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Sylvia Earle

77 quotes

“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.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have an opportunity, now, to achieve for humankind a prosperous, enduring future. If we fail, through inability to resolve thorny issues, or by default born of indifference, greed, or lack of knowledge, our kind might well be a passing short-term phenomenon, a mere three or four million-year blip in the ancient and ongoing saga of life on Earth.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to get out in the water. I wanted to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview: Sylvia Earle Undersea Explorer, Academy of Achievement, January 27, 1991
“If I were an evil alien wishing to alter the nature of life on earth, I would change the temperature of the ocean, I would change the chemistry. That is exactly what we are doing: excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere becomes excess carbon dioxide in the ocean that becomes carbonic acid. The ocean is becoming more acidic. That changes everything.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve had the privilege of living underwater on 10 different occasions. It has enabled me to get to know individual moray eels, individual groupers, even individual lobsters. They all have faces, they have attitudes. They have sensory systems much like our own. And yet we somehow harden ourselves to think they don’t feel pain. We pride ourselves on being “humane” but it doesn’t translate to the way we treat animals in the sea.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge is the superpower of the 21st century. Even the smartest people alive when I was born did not know what 10-year-olds today have available to them. That’s truly cause for hope.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ocean is the blue heart of the planet.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 movement.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've had a chance to live underwater 10 times now in various underwater laboratories and to use more than 30 different kinds of submarines, thousands of hours seeing the ocean from the inside out and realizing this is not just rocks and water; this is alive. It's a soup, like minestrone, but all the little pieces are alive.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being a child in Florida when my parents moved there in 1948 and witnessing the changes in the coastline, the marshes that I first discovered - finding horseshoe crab eggs, these tiny little creatures prospering in really clear water and going out on a dock at night and seeing these bioluminescent creatures just flashing and glowing - and witnessing the change, that the waters became not beautiful, clear and blue but muddy - that was powerful incentive to say, why are we doing this?”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it's still there - the habit of thinking that the ocean is too big to fail. And we're still taking life in the ocean for granted. We still think that we have the capacity to take fish on a scale that we currently are and continue to do it forever.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think one of the most important trends is the awareness and willingness to embrace places and to recognize that protecting nature, the natural systems, have benefits back to us in terms not just of better health, not just because they're beautiful - it's not even a choice anymore; it's necessary for our existence. We have to realize we're a part of nature. We can see the connection between trees and climate. We can see connection between the forests and the ocean, the phytoplankton capturing carbon, generating oxygen, maintaining a planet that works in our favor. This is common sense.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we can't be happy or healthy if we don't take care of our life support system, the planet.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The 21st century humans are poised to be the heroes for all time because we're armed with a superpower of knowing that we have to change our attitude about the world that keeps us alive, that we can't just continue mining and, you know, taking and taking. We have to be aware of the consequences.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there is a basic ethical attitude: respect for life, respect for other humans, certainly, but for all forms of life. It’s something that if everyone could just realize how special it is to be alive on this little blue speck in the universe, it’s a miracle that life exists at all and that we have a piece of time that is ours — whoever we are, shorter or longer, whatever it is, but — to really be a part of the action and to respect where we have come from, where we might be going.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s heaven on earth. It just happens to be in the ocean.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we know that with cats and dogs and horses and kids, humans, every face is really different. But it’s true with all forms of life.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. No water, no life; no blue, no green.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose you want to know what my wish is. I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films, expeditions, the web, new submarines -- and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas -- hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually -- as it turns out -- is my favorite species; that would be us. For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the 1800's, numerous species and entire complex living ecosystems many millions of years in the making have been decimated or significantly altered, from populations of whales and other large mammals to dozens of commercially valued fish species, all marine turtles, many sharks, and numerous small creatures including certain krill, crabs, and shrimp. Worldwide, the living network of microorganisms that shape the basic ingredients of the ocean's "living soup" has been tugged, the system nudged, with unknown consequences. Far too little is known about the earth's living processes to know or predict the specific consequences of our tinkering, but the outcome is not likely to be favorable for humankind.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I had to name the single most frightening and dangerous threat to the health of the oceans, the one that stands alone yet is at the base of all the others is ignorance: lack of understanding, a failure to relate our destiny to that of the sea, or to make the connection between the health of coral reefs and our own health, between the fate of the great whales and the future of humankind. There is much to learn before it is possible to intelligently create a harmonious, viable place for ourselves on the planet. The best place to begin is by recognizing the magnitude of our ignorance, and not destroy species and natural systems that we cannot re-create nor effectively restore once they are gone.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(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.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What is the biggest threat to the ocean right now?) Deep-sea mining. Some are buying into the lie that we should be taking minerals that are necessary for today’s generation of [EV] batteries, like lithium, cobalt and nickel, from the deep sea, because who cares what happens in the deep sea? These deep-sea systems are full of life and are part of the biogeochemical cycling systems that hold Earth steady. If Earth functions like a big computer system with all these little wires and lights that we don’t understand but we know it keeps us alive, would we want to get in there and take those little lights out because we don’t understand how they work?”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Diving into the ocean, it’s like diving into the history of life on earth, not just over the last 50 or 1,000, but the last million, 10 million, 100 million years, because creatures are there that have been there for several hundred million years, not those same creatures, but their near relatives, like jellyfish; like — well, sharks have been around for 300 million years; horseshoe crabs, creatures that lured me into the ocean as a child in New Jersey, have a history that goes back at least 300 million years; so many forms of life that were found in the ocean long before there were multicellular creatures occupying space on the land.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there’s a chemistry of life that has this capacity for enormous variation, maybe infinite variation. It’s a source of endless wonder and something that — it’s worth using our minds, that special gift that we have. There are other intelligent creatures out there — whales, dolphins, elephants, fish. Some of them are really smart. But they don’t know what we know. They can’t see the inside of a star or the inside of a starfish — except some of them, maybe, to eat them. But we have this power not only to explore, but we can go back in time. We can anticipate the future, far into the future. We can plot a course for ourselves based on intelligence. And the trick is: OK, homo sapiens, the smart ones, the wise ones — let’s take advantage of that capacity...Let’s put that into action and not just be like the bacteria on a dish that consume everything until they die. We don’t have to do that.”
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source