Sylvia Earle
Sylvia Earle
Sylvia AliceEarleis an American marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer. She has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998. Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was named by Time Magazine as its first Hero for the Planet in 1998...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 August 1935
CountryUnited States of America
ocean thinking joy
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.
past earth deeper
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.
taken years earth
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.
numbers impact profound
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.
simple thinking years
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.
ocean writing feet
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.
evolution understood
Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.
years perspective half
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.
needs attention development
Why does evolution matter? There is so much about the evolution of life, the development of life on Earth that should rivet the attention of everyone to understand where we've come from and where we might be going. We need to understand the world around us if we are to succeed as a species on the planet.
attitude children ocean
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.
children ocean sharks
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.
florida parent backyards
My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.