List of Sylvia Earle Quotes

Most Of Life On Earth Has A Deep Past, Much Deeper Than Ours. And We Have Benefited From The Distillation Of All Preceding History, Call It Evolutionary History If You Will.

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.

When Some People Look At A Shrimp They Think, "hmm. Delicious." When I Look At A Shrimp I Think, "you're A Miracle, Absolutely Incredible. Your Ancestors Have Gone Back Hundreds Of Millions Of Years." And To Develop A Thing As Simple As A Shrimp Cocktail, You Have To Calculate The Hundreds Of Millions Of Years That Have Preceded That Moment Where You're Sitting There With Your Sauce And Fork Poised.

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.

When You Think About The Real Cost Of So-called Cheap Energy That Has Driven Our Prosperity To Unprecedented Levels, For Some Of Us, To Our Horror, We've Realized That This Has The Potential For Burning Brightly And Then Snuffing Out.

We Couldn't Go To The Moon On Whale Oil. We Don't Have The Capacity Yet To Consider Doing Such Things As Harnessing Current Sunlight. We're Burning Ancient Sunlight In Order To Get Us To Where We Now Are. But It's Costly.

The Very Energy Sources That Have Gotten Us To Where We Are Now Are Also, If We Continue Doing What We're Doing, A Shortcut To The End Of All That We Hold Near And Dear.

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.

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.

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.

Some Experts Look At Global Warming, Increased World Temperature, As The Critical Tipping Point That Is Causing A Crash In Coral Reef Health Around The World. And There's No Question That It Is A Factor, But It's Preceded By The Loss Of Resilience And Degradation.

Ignorance Is The Biggest Problem Of All For The Ocean - And For Many Other Things As Well.