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The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.

Sylvia Earle

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Sylvia Earle
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: August 30
Biologist
Botanist
Explorer
Marine Biologist
Oceanographer
Gibbstown
New Jersey
Sylvia Alice Earle
S.A.Earle
Perspective
Recent
Four
Billion
Half
Developed
Given
Observation
Years
Billions
Really
Fit
Newcomers
Planet
Arrivals
Planets
Observations

More quotes by Sylvia Earle

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Eating wildlife is probably not the smartest thing that we can do in terms of maintaining the integrity of natural systems.
Sylvia Earle
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Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.
Sylvia Earle
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There's something missing about how we're informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.
Sylvia Earle
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Never before have we known what we know.
Sylvia Earle
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When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so now the situation is reversed.
Sylvia Earle
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We have an atmosphere that is roughly 21% oxygen. The rest of it is largely nitrogen. There's just enough carbon dioxide (CO2) to drive photosynthesis. That has been, throughout the history of our species, pretty stable. Until recently.
Sylvia Earle
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Childcare is a huge issue for young women whose work may require them to leave their families for weeks at a time.
Sylvia Earle
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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.
Sylvia Earle
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I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.
Sylvia Earle
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Our job is to keep what is working intact and not destroy what we have got.
Sylvia Earle
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This much is certain: We have the power to damage the sea, but no sure way to heal the harm.
Sylvia Earle
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My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
Sylvia Earle
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Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increasingly acid - is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.
Sylvia Earle
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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.
Sylvia Earle
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Scientists never stop asking. They're little kids who never grew up.
Sylvia Earle
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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.
Sylvia Earle
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If Darwin could see what we now see, what we now know about the ocean, about the atmosphere, about the nature of life, as we now understand it, about the importance of microbes - I think he would just beam with joy that many of the thoughts and the glimpses of the majesty of life on Earth that he had during his life, now magnified many times over.
Sylvia Earle
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The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.
Sylvia Earle
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When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic' covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.
Sylvia Earle
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I find the lure of the unknown irresistible.
Sylvia Earle