Top 90 Sylvia A. Earle Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

52. “As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything we did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

53. “I am not in any hurry to grow up.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

54. “I hope that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

55. “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

56. “Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

57. “There’s something missing about how we’re informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

58. “It’s a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

59. “I’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

60. “We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

61. “Any astronaut can tell you you’ve got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

62. “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.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

63. “The bottom line answer to the question about why biodiversity matters is fairly simple: The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

64. “All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class – which wasn’t such a bad deal.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

65. “Protecting vital sources of renewal – unscathed marshes, healthy reefs, and deep-sea gardens – will provide hope for the future of the Gulf, and for all of us.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

66. “Our near and distant predecessors might be forgiven for exterminating the last woolly mammoth, the ultimate dodo, the final sea cow, and the last living monk seal for lack of understanding the consequences of their actions. But who will forgive us if we fail to learn from past and present experiences, to forge new values, new relationships, a new level of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive?”

— Sylvia A. Earle

67. “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.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

68. “Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

69. “What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

70. “Thanks to generations of curious, daring, intrepid explorers of the past, we may know enough, soon enough, to chart safe passage for ourselves far into the future.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

71. “So, should we race to see how quickly we can consume the last tuna, swordfish, and grouper? Or race to see what can be done to protect what remains? For now, there is still a choice.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

72. “I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

73. “My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

74. “We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

75. “Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

76. “The concept of ‘peak oil’ has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. ‘Peak fish’ occurred around the end of the 1980s.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

77. “The single non-negotiable thing life requires is water.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

78. “I personally have stopped eating seafood.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

79. “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 A. Earle

80. “There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

81. “I’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

82. “Even smaller pieces are engulfed by inch-long krill; ant-size copepods; and filter-feeding salps, clams, oysters, and mussels. Large plankton feeders such as whale sharks and manta rays swallow gallons of water at a time, plastic and all. Whether at the large, medium, small, or ultra-small scale, ingested plastic lumps, clumps, pellets, or microscopic mites kill by physically obstructing, choking, clogging, or otherwise stopping up the passage of food.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

83. “America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

84. “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 A. Earle

85. “In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

86. “If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

87. “Currently, up to 20 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions are being caused by deforestation in tropical Brazil and Indonesia, making those countries two of the highest carbon emitters in the world. It is estimated that halting forest destruction would save the same amount of carbon over the next century as stopping all fossil-fuel emissions for ten years.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

88. “Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

89. “I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

90. “I want to get out in the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

91. “When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the ‘National Geographic’ covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

92. “It’s mainly the high-end luxury market now that drives much of the fishing in the sea. It’s not feeding the starving millions. It’s feeding a luxury market.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

93. “Nearly all of the major kinds of life, divisions of life, phyla of animals, occur in the sea. Only about half of them can make it to land or freshwater.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

94. “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.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

95. “Rather than be afraid of evolution and try to stifle inquiry, people should revel in the joys of knowing and find a serenity and a joy in being a part the rest of life on Earth. Not apart from it, but a part of it.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

96. “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.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

97. “Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.”

— Sylvia A. Earle

98. “We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.”

— Sylvia A. Earle