Sylvia A. Earle Quotes

Sometimes, I try to imagine what intelligent aliens, viewing Earth from afar, might think about the sea. From their perch in the sky, they could immediately see what many earthlings never seem to grasp: that this is a planet dominated by saltwater! In fact, the ocean is the cornerstone of the systems that sustain us: every breath we take is linked to the sea.

The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That's why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.

There's plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.

Without an ocean, there would be no life-no people anyway

I suppose you want to know what my wish is. I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films, expeditions, the web, new submarines -- and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas -- hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually -- as it turns out -- is my favorite species; that would be us. For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time.

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.

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

Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. 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. Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. No water, no life; no blue, no green.

The poet W. H. 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.

And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.

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. 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.

High on my short list of heroes for science-based ocean conservation is Graeme Kelleher, for 25 years the chairman of Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and for his entire career a proponent of marine protected areas.

But taking a small number of wild creatures out of large populations while protecting-not destroying the habitat is very different from the industrial-scale extraction of wildlife now taking place in the sea. These issues seemed to intrigue President George W. Bush during a conversation over dinner at the White House in April 2006.

Perversely, the natural living systems that over billions of years have generated and shaped planetary chemistry in ways that make Earth hospitable for humankind are being destroyed at breathtaking speed. This, too, we now know. Now that I know, I hope to convey a sense of urgency to others, to inspire use of the special powers that humans possess to take actions to protect what remains and restore whatever we can of the natural living systems that give us life, and provide the underpinnings of all we hold near and dear.

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."