EARLE






