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For Humans, The Arctic Is A Harshly Inhospitable Place, But The Conditions There Are Precisely What Polar Bears Require To Survive - And Thrive. 'harsh' To Us Is 'home' For Them. Take Away The Ice And Snow, Increase The Temperature By Even A Little, And The Realm That Makes Their Lives Possible Literally Melts Away.

-Sylvia Earle

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For Humans, The Arctic

Sylvia Earle

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For Humans, The Arctic Is A Harshly Inhospitable Place, But The Conditions There Are Precisely What Polar Bears Require To Survive - And Thrive. 'harsh' To Us Is 'home' For Them. Take Away The Ice And Snow, Increase The Temperature By Even A Little, And The Realm That Makes Their Lives Possible Literally Melts Away.

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We Have Become Frighteningly Effective At Altering Nature.

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We Have The Power To Abstain From Destructive Behavior.

Destructive Behavior

The Ocean Is Dying, And We Have No Place To Escape To If This Experiment Doesn't Go In Our Favor.

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The Ocean Is Our Life Support System. No Blue, No Green. It's Really A Miracle That We Have Got A Place That Works In Our Favor.

Support Systems

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Never Again Will We Have This Good A Chance As We Now Have To Find An Enduring Place For Ourselves Within The Natural Systems That Keep Us Alive. It's A Sweet Spot In History. That's Why This Is Such A Critical Time.

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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.

I Am Not In Any Hurry To Grow Up.

Give The Ocean A Break. Give Yourself A Break.

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When I Arrived On The Planet, There Were Only Two Billion. Wildlife Was More Abundant, We Were Less So; Now The Situation Is Reversed.

Everybody Can Make Choices That Will Make Peace With The Natural World.

Throughout All Of Human History We Have Consumed The Natural World. All Creatures Do. Birds Do. Fish Do. Earthworms Do. We Consume The Natural World As A Source Of Our Survival. But No Creature Has Ever Consumed At The Scale That Humans Have, And Now There Are Seven Billion Of Us. I Think The Good News Is That A Large Percentage Of Those Seven Billion Minds Can Work To Make Better Decisions.

Our Job Is To Keep What Is Working Intact And Not Destroy What We Have Got.

We Couldn't Go To The Moon On Whale Oil. We Don't Have The Capacity Yet To Consider Doing Such Things As Harnessing Current Sunlight. We're Burning Ancient Sunlight In Order To Get Us To Where We Now Are. But It's Costly.

It Isn't Too Late To Shift From The Swift, Sharp Decline Of Ocean Systems In Recent Decades To An Era Of Steady Recovery. There Is Time, And There Is A Growing Awareness, Which Is The Best Way To Counter Indifference. People Who Know Might Care.

When I Was 12, We Moved From New Jersey To Florida. The Gulf Of Mexico Was Literally My Backyard. Every Day, I Could See The Ocean. At Low Tide I Went Out And Played In Seagrass Meadows That Used To Come Right Up To The Shore, Filled With Tiny Seahorses, Pipefish And Soft Corals. There Was So Much Life! But Then I Witnessed The Change, The Loss Of The Shoreline, The Loss Of The Mangrove Trees, The Loss Of The Seagrass Meadows. Shallow Bay Areas Were Turned Into Parking Lots.

Look At The Bark Of A Redwood, And You See Moss. If You Peer Beneath The Bits And Pieces Of The Moss, You'll See Toads, Small Insects, A Whole Host Of Life That Prospers In That Miniature Environment. A Lumberman Will Look At A Forest And See So Many Board Feet Of Lumber. I See A Living City.

Places Change Over Time With Or Without Oil Spills, But Humans Are Responsible For The Deepwater Horizon Gusher - And Humans, As Well As The Corals, Fish And Other Creatures, Are Suffering The Consequences.

It's Mainly The High-end Luxury Market Now That Drives Much Of The Fishing In The Sea. It's Not Feeding The Starving Millions. It's Feeding A Luxury Market.

It Is Not Too Late To Turn Things Around.

We Want To Believe That We Can Continue Doing What We've Done For The Past Thousand Years And Not Worry About The Consequences Coming Back To Us.

Even If You Never Have The Chance To See Or Touch The Ocean, The Ocean Touches You With Every Breath You Take, Every Drop Of Water You Drink, Every Bite You Consume. Everyone, Everywhere Is Inextricably Connected To And Utterly Dependent Upon The Existence Of The Sea.

If We Have A Hope Of Really Understanding Our Place In Nature And Of Carving Out A Place For Ourselves That Is Sustainable, It's Primarily Because Of The New Level Of Communication. It Used To Be, 'what You Don't Have In Your Mind, You Have On Your Shelf.' But Now We Have The Web.

With Knowing Comes Caring.

