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.
SYLVIA EARLEIf 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.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish.
SYLVIA EARLE -
Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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 -
I’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.
SYLVIA EARLE -
All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.
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 -
Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss.
SYLVIA EARLE -
No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
SYLVIA EARLE -
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea.
SYLVIA EARLE -
If 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 EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.
SYLVIA EARLE -
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.
SYLVIA EARLE -
No water, no life. No blue, no green.
SYLVIA EARLE