Dr. Sylvia Earle
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Sylvia Earle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Today, look, space station men and women live together. Airplanes, you know, you fly. It's not a big deal. But it was a big deal then. So... They had to put together a women's team and actually had to find an engineer who was willing to come and be a part of this. The others involved applied the way I did, and they just patched us together irrespective of our compatibility.
But, hey, you know, women get along.
Yeah. Well, one of them, sadly, is gone. One is a coral scientist, and we stay in touch from time to time. Another became an environmental lawyer. She got her Ph.D. at Scripps in zoology, but then got her law degree. And the engineer, Peggy Lucas, lives in Hawaii, and we talk from time to time.
Yeah, so obviously didn't.
Well, as I say, I evidently didn't manage all that well. But my mom and dad were together for 61 years. It was a model I tried very hard to emulate. I mean, that's what I thought was what I should be doing.
When I could, I took them with me to places. They'd been diving with dolphins and whales. I mean, it was almost a condition of either it was acceptable for them to go with me or... Usually not all three, although sometimes all three got to go with me. But I don't know.
There's no recipe that I can tell anybody else or that I can learn except to say, well, Jeanne Clark, the so-called Lady and the Sharks, started the Cape Hays Murray Laboratory, now the Moat Murray Laboratory. She had four kids and somehow managed to run a marine lab and be a distinguished scientist. For some, it was just too much that they decided just to stay solo.
Some of the great women scientists, in order to be able to stay on point, they didn't have a partner who cooked and did the laundry and... and took care of you when you were sick.
And they pulled speed ahead. They didn't have much time or take time for diversions. I mean, the history is full of such individuals who had to give up what many people think of as a normal relationship with family and kids. Did your parents help you with your kids? I was really lucky to have my parents... live nearby and take care of the kids.
And during the project where I lived underwater, they actually came and stayed at the home in Los Angeles when I was off aquanauting.
Yeah, no kidding.
Absolutely, we have done it to ourselves, and it's going to get harder. But the sooner we take seriously the opportunity that will never be as good as it is right now, it's a race with what we're learning and what we're losing. Mm-hmm. And looking at the climate issues, the loss of the natural fabric of life, 5% maybe of old-growth forest.
Old-growth, meaning those systems that have survived, they were here preceding the advent of Europeans arriving in North America. Some preceding, going back literally thousands of years that are still intact. A few trees in a few places that literally are more than a thousand years old. Most of them have been converted to lumber, board feet that you can measure in dollars. Right.
But they're really priceless. What else can I say? This is the last best chance we'll ever have. And it isn't just in North America. It's across the globe. So I'm excited about a lot of things, mostly the kids. who I say to them, you're so fortunate. You're a 21st century kid. And I'm lucky, too, because of what we know that nobody could know before. It's that race with knowledge and loss.
But nobody had been to the moon or the deepest part of the ocean. Nobody knew about DNA or RNA or the microbes that live within us that we need. Now we might come to realize we need fish alive in the ocean. We need them, like we need birds in the sky. We need nature. We need a living planet, not a dead one.
And just what can anybody do to restore life instead of constantly being on the killing side, the consuming side? And if I could be born any time, I think it would have to be right about now.
Because of what's known, the best chance. What's known? Yeah.
Yeah, we had no idea.
Going back when I was a kid, that the kids of today grow up with that awareness that is in their everyday existence. Cause for hope. Cause for huge hope.
I wish everybody could go back to 50 years ago, whatever it is, armed with what we know now.
Showing 41–60 of 80 · page 3 of 4
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