With Every Drop Of Water You Drink, Every Breath You Take, You're Connected To The Sea. No Matter Where On Earth You Live.

It Doesn't Matter Where On Earth You Live, Everyone Is Utterly Dependent On The Existence Of That Lovely, Living Saltwater Soup. There's Plenty Of Water In The Universe Without Life, But Nowhere Is There Life Without Water.

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There Are A Lot Of Smart Creatures Out There. Dolphins, Elephants, And Whales Are Smart. And There Are Some Really Smart Birds. I Know Some Really Intelligent Fish. But They Cannot Know What Humans Know And Are Incapable Of Inflicting As Much Damage.

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No Water, No Life. No Blue, No Green.

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There Is Not A Well-funded Campaign Among Scientists To Say, "look, Here's The Evidence. You Can Read It Yourself. Here Are The Facts. We're Not Making This Up."

I Have Lots Of Heroes: Anyone And Everyone Who Does Whatever They Can To Leave The Natural World Better Than They Found It.

The Ocean Governs The Climate And The Weather, It Is Taking Care Of The Temperature And It Is Shaping The Chemistry Of Our Planet.

We Have An Atmosphere That Is Roughly 21% Oxygen. The Rest Of It Is Largely Nitrogen. There's Just Enough Carbon Dioxide (co2) To Drive Photosynthesis. That Has Been, Throughout The History Of Our Species, Pretty Stable. Until Recently.

Since I Began Exploring The Ocean In The 1950s, 90 Percent Of The Big Fish Have Been Stripped Away. Tuna, Sharks, Swordfish, Cod, Halibut, You Name It, The Numbers Have Just Collapsed. Also, About Half Of The Coral Reefs Are Gone, Globally, From Where They Were Just A Few Decades Ago.

It's Baffling Why The Issues Relating To Climate Change - [which] Have Far More Obvious And Tangible And Much More Clear-cut Evidence About The Cause - Have Been Slower For People To Accept As A Given.

The Ocean Seemed Like A Sea Of Eden. But Now We Are Facing Paradise Lost.

Great Attention Gets Paid To Rainforests Because Of The Diversity Of Life There. Diversity In The Oceans Is Even Greater.

If You Think The Ocean Isn't Important, Imagine Earth Without It. Mars Comes To Mind. No Ocean, No Life Support System.

Support Systems

We've Got To Somehow Stabilize Our Connection To Nature So That In 50 Years From Now, 500 Years, 5,000 Years From Now There Will Still Be A Wild System And Respect For What It Takes To Sustain Us.

We Have Been Far Too Aggressive About Extracting Ocean Wildlife, Not Appreciating That There Are Limits And Even Points Of No Return.

If You Make The Choice To Just Go With The Flow, That Is A Choice To Make A Difference In A Negative Way.

Making A Difference

With Care And Protection, With Safe Havens In The Ocean, There Is Still A Good Chance That We Can Turn Things Around.

Historically, Girls Have Not Been Encouraged To Be Scientists, To Be Explorers, And There's A Social Kind Of Constraint, Of Course. Having The Responsibility, A Disproportionate Part Of The Responsibility, For Caring For Families, Caring For Children. I Know This Challenge From Firsthand Experience Because I Have Three Children And Four Grandsons.and Some Of The Time I Have Spent As A Scientist And As An Explorer Has Meant Choosing To Not Be With My Children And Grandchildren As Much As I Might Otherwise Have Done Had I Not Been A Scientist, An Explorer.

Protecting Vital Sources Of Renewal - Unscathed Marshes, Healthy Reefs, And Deep-sea Gardens - Will Provide Hope For The Future Of The Gulf, And For All Of Us.

People Ask: Why Should I Care About The Ocean? Because The Ocean Is The Cornerstone Of Earth's Life Support System, It Shapes Climate And Weather. It Holds Most Of Life On Earth. 97% Of Earth's Water Is There. It's The Blue Heart Of The Planet - We Should Take Care Of Our Heart. It's What Makes Life Possible For Us. We Still Have A Really Good Chance To Make Things Better Than They Are. They Won't Get Better Unless We Take The Action And Inspire Others To Do The Same Thing. No One Is Without Power. Everybody Has The Capacity To Do Something.

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.

I Actually Love Diving At Night; You See A Lot Of Fish Then That You Don't See In The Daytime.

We Must Protect Our Ocean As If Our Lives Depend Upon It, Because They Do.

We Are All Together In This, We Are All Together In This Single Living Ecosystem Called Planet Earth. As We Learn How We Fit Into The Greater Scheme Of Things, And Begin To Understand How The System Works, We Can Plan Ahead, We Can Use The Resources Responsibly, To Show Some Respect For This Inheritance That Goes Back 4.6 Billion Years.

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Ray Stannard Baker

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