Change happens because of individuals who team up with others or inspire others. And soon you’ve got 10 or 100 or 1,000, and then you’ve got a moveme… - Sylvia A. Earle

Sometimes I try a poetic approach and describe how luminous, rainbow-colored jellies, starlike planktonic creatures, giant squid, translucent pink prawns, gray dolphins, brown lizards, spotted giraffes, emerald mosses, rustling grasses, every leaf on every tree and all people everywhere, even residents of inland cities and deserts who may never see the sea, are nonetheless dependent upon it.

(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.

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.