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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.

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
World
Safe
Earliest
Numbers
Stages
Stage
Priority
Child
Humankind
Learn
Increasingly
Place
Maintain
Must
Priorities
Children
Highest
Alphabet

More quotes by Sylvia Earle

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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.
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Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher - and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences.
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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.
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There's plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.
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We are taking way more out of the ocean than the ocean can replenish.
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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.
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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.
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We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
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The climate has been changing. Of course it [has]. Evidence throughout history, [which] we can assess, especially during human history, shows there have been ups and downs. But the last ten thousand years have been relatively stable compared to now.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.
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Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.
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If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it's primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, 'What you don't have in your mind, you have on your shelf.' But now we have the Web.
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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.
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The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it's also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth... our impact on the diversity of life has been profound.
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We want to think of ourselves as truly special creatures that are unique in the universe and, well, we are. And we have that capacity to wonder, to question, and to see ourselves in the context of all of life that has preceded the present time, and all that will go off far into the future, one way or another.
Sylvia Earle
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The Earth is a unique system in the universe, the only planet we know of that's hospitable for humankind.
Sylvia Earle