Carolina QuotesI 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."
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 certainly was unaware that the ocean globally was on the v…” Sylvia A. Earle. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F945709028. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f945709028
More from Sylvia A. Earle
it's still there - the habit of thinking that the ocean is too big to fail. And we're still taking life in the ocean for granted. We still think that we have the capacity to take fish on a scale that we currently are and continue to do it forever.
And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.
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.