Brian Skerry Quotes

The ocean is the lifeblood of our world. If we were to lose our fish that we appreciate so much by overfishing; or if we were to lose some of our favorite beaches to overbuilding and pollution, then how would we feel? It's become a case of not knowing what you've got until it's gone.

We've built, drilled, and shipped indiscriminately across our oceans, with little consideration for the natural environment that is critical to the health of many of our other ocean uses, like food and recreation.

If you're overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you're creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.

We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.

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

Penguins are an indicator of the health of our watery planet, and if they are unable to survive, we had better take notice or we might find our own survival threatened.

Health to the ocean means health for us.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

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.

If you take away the predators in the prairies and the national parks, you suddenly have an explosion of elk, and then you have a lack of the food source for the elk, so they strip all the ground bare and that takes away the cover, on and on and on and on. The whole food chain is disrupted.

A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate.

The very survival of the human species depends upon the maintenance of an ocean clean and alive.... The ocean is our planet's life belt.

Crocs are apex predators, and as with all apex predators, they are critical to the environment: if you lose the crocs, you'll lose the barramundi, you'll lose the crabs - a catfish can eat 30,000 barramundi fingerlings, and who do you think eats the catfish? Crocs.

If we keep on destroying fish, there won't be any left. If the oceans die, we all die. It's as simple as that.

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.

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

Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world's protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans' health declines, our very survival is at risk.

Marine scientists predict that by 2050 there will be no more large fish left in the ocean if we don't change our relationship with the sea.

The ocean is like a checking account where everybody withdraws but nobody makes a deposit. This is what's happening because of overfishing.

I could cut my leg of; I could cut my arm off. I could gouge my eye out - I'd still probably survive, but not very well, and that's what we're doing to the ocean. It's the life support system of this planet. We've been dumping in it, we've been polluting it, we've been destroying it for decades, and we're essentially maiming ourselves.

If we continue to address the issue of the environment where we live as though we're the only species that lives here, we'll create a disaster for ourselves.

People habitat has to take priority over bird habitat.

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.

If we lose bees, we may be looking at losing apples and oranges. We may be looking at losing a great deal of other crops, as well, and other animals that depend on those crops.

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.