What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.
As a young planet, Venus was losing hydrogen rapidly to space. The oceans boiled off, and after some period of time, perhaps 600 million years, there was no surface water.
So looking at the planet from this perspective – to see the Earth and these beautiful land masses and oceans without lines or words drawn on them – it just heightens an awareness that the planet needs protection, and human life needs protection, and we are the ones who have to protect it.
I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they’re plastic bags. I’m always that guy that will take it into the shore.
Over the years, I have seen the power of the oceans to excite, feed, and sustain people. I have also seen them undergo a growing onslaught of attacks, from destructive fishing practices to rising acidification.
Even if the Moon didn’t exist – even if it had been vaporized billions of years ago by cantankerous Klingons – there would still be (somewhat lower) tides raised by the Sun. For creatures dependent on the oceans’ ebb and flow, life could go on.
Neither our oceans nor our radar nor our fighters can keep us intact through another major war.
The simple fact that half of the oxygen that we breathe is produced by the oceans should be reason enough to mobilize around the issue of better protecting our oceans.
This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful – filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.
Earth is going to lose its oceans in the future, just as Venus did in the past. How long planets retain their oceans is a function of distance from the sun, all other things being equal.
Instead of going to the ends of the Earth – and plumbing the depths of the oceans – to squeeze out every last drop of oil, we need, instead, to do everything we can to reduce the risks of offshore oil and gas production.
I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I’ve seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don’t know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.
Human activity is having a major impact on the planet. We consume or have diverted a large proportion of the productivity of the land and oceans. Our hunger for land crowds out fellow species. Our waste products pollute the waters, warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.
The oceans produce up to 70 percent of our oxygen, they shape our climate, and they support an American oceans economy larger than our nation’s entire agriculture sector.
The world’s oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic – bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles – and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.
The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn’t get through to us in the same way.
We don’t know that Venus had oceans, but there’s every reason to believe it did.
Humpback whales – which can be as long as 60 feet, weigh as much as 40 tons and can live for 50 years – are found in all of the world’s oceans.
I’m the grandson of immigrants who came across rivers and oceans to get here, some without documentation.
Our planet’s lands and oceans are already stretched to meet the demands of 7 billion people. The human population continues to grow. The search for sustainable solutions is an economic and a moral imperative if we are to create the future we want.
To play music, you have to understand it. I didn’t understand ‘Topographic Oceans.’ That’s why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end – and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.
As we burn fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide, much of which is absorbed by the oceans.
The first time I ever had the opportunity to dive on the Great Barrier Reef, it was while filming ‘Oceans Deadliest’ with Steve Irwin. I remember just how awestruck I was by its beauty.
The United States is a superpower whose influence reaches across oceans and beyond borders.
Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.
This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.
Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that – unless we act boldly and transform our energy system in the very near future – there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels.
Since writing JAWS, I’ve been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.
Oceans are a family heritage, because of my great-great-grandfather, but also my father, who spearheaded different initiatives to better protect the Mediterranean. He was very instrumental in setting up the Pelagos Marine Sanctuary, which is a sanctuary for marine mammals between Italy, France and Monaco.
Everyone said to me: ‘Oh there’s nothing you can do about plastic once it gets into the oceans,’ and I wondered whether that was true.
We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It’s killing our oceans. It’s entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.
The high seas – in other words, the oceans beyond the 200-mile national limits – are a lawless realm.
I am an agnostic, even though I respect and am interested in all religions. If there’s something I believe in, it’s a mysterious energy; the one that fills the oceans during tides, the one that unites nature and beings.
Frankly, we should have an ARPA-O, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for oceans research, to match DARPA for defense and ARPA-E for energy. And we should have an Oceans and Coasts Fund to match the upland- and freshwater-directed Land and Water Conservation Fund.
I think being a good dad is on the list of things to do. But, I will always ski, climb, surf, and be out in the mountains and oceans. It’s who I am. My goal is to just keep doing it all and enjoying it.
We’re going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years – if not longer – to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don’t know yet. But we will turn the ship.
It is hard for anyone born after 1945 to imagine a world where the oceans – the global commons – are not open for trade and commerce or where freedom of navigation is imperiled.
We run around so much – with the best intentions: I want to save the rain forest. I’ve gotta clean up the oceans. I’ve gotta save the dolphins. All worthy efforts, but if you’re not centered and you don’t have the serenity in your life you need to accomplish that task, you’re not going to do a very good job.
I loved my Communications class. The toughest one I had was Oceanography only because I didn’t have too much interest in the oceans.
Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It’s akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn’t do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?
Neither does man have gills for living in a water environment; yet it is not sinful to explore the depths of the oceans in search of food or other blessings.
There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees. And there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living.
If you compare NASA’s annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA’s budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.
If man doesn’t learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.
Looking out at the ocean, it’s easy to feel small – and to imagine all your troubles, suddenly insignificant, slipping away. Earth’s seven oceans seem vast and impenetrable, but a closer look tells another story.
I like mountains and oceans and stuff, which is where I’ve always felt some sort of power of meaning, but that’s not necessarily spiritual.
We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.
We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.
Oceans, in their beauty and mystery, unite human beings whatever their situation, nationality, or faith.
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us – the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small – to flourish.
