Sylvia Earle Quotes

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

Commercial fishermen are the greediest, stupidest people on earth.

To the naked eye, our oceans are beautiful. But scientists tell us that all of the world's fisheries will collapse by 2048, unless we change how we manage them. Help protect our oceans so the next generation can also enjoy their bounty.

We are literally eating the oceans alive and there are simply not enough fish to continue to feed an ever expanding population of humanity.

We are blessed with a magnificent and miraculous world ocean on this planet. But we are also stressing it in ways that we are not even close to bringing under control.

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.

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?

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

Large areas of the Gulf have escaped being scraped by trawls, crushed by more than 40,000 miles of pipelines, or displaced by one of 50,000 oil and gas wells drilled since the middle of the 20th century. Some places have been deliberately protected.

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

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

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

Oceans are one of the most important things in the world now and that is a national security threat of the United States of America, to be honest with you. That is why seeing the habitat destroyed is so short-sighted by us.

When the fish price is too low, the fishermen starve.

It’s all in there. We have harpooned every whale in the ocean.

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.

Sharks have swum the oceans for over 400 million years, but we're threatening this critically important species for the purpose of making soup - it's sad and wasteful.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

We are taking way more out of the ocean than the ocean can replenish.

What we have now - a world without [marine] reserves - is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit. Reserves are like savings accounts.

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.

In the Mediterranean of my childhood, there were no large groupers, sharks, or whales. All I saw was seaweed and a few fish, smaller than my little diving mask. All the large animals were gone, simply because we had eaten them.

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

We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival.