“Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.”

I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.

I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.

Our 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.

Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss.

We did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.

My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.

Photosynthetic 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.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.

They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers.

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.

Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.

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.

With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea.

I personally have stopped eating seafood.

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.

And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

We are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.