We have an opportunity, now, to achieve for humankind a prosperous, enduring future. If we fail, through inability to resolve thorny issues, or by de… - Sylvia A. Earle

In the rush to "develop" and use the legacy 4.6 billion years in the making, we have struck the earth like a slow-motion comet, wielding powerful new forces of change, rivaling and compounding the impact of natural storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, disease, fires-even, it now seems, nudging the grand and gradual planetary processes that cause ice ages to come and go.

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."

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.