Sylvia Earle Quotes

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.

Sustainable fishing is a fraud. It's a marketing term that really means 'business as usual.'

Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.

European fisheries are a disaster. The American fisheries are well-kept.

80 percent of our global fish stocks are fully exploited, overly exploited or have collapsed. Two billion people rely on the oceans for their primary source of protein.

While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people - even those who profess great environmental consciousness - continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice.

I don't eat fish because there is no such thing as sustainable fishing in the world right now.

Fish are a renewable resource, and one of the problems we've had is people feel obliged to catch the limit, then throw 'em in the garbage can.

Believe me, I did not come to London to cook farmed fish. All my fish are wild.

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish.

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.

The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.

Commercial fishermen are the greediest, stupidest people on earth.

There is an urgent need for regeneration of fisheries and fostering a sustainable fisheries programme. What I mean is, designing new fishing vessels and nets so that they do not disrupt the fish lifecycle by catching young ones and also do not destroy sea grass beds, which serve as habitats for dugongs.

Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.

Until fishing is properly regulated and contained, we should withdraw our consent. Save your plastic bags by all means, but if you really want to make a difference, stop eating fish.

Without sound conservation and management measures, fisheries will quickly become depleted and a basic component of global food security will be lost.

I would just like my children to be able to eat fish when they grow up. Now, I don't think there's anything controversial about that.

Sharks are in real trouble, and they need all the help they can get.

Wild fish are under threat of extinction because they're hunted to feed us. Yet land animals that we farm are under no threat of extinction. Shifting from hunting fish to farming fish - where the farmers have the incentive to keep their stocks healthy - could do a tremendous amount of good for wild fish.

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.

There are a number of things everyone can do to help protect whales.

I think that the Japanese - and I do love Japanese cuisine and adore Japanese food culture - I think that they're going to plow through the entire world's fishing. They're going to eat everything anyways.