I now know, the horseshoe crab and thousands of other ancient, resilient creatures may not survive the impact my species has had on the living world, largely in a single century. More worrisome, humankind may not survive for long, either, unless we use our remarkable capacity to learn from the past, anticipate the consequences, and take actions that will ensure an enduring future. As it turns out, the future of the ocean, the creatures who live there, and our own future are inextricably linked.
Sylvia A. Earle Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (2009)
- year
- 2009
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“I now know, the horseshoe crab and thousands of other ancien…” Sylvia A. Earle. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6B0B41F877. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6b0b41f877
More from Sylvia A. Earle
I’ve had the privilege of living underwater on 10 different occasions. It has enabled me to get to know individual moray eels, individual groupers, even individual lobsters. They all have faces, they have attitudes. They have sensory systems much like our own. And yet we somehow harden ourselves to think they don’t feel pain. We pride ourselves on being “humane” but it doesn’t translate to the way we treat animals in the sea.
two things changed in the 20th century that may jolt us into a new way of thinking. First, more was discovered about the nature of the ocean and its relevance to the way the world works than during all preceding history. Second, during the same narrow slice of time, human actions caused more destruction to ocean systems than during all preceding history. And the pace is picking up.
Our soaring population may suggest success as a species, but the environmental price of modern civilization is high, and our prosperity may be short-lived.