America gains most when individuals have great freedom to pursue personal goals without undue government interference.
All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.
If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.
The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy realm with an impact on ocean currents. That, in turn, influences the temperature of the planet. The Arctic is now vulnerable because of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with a rate of melting that is stunning.
Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat.
Ignorance is the biggest problem of all for the ocean - and for many other things as well.
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.
We woke up some years ago about the consequences of ozone depletion, the hole in the atmosphere. You can't see it. You can't taste it. You can't smell it. But now we do regard that as a key issue. It's a scientific finding.
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.
Some experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world. And there's no question that it is a factor, but it's preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.
There are now more than 4,000 places in the sea around the world that have some kind of protection. The bad news: You have to look hard to find them. What you find instead is destructive fishing, mining, gas and oil exploration.
Eating wildlife is probably not the smartest thing that we can do in terms of maintaining the integrity of natural systems.
Fish from all over the world, from deep in the sea, wind up in countries from Germany to Japan. That is just crazy.
In terms of personal choices, let's all think more carefully about where we get our protein from.
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.
When some people look at a shrimp they think, "Hmm. Delicious." When I look at a shrimp I think, "You're a miracle, absolutely incredible. Your ancestors have gone back hundreds of millions of years." And to develop a thing as simple as a shrimp cocktail, you have to calculate the hundreds of millions of years that have preceded that moment where you're sitting there with your sauce and fork poised.
It has taken these many hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune the Earth to a point where it is suitable for the likes of us.
