Sylvia Earle Quotes

A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.

The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?

Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon - it's a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.

Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.

So when I cease to be I want to go back...to the sea! Oh for the life of a sardine! That is the life for me!

I said that the oceans were sick but they're not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans - there will always be life - but they're getting sicker every year.

Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.

If we don't manage this resource, we will be left with a diet of jellyfish and plankton stew.

Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.

I think the concept of the sea is very important.

Practically the whole world depends on coral reefs, so if the coral reefs get all killed, then the ocean will start going out of whack, and if the ocean goes out of whack, something might happen on land.

Just as human activity is upsetting Earth's carbon cycle, our actions are altering the water cycle.

Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.

I love ocean life. I'm fascinated that so much of it remains unexplored by human beings. Diluted seawater consisted of nearly the same concentration of elements and minerals as blood plasma. They've got the same amount of sodium, too.

Most whale photos you see show whales in this beautiful blue water - it's almost like space.

New England waters are some of my favorite - they are some of the richest waters because they are temperate waters and nutrient-rich, and therefore provide food for so many animals, from giant whales to sharks to everything else.

If salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.

Ships are expendable; the whales are not.

If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can't live on this planet with a dead ocean.

The Polynesians used to have a system where they proclaimed a fishing area as 'taboo.' If any fisherman was caught fishing in a taboo area, they would be killed. The Polynesians understand that the fish had to be given a chance to recover.

If we are to be good stewards of the ocean, we need to understand what lives there and how the animals interact with each other and with their environment, which means we need to be constantly seeking new and improved methods for exploration and observation.

Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.