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.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

We have the power to abstain from destructive behavior.

Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything we did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

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