We still have 10 percent of the sharks. We still have half of the coral reefs. However, if we wait another 50 years, opportunities might well be gone.

People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.

The concept of 'peak oil' has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. 'Peak fish' occurred around the end of the 1980s.

If you make the choice to just go with the flow, that is a choice to make a difference in a negative way.

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.

Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.

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