Sylvia A. Earle Quotes

Knowledge is the superpower of the 21st century. Even the smartest people alive when I was born did not know what 10-year-olds today have available to them. That’s truly cause for hope.

I’ve had the privilege of living underwater on 10 different occasions. It has enabled me to get to know individual moray eels, individual groupers, even individual lobsters. They all have faces, they have attitudes. They have sensory systems much like our own. And yet we somehow harden ourselves to think they don’t feel pain. We pride ourselves on being “humane” but it doesn’t translate to the way we treat animals in the sea.

(What is the biggest threat to the ocean right now?) Deep-sea mining. Some are buying into the lie that we should be taking minerals that are necessary for today’s generation of [EV] batteries, like lithium, cobalt and nickel, from the deep sea, because who cares what happens in the deep sea? These deep-sea systems are full of life and are part of the biogeochemical cycling systems that hold Earth steady. If Earth functions like a big computer system with all these little wires and lights that we don’t understand but we know it keeps us alive, would we want to get in there and take those little lights out because we don’t understand how they work?

(What is the single most important thing we can do for the oceans today?) Right now a disproportionate bite out of the ocean is being taken by a relatively small number of countries doing industrial fishing. We’ve got to get over this idea that wildlife from the ocean is essential for our food security. What we now are beginning to understand is the high cost of eating fish. What does it take to make a pound of tuna? A lot of halibut or cod. What makes the halibut? Smaller fish. What do they eat? Krill. Krill eat phytoplankton, zooplankton. Over the years thousands of pounds of phytoplankton make a single pound of tuna. So that tuna is expensive in terms of the carbon that it has captured. The more fish we take out of the sea, the more carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere.

If I were an evil alien wishing to alter the nature of life on earth, I would change the temperature of the ocean, I would change the chemistry. That is exactly what we are doing: excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere becomes excess carbon dioxide in the ocean that becomes carbonic acid. The ocean is becoming more acidic. That changes everything.

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

We have an opportunity, now, to achieve for humankind a prosperous, enduring future. If we fail, through inability to resolve thorny issues, or by default born of indifference, greed, or lack of knowledge, our kind might well be a passing short-term phenomenon, a mere three or four million-year blip in the ancient and ongoing saga of life on Earth.

Perhaps with knowing will come caring, and with caring, an impetus toward the needed sea change of attitude, one that combines the wisdom of science and the sensitivity of art to create an enduring ethic.

If I had to name the single most frightening and dangerous threat to the health of the oceans, the one that stands alone yet is at the base of all the others is ignorance: lack of understanding, a failure to relate our destiny to that of the sea, or to make the connection between the health of coral reefs and our own health, between the fate of the great whales and the future of humankind. There is much to learn before it is possible to intelligently create a harmonious, viable place for ourselves on the planet. The best place to begin is by recognizing the magnitude of our ignorance, and not destroy species and natural systems that we cannot re-create nor effectively restore once they are gone.

To ensure a decent quality of life for the rest of our lives, as well as for all those who follow, we must develop global policies that recognize the interdependence of life and the need for nations to agree on mutually beneficial measures to protect and maintain the basic elements of life support, on a planetary scale. But it is difficult to be concerned

One of my personal heroes is William Perrin

Part of human impact on the earth relates to our swiftly growing numbers. If we do not take deliberate, conscious action to maintain a reasonable balance between the numbers of people and the environmental wealth required to sustain us, nature will make appropriate adjustments, and famine, disease, and wars-the predictable outcomes of living beyond one's environmental means, of overspending environmental capital-will ultimately force a cruel discipline.

A few individuals, armed with modern technology, can wield enormous destructive power. One person with a bulldozer can, in a few days, eliminate a forest that has been quietly building for millennia; one fisherman deploying miles of drift nets can wipe out entire seagoing societies...But just as individuals can and do negatively impact the course tory, so can and do individuals make a positive difference.

In the past few decades-my lifetime-the sea has changed; with each passing year, pressures on ocean resources and ocean ecosystems increase; the size of the ocean does not.

Despite clear evidence that ocean ecosystems are collapsing and fish populations can not sustain commercial taking, huge nets, trawlers, and factory ships are still being deployed, and more are being built.