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.
SYLVIA EARLEIf somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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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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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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
SYLVIA EARLE -
The Arctic is an ocean. The southern pole is a continent surrounded by ocean. The North Pole is an ocean, or northern waters. It’s an ocean surrounded by land, basically.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Health to the ocean means health for us.
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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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.
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.
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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
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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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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 -
I love music of all kinds, but there’s no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.
SYLVIA EARLE