Quotes About Sylvia Earle

#1. 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 Earle

#2. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.

Sylvia Earle

#3. I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.

Sylvia Earle

#4. My first encounter with the ocean was on the Jersey Shore when I was three years old and I got knocked over by a wave. The ocean certainly got my attention! It wasn't frightening, it was more exhilarating.

Sylvia Earle

#5. Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

Sylvia Earle

#6. Success underwater depends mostly on how you conduct yourself. Diving can be the most relaxing experience in the world. Your weight seems to disappear. Space travel will be available only to a few individuals for some time, but the oceans are available to almost everyone - now.

Sylvia Earle

#7. 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 Earle

#8. We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.

Sylvia Earle

#9. I love music of all kinds, but there's no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.

Sylvia Earle

#10. There's a vested interest in trying to keep people smoking cigarettes.

Sylvia Earle

#11. If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

Sylvia Earle

#12. There's something missing about how we're informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.

Sylvia Earle

#13. We have the capacity to alter the nature of nature. No, we don't have just the capacity - we are altering the nature of nature, the natural systems that cause the planet to function in our favor.

Sylvia Earle

#14. 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

#15. Ironically the very energy, the very basis of how we know what we know, has been reliant on having an energy source [necessary] to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, to support airplanes that fly, and satellites to give us our communication.

Sylvia Earle

#16. Never before have we known what we know.

Sylvia Earle

#17. I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.

Sylvia Earle

#18. I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime.

Sylvia Earle

#19. My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.

Sylvia Earle

#20. Humans have always wondered the big questions, "Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?" It's part of human nature. It's perhaps the underpinnings of religion.

Sylvia Earle

#21. This much is certain: We have the power to damage the sea, but no sure way to heal the harm.

Sylvia Earle

#22. We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.

Sylvia Earle

#23. The sudden release of five million barrels of oil, enormous quantities of methane and two million gallons of toxic dispersants into an already greatly stressed Gulf of Mexico will permanently alter the nature of the area.

Sylvia Earle

#24. When you think about the real cost of so-called cheap energy that has driven our prosperity to unprecedented levels, for some of us, to our horror, we've realized that this has the potential for burning brightly and then snuffing out.

Sylvia Earle

#25. Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you're lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you're in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don't see sharks.

Sylvia Earle

#26. I want to get out in the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.

Sylvia Earle

#27. We must protect our ocean as if our lives depend upon it, because they do.

Sylvia Earle

#28. What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish.

Sylvia Earle

#29. Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.

Sylvia Earle

#30. I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.

Sylvia Earle

#31. Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time.

Sylvia Earle

#32. The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something before you can care about it.

Sylvia Earle

#33. Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.

Sylvia Earle

#34. Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. 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. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

Sylvia Earle

#35. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#36. I've always said, 'Underwater or on top, men and women are compatible.'

Sylvia Earle

#37. The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.

Sylvia Earle

#38. There are some who would like to see the oil rigs removed right down to the ground once their job is done, and there are others, and I count myself among them, who think that once they are in place they begin to be adopted by life in the ocean as a habitat.

Sylvia Earle

#39. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.

Sylvia Earle

#40. We're still under the weight of this impression that the ocean is too big to fail, that the planet is too big to fail.

Sylvia Earle

#41. Some experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world. And there's no question that it is a factor, but it's preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

Sylvia Earle

#42. Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now.

Sylvia Earle

#43. I am not in any hurry to grow up.

Sylvia Earle

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

Sylvia Earle

#45. I find the lure of the unknown irresistible.

Sylvia Earle

#46. Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative - don't wait for someone else to ask you to act.

Sylvia Earle

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

Sylvia Earle

#48. It's a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.

Sylvia Earle

#49. 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

#50. With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.

Sylvia Earle

#51. Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.

Sylvia Earle

#52. Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

Sylvia Earle

#53. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#54. There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

Sylvia Earle

#55. The very energy sources that have gotten us to where we are now are also, if we continue doing what we're doing, a shortcut to the end of all that we hold near and dear.

