(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 rela… - Sylvia A. Earle
" "(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.
About Sylvia A. Earle
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) is an American marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer. Since 1998 she has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. Earle was the first woman to be appointed chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was named by Time Magazine as its first Hero for the Planet in 1998.
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Additional quotes by Sylvia A. Earle
I feel like a witness to—I am—to the greatest era of change on the planet as a whole. Anybody who’s been around even for ten years is a part of this, but the longer you’ve been around, the more you’ve seen. And the last half-century, in particular, has been a time of revolutionary change. We didn’t know the existence of those great mountain chains, hydrothermal vents, the existence of life in the deepest sea, seven miles down. Nobody had been there. Not until 1960 was it possible for two men to make a descent to the deepest part of the sea.
The ocean drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, absorbs much of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, holds 97 percent of Earth's water, and embraces 97 percent of the biosphere. Far and away the greatest abundance and diversity of life occurs in the ocean, occupying liquid space from the sunlit surface greatest depths.
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that’s the joy of being a scientist and an explorer. You do what little children do. You ask questions, like: Who? What? Why? When? Where? How? And you never stop, and you never cease being surprised. You just never stop that sense of wonder. It is fantastic that life exists at all. And I revel in just the joy of being out in some wild place, or even in my own backyard. Just look at a leaf. It’s an amazing thing what goes on in a leaf; and it happens all the time, and we can breathe because of it, or because of photosynthesis that takes place there and in the sea. Knowing that, I think it’s just impossible to be bored.