If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth's life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth's water is there. It's the blue heart of the planet - we should take care of our heart. It's what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won't get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.

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.

The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it's also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth... our impact on the diversity of life has been profound.

We are not only warming the ocean and the planet as a whole, but we are also acidifying the ocean and changing its chemistry.

If Darwin could get into a submarine and see what I've seen, thousand of feet beneath the ocean, I am just confident that he would be inspired to sit down and start writing all over again.

If Darwin could see what we now see, what we now know about the ocean, about the atmosphere, about the nature of life, as we now understand it, about the importance of microbes - I think he would just beam with joy that many of the thoughts and the glimpses of the majesty of life on Earth that he had during his life, now magnified many times over.