I’ve always said, ‘Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.’
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.
More Sylvia Earle Quotes
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In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.
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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.
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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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I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.
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For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive – and thrive. ‘Harsh’ to us is ‘home’ for them.
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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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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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Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.
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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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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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Everyone has power. But it doesn’t help if you don’t use it.
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My mother was known as the ‘bird lady’ of the neighborhood.
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For heaven’s sake, when you see the enemy attacking, you pick up the pitchfork, and you enlist everybody you see.
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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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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.
SYLVIA EARLE






