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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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Sylvia Earle
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: August 30
Biologist
Botanist
Explorer
Marine Biologist
Oceanographer
Gibbstown
New Jersey
Sylvia Alice Earle
S.A.Earle
Made
Presence
Kilometers
Spent
Evidence
Dive
Saws
Tangible
Hours
Trash
Water
Deepest
Ever
Thousands
Even
Miles

More quotes by Sylvia Earle

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When you are a child you learn your alphabet, your numbers, but increasingly, we must learn from the earliest stages that the highest priority has to be to maintain the world as a safe place for humankind.
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The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something before you can care about it.
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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.
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The burning of fossil fuels has altered the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so rapidly and so abundantly that now, we are driving not just the warming trend, not just the sea level rise that is a consequence of the warming trend that is melting polar ice and alpine ice, but also [ocean acidification].
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It has taken these many hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune the Earth to a point where it is suitable for the likes of us.
Sylvia Earle
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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
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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.
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We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
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We've got to somehow stabilize our connection to nature so that in 50 years from now, 500 years, 5,000 years from now there will still be a wild system and respect for what it takes to sustain us.
Sylvia Earle
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The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. 'Who, what, where, why, when, and how!' They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.
Sylvia Earle
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We want to believe that we can continue doing what we've done for the past thousand years and not worry about the consequences coming back to us.
Sylvia Earle
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We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.
Sylvia Earle
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Ignorance is the biggest problem of all for the ocean - and for many other things as well.
Sylvia Earle
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There are now more than 4,000 places in the sea around the world that have some kind of protection. The bad news: You have to look hard to find them. What you find instead is destructive fishing, mining, gas and oil exploration.
Sylvia Earle
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If Darwin could get into a submarine and see what I've seen, thousand of feet beneath the ocean, I am just confident that he would be inspired to sit down and start writing all over again.
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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The opportunity that is unique [to our] time is what inspires me to do everything I can to move things forward. This is the first time that we have the capacity to understand our place in the greater scheme of things to the extent that we do.
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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
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Ironically the very energy, the very basis of how we know what we know, has been reliant on having an energy source [necessary] to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, to support airplanes that fly, and satellites to give us our communication.
Sylvia Earle
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The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong response that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place.
Sylvia Earle