The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents.
SYLVIA EARLEWe wouldn’t be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
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When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.
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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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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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Is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.
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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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There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet.
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America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.
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Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.
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We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.
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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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The fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.
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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.
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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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Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica.
SYLVIA EARLE






