Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you’re lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you’re in a healthy ocean.
SYLVIA EARLEI’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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We wouldn’t be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.
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You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
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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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The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder.
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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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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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Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.
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Everyone has power. But it doesn’t help if you don’t use it.
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All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.
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The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.
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I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.
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Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss.
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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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We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
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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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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
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The fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.
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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.
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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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There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There’s still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.
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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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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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If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old.
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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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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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Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It’s agriculture. It’s golf courses. It’s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.
SYLVIA EARLE