Sylvia Earle

#56. That attitude of arrogance, that attitude of "It's all about me. It's all about what I can get out of life now" - well, I'm personally driven by wanting to get out of my life the best I can achieve as a gift for those who come after me.

Sylvia Earle

#57. Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.

Sylvia Earle

#58. Not only who am I, but who are we? And where are we going? It's the "we." It's the social connections that are special to human beings.

Sylvia Earle

#59. Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher - and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences.

Sylvia Earle

#60. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#61. Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

Sylvia Earle

#62. I would love to slip into the skin of a fish and know what it's like to be one. They have senses that I can only dream about. They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.

Sylvia Earle

#63. 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

#64. Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

Sylvia Earle

#65. When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic' covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.

Sylvia Earle

#66. The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong response that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place.

Sylvia Earle

#67. We've got to alter our fossil fuel dependence and go to other energy sources.

Sylvia Earle

#68. I suggest to everyone: Look in the mirror. Ask yourself: Who are you? What are your talents? Use them, and do what you love.

Sylvia Earle

#69. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.

Sylvia Earle

#73. I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.

Sylvia Earle

#74. 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

#75. Every time I slip into the ocean, it's like going home.

Sylvia Earle

#76. The Arctic is an ocean. The southern pole is a continent surrounded by ocean. The North Pole is an ocean, or northern waters. It's an ocean surrounded by land, basically.

Sylvia Earle

#77. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#78. There is this sweet spot in time when we have an opportunity to stop killing sharks and tunas and swordfish and other wildlife in the sea before it's too late.

Sylvia Earle

#79. We have taken the manatees out of the areas in the Caribbean and really elsewhere in the world, and this disruption to the system makes such systems vulnerable to changes as they come by, whether it's in terms of disease or terms or global warming for that matter.

Sylvia Earle

#80. My mother was known as the 'bird lady' of the neighborhood. Anything injured, or any unusual creature somebody found, they would always come to our doorstep.

Sylvia Earle

#81. Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart.

Sylvia Earle

#82. For heaven's sake, when you see the enemy attacking, you pick up the pitchfork, and you enlist everybody you see. You don't stand around arguing about who's responsible, or who's going to pay.

Sylvia Earle

#83. We want to believe that we can continue doing what we've done for the past thousand years and not worry about the consequences coming back to us.

Sylvia Earle

#84. Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.

Sylvia Earle

#85. You don't have to touch the ocean for the ocean to touch you

Sylvia Earle

#86. With respect to the ocean being the heart of our blue planet: We are often asked, 'How much protection is enough?' We can only answer with another question: How much of your heart is worth protecting?

Sylvia Earle

#87. The climate has been changing. Of course it [has]. Evidence throughout history, [which] we can assess, especially during human history, shows there have been ups and downs. But the last ten thousand years have been relatively stable compared to now.

Sylvia Earle

#88. It's baffling why the issues relating to climate change - [which] have far more obvious and tangible and much more clear-cut evidence about the cause - have been slower for people to accept as a given.

Sylvia Earle

#89. We woke up some years ago about the consequences of ozone depletion, the hole in the atmosphere. You can't see it. You can't taste it. You can't smell it. But now we do regard that as a key issue. It's a scientific finding.

Sylvia Earle

#90. There is not a well-funded campaign among scientists to say, "Look, here's the evidence. You can read it yourself. Here are the facts. We're not making this up."

Sylvia Earle

#91. It has taken these many hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune the Earth to a point where it is suitable for the likes of us.

Sylvia Earle

#92. If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it's primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, 'What you don't have in your mind, you have on your shelf.' But now we have the Web.

Sylvia Earle

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

Sylvia Earle

#94. The opportunity that is unique [to our] time is what inspires me to do everything I can to move things forward. This is the first time that we have the capacity to understand our place in the greater scheme of things to the extent that we do.

Sylvia Earle

#95. 'Green' issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.

Sylvia Earle

#96. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.

Sylvia Earle

#97. I personally have stopped eating seafood.

Sylvia Earle

#98. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#99. I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They're very efficient. 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.

Sylvia Earle

#100. Everyone has power. But it doesn't help if you don't use it.

Sylvia Earle