Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss.
SYLVIA EARLEAll through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.
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Any 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.
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With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea.
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The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder.
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Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.
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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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Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon – it’s a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.
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I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
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Health to the ocean means health for us.
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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.
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I personally have stopped eating seafood.
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When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.
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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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Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.
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Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.
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You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.
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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.
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The 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.
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You don’t stand around arguing about who’s responsible, or who’s going to pay.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.
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I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.
SYLVIA EARLE