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.
SYLVIA EARLEThe Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
-
-
Health to the ocean means health for us.
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 -
My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
SYLVIA EARLE -
They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.
SYLVIA EARLE -
When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.
SYLVIA EARLE -
The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.
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 -
You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Ocean acidification – the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid.
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 -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Health to the ocean means health for us.
SYLVIA EARLE