We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.

'Green' issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.

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.

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.

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.

My parents moved to Florida when I was 12, and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico.