110+ Sylvia Earle Quotes On Education, Seaspiracy And Oceanic

Sylvia Earle is an American oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer. She has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998 and was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earle is an advocate for ocean conservation and has founded several organizations, including Mission Blue and the Sylvia Earle Alliance. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sylvia Earle on education, life, leadership.

Top 10 Sylvia Earle Quotes

1. With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live.
2. The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something before you can care about it.
3. Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now.
4. No water, no life. No blue, no green.
5. Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you're lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you're in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don't see sharks.
6. I suggest to everyone: Look in the mirror. Ask yourself: Who are you? What are your talents? Use them, and do what you love.
7. Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.
8. I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.
9. We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.
10. I hope that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.

Sylvia Earle Short Quotes

• Everybody can make choices that will make peace with the natural world.
• We have the power to abstain from destructive behavior.
• You should know what is taken out of the ecosystem in order to give you a moment's sustenance.
• Only two percent of the ocean is fully protected right now.
• Our job is to keep what is working intact and not destroy what we have got.
• It is not too late to turn things around.
• What we put into the atmosphere in terms of burning fuel is unprecedented.
• We understand that we must make peace with nature - that our lives depend on it.
• If I seem like a radical it's because I have seen things that others have not.
• The next 10 years could be the most important in the next 10,000.

Sylvia Earle Quotes About Life

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 Earle

I want to get out in the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory. — Sylvia Earle

The oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle - all of these are linked to the existence of life in the sea. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

Life in the ocean makes Earth hospitable. We are sailing along in the universe and we have a blue engine that is making everything alright. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

We are depleting this immense diversity and abundance of life, and it matters tremendously for the future of the planet. — Sylvia Earle

There's plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water. — Sylvia Earle

The most important part is to take on the challenge of protecting the ocean as if your life depends on it - because it does. — Sylvia Earle

Sylvia Earle Quotes About Oceanic

Success underwater depends mostly on how you conduct yourself. Diving can be the most relaxing experience in the world. Your weight seems to disappear. Space travel will be available only to a few individuals for some time, but the oceans are available to almost everyone - now. — Sylvia Earle

Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea. — Sylvia Earle

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart. — Sylvia Earle

With respect to the ocean being the heart of our blue planet: We are often asked, 'How much protection is enough?' We can only answer with another question: How much of your heart is worth protecting? — Sylvia Earle

I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time. — Sylvia Earle

With care and protection, with safe havens in the ocean, there is still a good chance that we can turn things around. — Sylvia Earle

Many of us ask what can I, as one person, do, but history shows us that everything good and bad starts because somebody does something or does not do something. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

The ocean seemed like a sea of Eden. But now we are facing paradise lost. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

Sylvia Earle Quotes About Ocean

Since I began exploring the ocean in the 1950s, 90 percent of the big fish have been stripped away. Tuna, sharks, swordfish, cod, halibut, you name it, the numbers have just collapsed. Also, about half of the coral reefs are gone, globally, from where they were just a few decades ago. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

We are not only warming the ocean and the planet as a whole, but we are also acidifying the ocean and changing its chemistry. — Sylvia Earle

We humans have this idea that the ocean is so big, so vast, so resilient that it doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 1,000 years ago. But in the last 100, especially the last 50 years, we have destroyed the assets that make our lives possible. — Sylvia Earle

It isn't too late to shift from the swift, sharp decline of ocean systems in recent decades to an era of steady recovery. There is time, and there is a growing awareness, which is the best way to counter indifference. People who know might care. — Sylvia Earle

Ignorance is the biggest problem of all for the ocean - and for many other things as well. — Sylvia Earle

We're still under the weight of this impression that the ocean is too big to fail, that the planet is too big to fail. — Sylvia Earle

We still have the illusion that the ocean will recover. That even if we do have to lose sharks, people don't understand why this matters. The evidence is in front of us, and we fail to take it in and say, "Now I get it. Now I understand." — Sylvia Earle

We must protect our ocean as if our lives depend upon it, because they do. — Sylvia Earle

The ocean is dying, and we have no place to escape to if this experiment doesn't go in our favor. — Sylvia Earle

Sylvia Earle Quotes About Water

Fortunately, we know more about the problems that we have than in all preceding history. We know now the consequences of the things that we put into the air, into the water - of the way we treat life on Earth. — Sylvia Earle

I've spent thousands of hours under water. And even in the deepest dive I have ever made, 2.5 miles (about 4 kilometers) down, I saw trash and other tangible evidence of our presence. — Sylvia Earle

It doesn't matter where on Earth you live, everyone is utterly dependent on the existence of that lovely, living saltwater soup. There's plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water. — Sylvia Earle

Sylvia Earle Famous Quotes And Sayings

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. — Sylvia Earle

We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called Planet Earth. As we learn how we fit into the greater scheme of things, and begin to understand how the system works, we can plan ahead, we can use the resources responsibly, to show some respect for this inheritance that goes back 4.6 billion years. — Sylvia Earle

Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species. — Sylvia Earle

The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That's why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one. — Sylvia Earle

We still have 10 percent of the sharks. We still have half of the coral reefs. However, if we wait another 50 years, opportunities might well be gone. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

Humans have always wondered the big questions, "Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?" It's part of human nature. It's perhaps the underpinnings of religion. — Sylvia Earle

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

The value of sharks' lives is now widely understood to be more important than their value as products. And when you have sharks in an area, it's a sign of good health. They're top predators, which means they feed on old, sick, and slower fish, keeping an entire population healthy. — Sylvia Earle

It's an appreciation for life generally, every bit of life, the smallest creature that lives in the intestines of termites that make termite life possible - to the leaves that turn out oxygen and grab carbon dioxide and with water make simple sugars that feed much of the world. I mean, these are everyday miracles. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

Globally sharks have been killed for their fins, for their cartilage, for their livers, for their meat. But mostly what has driven some species of sharks to near extinction - including the hammerhead shark - is the new luxury taste for shark fin soup. — Sylvia Earle

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

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 Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do. — Sylvia Earle

Fish from all over the world, from deep in the sea, wind up in countries from Germany to Japan. That is just crazy. — Sylvia Earle

Give the ocean a break. Give yourself a break. — Sylvia Earle

With knowing comes caring. — Sylvia Earle

Ironically the very energy, the very basis of how we know what we know, has been reliant on having an energy source [necessary] to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, to support airplanes that fly, and satellites to give us our communication. — Sylvia Earle

Throughout all of human history we have consumed the natural world. All creatures do. Birds do. Fish do. Earthworms do. We consume the natural world as a source of our survival. But no creature has ever consumed at the scale that humans have, and now there are seven billion of us. I think the good news is that a large percentage of those seven billion minds can work to make better decisions. — Sylvia Earle

Knowledge is the key to making a difference. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

We don't have to be that greedy generation that just continued to take down the underpinnings of what makes the planet work in our favor. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

If Darwin could see what we now see, what we now know about the ocean, about the atmosphere, about the nature of life, as we now understand it, about the importance of microbes - I think he would just beam with joy that many of the thoughts and the glimpses of the majesty of life on Earth that he had during his life, now magnified many times over. — Sylvia Earle

Throughout all of human history we've enjoyed certain benign circumstances: an envelope of atmosphere, an envelope of temperature. A kind of resilience that if you cut down trees, then they'll grow back. You take fish, they recover. You put stuff into the atmosphere that you know is not good for us, but we can still breathe. We haven't awakened, generally, to the sense of urgency that does exist. — Sylvia Earle

I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter. — Sylvia Earle

The opportunity that is unique [to our] time is what inspires me to do everything I can to move things forward. This is the first time that we have the capacity to understand our place in the greater scheme of things to the extent that we do. — Sylvia Earle

We have found ways to capture, kill and market ocean wildlife on an unprecedented scale. It's an absolute catastrophe. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

There's a vested interest in trying to keep people smoking cigarettes. — Sylvia Earle

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 Earle

What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish. — Sylvia Earle

Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time. — Sylvia Earle

Eating wildlife is probably not the smartest thing that we can do in terms of maintaining the integrity of natural systems. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

No creature on Earth ever has organized themselves in ways that we have, with the capacity to alter the nature of nature the way we have. — Sylvia Earle

You should ask where your food is coming from. — Sylvia Earle

There is not a well-funded campaign among scientists to say, "Look, here's the evidence. You can read it yourself. Here are the facts. We're not making this up." — Sylvia Earle

We are blessed with a place that is open to the universe and, despite this, supports this very thin envelope of air we call atmosphere, which holds just the right amount of oxygen for us to breathe. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together. — Sylvia Earle

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet-as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean...We are learning otherwise. — Sylvia Earle

Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood. — Sylvia Earle

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. — Sylvia Earle

The burning of fossil fuels has altered the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so rapidly and so abundantly that now, we are driving not just the warming trend, not just the sea level rise that is a consequence of the warming trend that is melting polar ice and alpine ice, but also [ocean acidification]. — Sylvia Earle

The ocean governs the climate and the weather, it is taking care of the temperature and it is shaping the chemistry of our planet. — Sylvia Earle

We have to look in the mirror first. What are we doing? How can we make a change? It always starts with looking in the mirror. Every individual can. Every individual can make a difference either by proactively doing something positive or by doing nothing. That's a decision, too. — Sylvia Earle

It's baffling why the issues relating to climate change - [which] have far more obvious and tangible and much more clear-cut evidence about the cause - have been slower for people to accept as a given. — Sylvia Earle

Use your power to do whatever it takes to secure for humankind an enduring place on this little blue speck in the universe - our only hope. — Sylvia Earle

The Earth is a tiny blue speck in a universe of unfriendly options. — Sylvia Earle

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential. — Sylvia Earle

Look at a child and realize that their future is in your hands. It's not just those who will be here fifty years from now. The decisions we make in the next ten years will shape the next 10,000 years. — Sylvia Earle

That attitude of arrogance, that attitude of "It's all about me. It's all about what I can get out of life now" - well, I'm personally driven by wanting to get out of my life the best I can achieve as a gift for those who come after me. — Sylvia Earle

I am driven by what I know; that the world I love is in trouble. — Sylvia Earle

We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature. — Sylvia Earle

We've got to alter our fossil fuel dependence and go to other energy sources. — Sylvia Earle

Life Lessons by Sylvia Earle

1. Sylvia Earle's life is a testament to the power of resilience and determination. She has faced many challenges and obstacles throughout her life, but she has persevered and achieved incredible success.
2. Sylvia Earle's life is also a reminder that we should never stop learning and exploring. She has dedicated her life to studying the ocean and advocating for its protection, and her work has inspired countless people to pursue their own passions.
3. Finally, Sylvia Earle's life is a reminder that we should never underestimate the power of our actions. Her tireless efforts to protect the ocean have had a lasting impact on the environment, and her legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.