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We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
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
Effective
Disaster
Loss
Environment
Nature
Become
Frighteningly
Altering
More quotes by Sylvia Earle
When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.
Sylvia Earle
Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time.
Sylvia Earle
There is not a well-funded campaign among scientists to say, Look, here's the evidence. You can read it yourself. Here are the facts. We're not making this up.
Sylvia Earle
If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.
Sylvia Earle
There are a lot of smart creatures out there. Dolphins, elephants, and whales are smart. And there are some really smart birds. I know some really intelligent fish. But they cannot know what humans know and are incapable of inflicting as much damage.
Sylvia Earle
This much is certain: We have the power to damage the sea, but no sure way to heal the harm.
Sylvia Earle
The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It's not just a cost to the people who live there. It's a cost to all people everywhere.
Sylvia Earle
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
Santa Monica Bay is less polluted today than when I first moved to the area in the 1970s, because actions have been taken to avoid putting some of the noxious materials into the sea. I think people are more aware than they once were, the air is cleaner, water generally is, in spite of the fact that there are more people.
Sylvia Earle
The most important part is to take on the challenge of protecting the ocean as if your life depends on it - because it does.
Sylvia Earle
Globally sharks have been killed for their fins, for their cartilage, for their livers, for their meat. But mostly what has driven some species of sharks to near extinction - including the hammerhead shark - is the new luxury taste for shark fin soup.
Sylvia Earle
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
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
Scientists never stop asking. They're little kids who never grew up.
Sylvia Earle
We are taking way more out of the ocean than the ocean can replenish.
Sylvia Earle
It's baffling why the issues relating to climate change - [which] have far more obvious and tangible and much more clear-cut evidence about the cause - have been slower for people to accept as a given.
Sylvia Earle
Even our rules and regulations, our laws, our policies, favor the destructive nature of taking too much from the ocean and using techniques that are horribly destructive. We know they don't work. We know it's not sustainable.
Sylvia Earle
Look at a child and realize that their future is in your hands. It's not just those who will be here fifty years from now. The decisions we make in the next ten years will shape the next 10,000 years.
Sylvia Earle
Fish from all over the world, from deep in the sea, wind up in countries from Germany to Japan. That is just crazy.
Sylvia Earle
Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.
Sylvia Earle
