Sylvia A. Earle

That's my question.

Do you have a way with music?

Do you have a way with numbers?

Do you have a way with words or with kids?

Nobody can do everything that needs to be done, but everybody can take what they've got and do something.

And sometimes it's like a little girl walking the beaches in Texas being disgusted by all the junk on the beach.

Nobody asked her.

She just started picking it up.

And people saw this little kid out there picking up the trash and first one and then another and...

There are people out there helping to pick up the trash.

It seems like a very mundane thing, but it makes a difference.

Imagine if everybody stopped throwing the trash in the first place.

Garbage, trash, waste, that's a human concept.

In nature, there is no excess.

Think of whales cruising the ocean, munching on squid or fish or krill, and they, of course, put nutrients back in the sea.

Well, it's not waste.

It's like delicious fertilizer for the phytoplankton that capture carbon dioxide and generates oxygen and food.

It's a circle that goes round and round and round, and it's really complicated.

And we haven't yet wrapped our little minds around how complicated it is.

We still think that as the bosses of the world, we can do whatever we like.