- Paul Watson: [from trailer] There will not be any fish by 2048 if we continue what we are doing now. This is ecological *insanity*.
- David Guggenheim: More than 95% of the sea turtles are gone from the planet. For most of them we destroyed their habitat.
- Daniel Pauly: The baseline by which change is assessed is itself changing, and that results in the gradual accommodation to the impoverishment of diversity, to reduced abundances of animals and plants around us, and to a gradual loss of diversity against which we cannot do anything because we don't notice it.
- [first lines]
- Julia Barnes: The moment you enter the water, you become a sea creature. A whole other world opens up in front of you, where you can do anything, and fear nothing. For as long as you can hold your breath, you are absolutely free.
- David Guggenheim: When I went back to Christopher Columbus' log books, I found a passage written that said, "Approaching Cuba this way, we saw sea turtles three to four feet long in such vast numbers that they covered the sea."
- William Rees: The human population has gone up sixfold since the 19th century. But consumption has gone up maybe twice or three times as fast as that. So the population has gone up explosively, but the economy, our impact on the planet has exploded even more dramatically.
- Callum Roberts: All of the changes we are seeing now, in the 20th and into the 21st century, are driven by one thing, essentially, and that is human population growth. We have been accelerating in terms of population size for the last several centuries, but we now get into this steepness of the curve where we're adding hundreds of millions of people every decade. And that is making a difference to the scale of our impact.
- Derrick Jensen: I understand that if you have 315 parts per million, and then 330 ppm, then 350 ppm, then 370, and 390, and 400... eventually you're going to get to hell.