Jacques Cousteau Quotes

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.

I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.

There's a lot to be said about what's happening to our ocean, big companies polluting it with their oil and all the raw garbage that's being spilled in there.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

Pollution, overfishing, the destruction of habitats, and climate change are emptying the oceans and enabling the lowest forms of life to regain their dominance.

Over the last several decades, human activity have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they're plastic bags. I'm always that guy that will take it into the shore.

Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.

Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

I think people had somehow gotten the sense that we have explored everything, when that isn't the case. We so know so little about the ocean, and so much of it is being destroyed.

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.

Over the years, I have seen the power of the oceans to excite, feed, and sustain people. I have also seen them undergo a growing onslaught of attacks, from destructive fishing practices to rising acidification.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

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.

Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. They also pollute their next-door neighbors.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.

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.

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Our beaches should not be garbage dumps. Our oceans must not be cesspools.

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.

We have done extraordinary things to destroy our waters. We can never do enough to research and coordinate cleaning these waters up.

I have always seen pollution as theft.

Unrestricted dumping in rivers, lakes, and coastal waters harms the habitat and harms the fish. You don’t have to be a fisherman to understand this, it’s plain to anyone.