There’s heaven on earth. It just happens to be in the ocean. - Sylvia A. Earle

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.

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."

As I walked solemnly over the blackened, blistered remains of what had been a friend's home, it was clear that those with whom I share the present time matter most: family, friends, acquaintances, members of my species throughout the world, and ranging beyond humankind, to other creatures I know personally or have met and admired on their own terms, from great humpback whales who turned their eyes to meet mine to the three Stellar's jays that recently fledged from a nest over my backdoor. I wish them well, want them to prosper, will take measures to protect them, if I can...