No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.

Life is flowing away like water running out from a leaky vessel.

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes — a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.

Degenerates! Your fate is sealed! Cry woe! Don't hope you'll ever see the skies again! I'm here to lead you to the farther shore, into eternal shadow, heat and chill. And you there! You! Yes, you, the living soul! Ger right away from this gang! These are dead.

Once the ocean teamed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned to the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died; and now there’s nothing left but the food yeast and us.
We’ve forgotten so much about the past that we can’t separate legend from fact. We’ve wiped out most of the forms of life on earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we’d be afraid to change it back.
I fear the unknown beasts of the past. I cannot breathe the air. I do not know the edible plants. I could not kill the animals for food. I do not know which would kill me.
The earth’s past is as alien to me as another planet.

Only a little while ago the oceans seemed unassailable—too big and stable to be hurt by man, too teeming with life to let him ever go hungry. But now we know better. Suddenly, even the myriad creatures of the sea are suffering from human intemperance. The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away.

Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

Nature no longer entertains us when conserving it becomes inconvenient.