America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.
Success underwater depends mostly on how you conduct yourself. Diving can be the most relaxing experience in the world. Your weight seems to disappear. Space travel will be available only to a few individuals for some time, but the oceans are available to almost everyone – now.
There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.
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.
The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. ‘Who, what, where, why, when, and how!’ They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.
People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.
Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.
What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish.
The most important part is to take on the challenge of protecting the ocean as if your life depends on it-because it does.
Everyone has power. But it doesn’t help if you don’t use it.
In terms of personal choices, let’s all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.
Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat.
My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.
I want to get out in the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.
It’s a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.
I hope that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.
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.
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.
Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.
When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.