I’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.
SYLVIA EARLEI’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.
SYLVIA EARLEIf 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 EARLEThe 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.
SYLVIA EARLEI personally have stopped eating seafood.
SYLVIA EARLEOur insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.
SYLVIA EARLEWe did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.
SYLVIA EARLEBottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.
SYLVIA EARLELarge 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 EARLEThe end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.
SYLVIA EARLEPhotosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.
SYLVIA EARLEI’m friends with James Cameron. We’ve spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.
SYLVIA EARLEYou should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.
SYLVIA EARLEAnd there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.
SYLVIA EARLEOn 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 EARLEMy parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
SYLVIA EARLEAny 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.
SYLVIA EARLE