Nine planets round the sun
Only one does the sun embrace
Upon this watered one
So much to we take for granted...

- Dave Matthews, “One Sweet World” from Clean Air, Cool Planet www.cleanair-coolplanet.org

Unless we destroy them, our most valuable fisheries will always be those associated with the marshes and estuaries…  It is estimated by fishery experts that eighty to ninety percent of the fish gathered for market throughout the world come from shallow coastal waters.

John and Mildred Teal, “Life and Death of a Saltmarsh”, (NY: Ballantine Books 1969), 201,203

The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and the infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to commerce.  The land, the mere valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries him out beyond these limited circles of thought and action.

- G.W.F. Hegel, “The Philosophy of History”, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 90.

Oh! Ned, with all these sights to see, what ninnies they must be
That die and never glimpse the world! Why don’t they come to sea?

- William Cox Bennett: Sea Songs (1878).  “Why Don’t They Come to Sea?”

If you could you’d be a herring, one among many,
making your home in movement, squeezed by everyone
you’d ever known, letting the world slip away
over your flanks, holding yourself in tight

to fire like a bullet through your life,
eating and breathing wherever you went,
knowing only silver and

not silver, a terror
of dolphin, a wrenched
halt in the net.

- Verses from Matthew Francis: Ocean (2001).  The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:I.

It’s no wonder fish fly
when sky’s overthrown,
ocean’s upended
as blue waves above
capsized clouds,
tropical islands
in airy sea
beneath salty sky
of celestial starfish.

- Harryette Mullen: Summer Salt (2001). Callaloo 24.4.

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of  Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ‘tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea-
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody-
Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!

- John Keats, On the Sea.  “John Keats: Selected Poems”.  Penguin Books 1988.

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove?  Surely all this is not without meaning.

- Herman Melville, “ Moby Dick, or the Whale”. Penguin Books, 1992. (p.5)

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. 
Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond 
that, we all enter the food chain, and not 
always right at the top.

In the sea, last in the queue means first on the menu.

- Hunter S. Thompson

Blue Planet. Discover Films 2001

Survivors: A New View of Us. BBC Natural History Unit Series, originally aired 1986-1987 (especially segments on lemon sharks and leatherback turtles)

Reference as: Ecological Society of America. 2010. Communicating Ecosystem Services Toolkit: Marine Nurseries Presentation Aids. Online at www.esa.org/ecoservices