A few individuals, armed with modern technology, can wield enormous destructive power. One person with a bulldozer can, in a few days, eliminate a forest that has been quietly building for millennia; one fisherman deploying miles of drift nets can wipe out entire seagoing societies...But just as individuals can and do negatively impact the course tory, so can and do individuals make a positive difference.
Sylvia A. Earle Connected to the Carolinas
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“A few individuals, armed with modern technology, can wield e…” Sylvia A. Earle. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-4ADCA78265. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/4adca78265
More from Sylvia A. Earle
The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That's why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.
But taking a small number of wild creatures out of large populations while protecting-not destroying the habitat is very different from the industrial-scale extraction of wildlife now taking place in the sea. These issues seemed to intrigue President George W. Bush during a conversation over dinner at the White House in April 2006.
I certainly was unaware that the ocean globally was on the verge of cataclysmic decline, that the pristine seas I had known as a child were in danger of becoming Paradise Lost. I was not alone in not knowing. Rachel Carson, famous for her 1962 classic Silent Spring, 11 years earlier wrote in The Sea Around Us: "Eventually man...found his way back to the sea.... And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents."