I would love to slip into the skin of a fish and know what it’s like to be one. They have senses that I can only dream about.
SYLVIA EARLEMy parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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 -
Take away the ice and snow, increase the temperature by even a little, and the realm that makes their lives possible literally melts away.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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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Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
SYLVIA EARLE -
There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet.
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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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Ocean acidification – the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Hold 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.
SYLVIA EARLE