Green’ issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.
SYLVIA EARLEAs 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.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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I’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.
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We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
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Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.
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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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We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
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Ocean acidification – the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid.
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To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It’s not just a cost to the people who live there. It’s a cost to all people everywhere.
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My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
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You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
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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.
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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.
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My first encounter with the ocean was on the Jersey Shore when I was three years old and I got knocked over by a wave.
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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.
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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.
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By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.
SYLVIA EARLE






