Sylvia A. Earle > Quotes

“People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth's life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth's water is there. It's the blue heart of the planet — we should take care of our heart. It's what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won't get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.”
― Sylvia A. Earle

“Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Many of us ask what can I, as one person, do, but history shows us that everything good and bad starts because somebody does something or does not do something,”
― Sylvia Earle

“The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“I can still feel that leap of enthusiasm, and real joy, at the prospect of finally getting out to the beach, and running around. But probably the most important thing, to me, aside from just the freedom of it and the power of it, was the kind of creatures that you could see along the beach, that you can't find anywhere else." - Sylvia Earle”
― Sylvia Earle, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans

“Knowing is the key to caring, and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions. They might not care even if they know, but they can’t care if they are unaware.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“The bottom line answer to the question about why biodiversity matters is fairly simple: The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Our near and distant predecessors might be forgiven for exterminating the last woolly mammoth, the ultimate dodo, the final sea cow, and the last living monk seal for lack of understanding the consequences of their actions. But who will forgive us if we fail to learn from past and present experiences, to forge new values, new relationships, a new level of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive?”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“So, should we race to see how quickly we can consume the last tuna, swordfish, and grouper? Or race to see what can be done to protect what remains? For now, there is still a choice.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Thanks to generations of curious, daring, intrepid explorers of the past, we may know enough, soon enough, to chart safe passage for ourselves far into the future.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Currently, up to 20 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions are being caused by deforestation in tropical Brazil and Indonesia, making those countries two of the highest carbon emitters in the world. It is estimated that halting forest destruction would save the same amount of carbon over the next century as stopping all fossil-fuel emissions for ten years.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Far and away the biggest threat to the ocean is ignorance. It’s a lack of understanding that what we put in, what we take out matters—not just to the ocean, but matters to us. The ocean cannot be regarded as the planet’s ultimate dumpster or the ultimate place to get free food.”
― Sylvia Earle

“What we must do is encourage a sea change in attitude, one that acknowledges that we are a part of the living world, not apart from it.”
― Sylvia Earle

“Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea. Early”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“quoted Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, once accused of being an “adventurer.” His response was, “An adventure is what happens when exploration goes wrong.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“We are going to change the world from this point onward, one way or another. Either from what we do, or what we fail to do.”
― Sylvia Earle

“It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.”
― Sylvia A Earle

“Let’s talk trash…. Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“It takes 25 years or so for a male sperm whale to reach the edge of social maturity, when it attains the size and weight of those I saw being butchered. It took less than four hours to transform those once vibrant creatures into the basic ingredients of candle wax, lubricating oils, cosmetics, fertilizer, ivory trinkets, and food for domesticated animals.”
― Sylvia Earle

“There's something missing in how we inform the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the letters and numbers, but we fail to inform them about the importance of our connection with the living world”
― Sylvia Alice Earle

“Herrick fumed about this more than a century ago in his hefty tome on the American lobster: Civilized man is sweeping off the face of the earth one after another some of its most interesting and valuable animals, by a lack of foresight and selfish zeal…. If man had as ready access to the submarine fields as to the forests and plains, it is easy to imagine how much havoc he would spread. The ocean indeed seems to be as inexhaustible in its animal life as it is apparently limitless in extent and fathomless in depth, but we are apt to forget that marine animals may be as restricted in their distribution”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“The problem is the magnitude of synthetic materials that are used briefly, then thrown away for eternity, thereby permanently changing the nature of the world.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Even smaller pieces are engulfed by inch-long krill; ant-size copepods; and filter-feeding salps, clams, oysters, and mussels. Large plankton feeders such as whale sharks and manta rays swallow gallons of water at a time, plastic and all. Whether at the large, medium, small, or ultra-small scale, ingested plastic lumps, clumps, pellets, or microscopic mites kill by physically obstructing, choking, clogging, or otherwise stopping up the passage of food.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“astrophysicist Christopher McKay puts it: “The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“One kind of blue-green bacteria, Prochlorococcus, is so abundant—about 100 octillion (1 octillion = 1027) are alive at any given moment—that it alone is responsible for about 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Put another way, this nearly invisible form of life generates the oxygen in one of every five breaths you take, no matter where on the planet you live.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“The various seafood guides usually rank farmed fish based on safety for consumers as well as on environmental impacts. Currently, it’s really hard to find out where or how animals were raised, what they have consumed that you don’t want to have as a part of you, or how long they have been sitting in storage, accumulating things you also do not want to have as a part of you. What most guides do not tell you is whether the fish are plant-eaters or carnivores, nor do you learn their likely age, and these things matter a lot for two reasons. The higher up the food chain, and the older the animal, the greater the concentration of contaminants: tuna, shark, swordfish, halibut, and in fact, most of the fish in the counter fit into this category. It takes a much greater investment from the ecosystem, pound for pound, to make a ten-year-old fish-eating tuna than a one-year-old plant-eating catfish. For those who want to eat low on the food chain with lowest risk of contaminants, farmed catfish, tilapia, carp, and certain mollusks are the best choices, but even so, it makes a difference where and how they were raised.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“But there’s another, much darker, way in which Sylvia Earle helps us understand the size of the ocean. And that’s to point out that, vast as it is, it’s not so big that we can’t screw it up.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“Species have been disappearing from ocean ecosystems and this trend has recently been accelerating…. If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime—by 2048.” But, he continued, “The good news is that it is not too late to turn things around.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“But water alone does not generate oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, or yield the simple sugars that are the basis of food production powering most of life on Earth. By itself, water does not produce the dimethyl sulfide molecules around which water gathers to form vapor that becomes clouds that in turn become rain, sleet, and snow. Microscopic photosynthetic organisms in the sea do all of these things and much more.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“A report from the National Academy of Sciences published five years later reported that over 6 billion kilograms (14 billion pounds) of garbage were deliberately dumped into the sea every year.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One