Ocean acidification – the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid.
SYLVIA EARLESome experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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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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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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My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.
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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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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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Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.
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I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
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The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it.
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Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.
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If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.
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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.
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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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Since 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.
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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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You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.
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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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And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.
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I personally have stopped eating seafood.
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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.
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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.
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Green’ issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.
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The concept of ‘peak oil’ has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. ‘Peak fish’ occurred around the end of the 1980s.
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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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Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.
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Some experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world.
SYLVIA EARLE -
The fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.
SYLVIA EARLE