Sylvia Earle Quotes

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,

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.

The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

quoted Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, once accused of being an “adventurer.” His response was, “An adventure is what happens when exploration goes wrong.

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.

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?

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.

Let’s talk trash…. Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest.

With knowing comes caring.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Was it for pleasure that you followed them Putting off your slippers at the door To dance barefoot and blood-foot in the snow? No. What then? What glamoured you? No glamour at all; Only that I remembered I was young And had to put myself into a song. How could time bear witness that I was tall, Silken, and made for love, if I did not so? I do not know. - Earl Cassilis's Lady

astrophysicist Christopher McKay puts it: “The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement.

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.

I also understand that two of you are responsible for saving the Sylvia Earle and in the process saving the very annoying girl that is my cousin Alice. So thank you for that. I think.” “You’re welcome,” said Sydney and Brooklyn, laughing.

saving the Sylvia Earle and in the process saving the very annoying girl that is my cousin Alice. So thank you for that. I think.

To succeed as a predator, simple math explains that it is vital that the consumers do not outnumber the consumees. The older and larger the consumer, the greater the investment of energy, pound for pound. It takes a lot of seeds and grass to make enough mice and rabbits to make a wolf; a lot of little plants to make sufficient numbers of small fish to make a shark. As it turns out, it takes a lot of everything to power human societies.

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

In her childhood, [Sylvia] Wright had heard a tune in which some lines seemed to be 'They have slain the Earl Amurray / and Lady Mondegreen.' It wasn't until years later that Wright realized the lyric was 'They have slain the Earl of Moray / and laid him on the green.' We all have mondegreens. ... In his book Tiny Courts, poet David Bromige has a woman say that she's reading a book entitled 'Civilization and Its Discotheques.

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.

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.

Also, as oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out, the ocean “provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, and maybe in the universe.” That life, most of it microbial, determines most of the Gaian balance of gases in the atmosphere.

MONDEGREEN. A term for misheard song lyrics, coined by American freelance writer Sylvia Wright (1920–1961) in 1954. It derived from her long-held belief that a song contained the line, “They had slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” In fact, the line ended with the words, “and laid him on the green.

Option one, stop your ridiculous questions, thank these two girls for saving your daughter’s life, and go out to the members of the media who you’ve been feeding information to and announce that after a thorough investigation it is evident that MI6 made no lapses with regard to the hijacking of the Sylvia Earle.” “And option two?” “You continue your ridiculous questions, and I go out and address those same members of the media,” Judy said coolly. “And I tell them all about our family. I tell them about the late-night phone calls you make when you think I’m asleep and can’t hear who you’re doing business with. And of course, I explain to them why it is I live with my father and not with my mother.” The color drained from Bloody Mary’s face. “I don’t know how the fine people of Southgate will like what they hear, but I’m sure the press will be fully entertained by the pathetic soap opera that is our family.” The room fell into stunned silence until Alice stood up and pointed directly at Judy. “What she said!