Sylvia Earle Quotes

My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.

Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.

Our job is to keep what is working intact and not destroy what we have got.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.

There is this sweet spot in time when we have an opportunity to stop killing sharks and tunas and swordfish and other wildlife in the sea before it's too late.

You should know what is taken out of the ecosystem in order to give you a moment's sustenance.

I personally have stopped eating seafood.

The ocean is our life support system. No blue, no green. It's really a miracle that we have got a place that works in our favor.

The concept of 'peak oil' has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. 'Peak fish' occurred around the end of the 1980s.

I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime.

Health to the ocean means health for us.

Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.

With knowing comes caring.

I am driven by what I know; that the world I love is in trouble.

This much is certain: We have the power to damage the sea, but no sure way to heal the harm.

The ocean governs the climate and the weather, it is taking care of the temperature and it is shaping the chemistry of our planet.

You should ask where your food is coming from.

Knowledge is the key to making a difference.

The Earth is a tiny blue speck in a universe of unfriendly options.

The next 10 years could be the most important in the next 10,000.

It is not too late to turn things around.

The Arctic is an ocean. The southern pole is a continent surrounded by ocean. The North Pole is an ocean, or northern waters. It's an ocean surrounded by land, basically.

We understand that we must make peace with nature - that our lives depend on it.

No creature on Earth ever has organized themselves in ways that we have, with the capacity to alter the nature of nature the way we have.

Life in the ocean makes Earth hospitable. We are sailing along in the universe and we have a blue engine that is making everything alright.

We are taking way more out of the ocean than the ocean can replenish.

We don't have to be that greedy generation that just continued to take down the underpinnings of what makes the planet work in our favor.

There's a vested interest in trying to keep people smoking cigarettes.

If you make the choice to just go with the flow, that is a choice to make a difference in a negative way.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

We have the capacity to alter the nature of nature. No, we don't have just the capacity - we are altering the nature of nature, the natural systems that cause the planet to function in our favor.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

The most important part is to take on the challenge of protecting the ocean as if your life depends on it - because it does.

People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.

Nearly all of the major kinds of life, divisions of life, phyla of animals, occur in the sea. Only about half of them can make it to land or freshwater.

I am not in any hurry to grow up.

What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish.

It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together.

We've got to alter our fossil fuel dependence and go to other energy sources.

Not only who am I, but who are we? And where are we going? It's the "we." It's the social connections that are special to human beings.

Never before have we known what we know.

I love music of all kinds, but there's no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.

America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.

I've spent thousands of hours under water. And even in the deepest dive I have ever made, 2.5 miles (about 4 kilometers) down, I saw trash and other tangible evidence of our presence.

Give the ocean a break. Give yourself a break.

Fish from all over the world, from deep in the sea, wind up in countries from Germany to Japan. That is just crazy.

Eating wildlife is probably not the smartest thing that we can do in terms of maintaining the integrity of natural systems.

If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

Only two percent of the ocean is fully protected right now.