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Sylvia A. Earle
(30 Aug 1935 - )
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Science Quotes by Sylvia A. Earle (18 quotes)
[The effect of deep-sea mining is] to essentially clear-cut the deep ocean.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It’s akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn’t do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?
— Sylvia A. Earle
By the mid-1950s manatees were already scarce, and monk seals, once common as far north as Galveston, were gone. By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Human beings are sea creatures, dependent on the oceans just as much as whales, herring or coral reefs.
— Sylvia A. Earle
I think of the ocean as the blue heart of the planet. Well, how much of your heart do you want to protect?
— Sylvia A. Earle
I want to get out in the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.
— Sylvia A. Earle
In a world that is rightly so concerned about climate change and the atmosphere, to be so ignorant and neglectful of our oceans is deeply troubling. However, … having woken up to this living disaster and having realized that there are limits to how much abuse we can inflict, it’s not too late to turn things around.
— Sylvia A. Earle
In years gone by, we would just take, take, take from the oceans but today we realize this is not an option, that the oceans keep us alive, and that we need to tread more carefully. This is now both a governance issue and a choice issue.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Krill, a vital food sources for sea life, is being snatched in vast quantities, with trawlers traveling halfway around the globe, generating ruinous carbon emissions in the form of global supply chains.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat. Tuna take 10 to 14 years to mature, require thousands of pounds of food to develop, and we’re hunting them to the point of extinction.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Nobody is calling for an end to fishing on the high seas but some techniques, for example bottom trawling, must be banned.
— Sylvia A. Earle
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.
— Sylvia A. Earle
The big blue area that dominates the view of earth from space was once our home and today represents 97 percent of the biosphere where life exists, providing the water we drink and the air we breathe. And we are destroying it.
— Sylvia A. Earle
There’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.
— Sylvia A. Earle
Throughout all of human history, we have taken, taken, taken, from the natural world. All creatures, however large or small, do this as a way of making a living. Humans, though, have gone way beyond what elephants have done to the planet or what birds or what any fish in the sea is capable of doing.
— Sylvia A. Earle
We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
— Sylvia A. 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. I explored powder white beaches, dense marshes, mangrove forests, and miles of sea grass meadows alive with pink sea urchins, tiny shrimps, and seahorses half the size of my little finger. … Then, in mere decades, not millennia, the blue wilderness of my childhood disappeared: biologic change in the space of a lifetime.
— Sylvia A. Earle
You can’t see oxygen being generated by trees, carbon dioxide being taken up by trees, but we get that. We’re beginning to understand the importance of forests. But the ocean has its forests, too. They just happen to be very small. They’re very small in size but they’re very large in numbers.
— Sylvia A. Earle
See also:
- 30 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Earle's birth.
- Atlas of the Ocean: The Deep Frontier, by Sylvia Earle. - book suggestion.