Sylvia Earle Quotes (1935-)

“Without an ocean, there would be no life-no people anyway...Common sense forces me to consider first the incredible sweep of time that preceded this moment and the ocean's great age, relative to the infinitesimally small fragment of time enjoyed thus far by humankind.”

“As it turns out, the future of the ocean, the creatures who live there, and our own future are inextricably linked.”

“Fortunately, in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. And with knowing comes caring.”

“Change happens because of individuals who team up with others or inspire others. And soon you’ve got 10 or 100 or 1,000, and then you’ve got a movement.”

“You take care of your personal health because you want to live a long time, and you want to be happy. You want to be healthy. But we can't be happy or healthy if we don't take care of our life support system, the planet.”

“they witnessed the start of an era of unprecedented global consumption of living resources, the transformation of an earthly paradise 4.6 billion years in the making skimmed for the short-term service of a single insatiable species.”

“Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.”

“Astronomer Carl Sagan noted that even when it is viewed from so far away that it is a pale dot, Earth is discernibly blue.”

“nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one. We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above.”

“Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph.”

“The poet Auden said, "Thousands have lived without love; none without water." Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.”

“I certainly was unaware that the ocean globally was on the verge of cataclysmic decline, that the pristine seas I had known as a child were in danger of becoming Paradise Lost. I was not alone in not knowing. Rachel Carson, famous for her 1962 classic Silent Spring, 11 years earlier wrote in The Sea Around Us: "Eventually man...found his way back to the sea.... And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents."”

“Sylvia Earle, what a pioneer...her generation — they were explorers...They’re like, what is even down there? How do we understand this? And then: Oh [bleep], this is in trouble. And they all became conservationists, right? We saw that same professional transformation with Jacques Cousteau.”