
Carl Safina’s work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit organization, The Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, Audubon, Orion, and other periodicals and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com. He lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Patricia, the two best beach-running dogs in the world, some chickens, a couple of parrots, and Frankie the kingsnake.
I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you?Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words , readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest.Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn, Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.
Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among non-human animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this book offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of life on Earth, and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?
by Carl Safina
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
Part odyssey, part pilgrimage, this epic personal narrative follows the author's exploration of coasts, islands, reefs, and the sea's abyssal depths. Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world's changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.
The story of an ancient sea turtle and what its survival says about our future, from the award-winning writer and naturalistThough nature is indifferent to the struggles of her creatures, the human effect on them is often premeditated. The distressing decline of sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate what can go both wrong and right from our interventions, and teach us the lessons that can be applied to restore health to the world's oceans and its creatures. As Carl Safina's compelling natural history adventure makes clear, the fate of the astonishing leatherback turtle, whose ancestry can be traced back 125 million years, is in our hands.Writing with verve and color, Safina describes how he and his colleagues track giant pelagic turtles across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent. As scientists apply lessons learned in the Atlantic and Caribbean to other endangered seas, Safina follows leatherback migrations, including a thrilling journey from Monterey, California, to nesting grounds on the most remote beaches of Papua, New Guinea. The only surviving species of its genus, family, and suborder, the leatherback is an evolutionary marvel: a "reptile" that behaves like a warm-blooded dinosaur, an ocean animal able to withstand colder water than most fishes and dive deeper than any whale.In his peerless prose, Safina captures the delicate interaction between these gentle giants and the humans who are finally playing a significant role in their survival.
A moving account of raising, then freeing, an orphaned owl, whose lasting friendship with the author illuminates humanity’s relationship with the world.When ecologist Carl Safina and his wife, Patricia, took in a near-death baby owl, they expected that, like other wild orphans they’d rescued, she’d be a temporary presence. But Alfie’s feathers were not growing correctly, requiring prolonged care. And soon Carl and Patricia began to realize that the healing was mutual.Alfie & Me is the story of the remarkable impact this little owl would have on their lives. The continuing bond of trust following her freedom—and her raising of her own wild brood—drew Carl and Patricia across the boundary into Alfie’s world, allowing them a view of existence from Alfie’s perspective. Interwoven with Safina’s reflections on humankind’s relationship with the living world across cultures and throughout history, Alfie & Me is a work of profound beauties and magical timing harbored within one upended year.
An exhilarating journey of natural renewal through a year with MacArthur fellow Carl Safina Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again. We meet Eskimos whose way of life is melting away, explore a secret global seed vault hidden above the Arctic Circle, investigate dilemmas facing foraging bears and breeding penguins, and sail to formerly devastated reefs that are resurrecting as fish graze the corals algae-free. "Each time science tightens a coil in the slack of our understanding," Safina writes, "it elaborates its fundamental connection." He shows how problems of the environment drive very real matters of human justice, well-being, and our prospects for peace. In Safina's hands, nature's continuous renewal points toward our future. His lively stories grant new insights into how our world is changing, and what our response ought to be.
"One of the most delightful natural history studies in decades." ― The Boston GlobeEye of the Albatross takes us soaring to locales where whales, sea turtles, penguins, and shearwaters flourish in their own quotidian rhythms. Carl Safina's guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life. Safina's perceptive and authoritative portrait results in a transforming ride to the ends of the Earth for the reader, as well as an eye-opening look at the health of our oceans.
Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservations of the 20th century ( Audubon Magazine ) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak—and what he considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked.Safina takes us deep inside the faulty thinking that caused the lethal explosion. We join him on aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We confront pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe fades to black. Safina skewers the excuses and the silly jargon—like “junk shot” and “top kill”—that made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors—and highlighted Big Oil’s appalling lack of preparedness for an event that was inevitable.Based on extensive research and interviews with fishermen, coastal residents, biologists, and government officials, A Sea In Flames has some surprising answers on whether it was “Obama’s Katrina,” whether the Coast Guard was as inept in its response as BP was misleading, and whether this worst unintended release of oil in history was really America’s worst ecological disaster. Impassioned, moving, and even sharply funny, A Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of America’s main addiction. Safina “In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolutely worst—we’d still learn the big lesson here. We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. there’ll be a next time.”
A baby owl is rescued and rehabilitated, and builds her own family, in this tender and wise picture book. In the spring of 2019, ecologist Carl Safina and his wife, Patricia, took in little Alfie, a bedraggled Eastern Screech Owl chick who quickly became part of their family. With the Safinas’ care and expertise, the little owl grew, learned to hunt on her own, and eventually found her own family in a mate and chicks. As time passed, Carl realized that his bond with Alfie was greater than just saving her life―it offered wisdom, joy, and magic to him in return. Carl Safina lends an insightful and expert voice to Alfie’s tale, providing readers with a perspective that is simultaneously informative and deeply personal. With eye-catching, intimate photographs chronicling Alfie’s healing and growth, Owls in Our Yard is the heartfelt story of an animal/human friendship rooted in trust, care, and respect for the natural world. full color photos throughout
Eye-opening, wise, and filled with triumphant and heartbreaking stories about the wolf population at Yellowstone (as well as some personal anecdotes about dogs), Carl Safina's Beyond Words: What Wolves and Dogs Think and Feel accessibly explores the mysteries of animal thought and behavior for young readers.Weaving decades of field research with exciting new discoveries about the brain, and complete with astonishing photos, Beyond Words offers an extraordinary look at what makes these animals different from us, but more importantly, what makes them similar, namely, their feelings of joy, grief, anger, and love.These similarities between human and nonhuman consciousness and empathy allow the reader to reexamine how we interact with animals as well as how we see our own place in the world.
by Carl Safina
Rating: 3.8 ⭐
From New York Times -bestselling author Carl Safina comes Learning to Be Wild , a young readers adaptation of the notable book Becoming Wild that explores community, culture, and belonging through the lives of chimpanzees, macaws, and sperm whales.What do chimpanzees, macaws, and whales all have in common?Some believe that culture is strictly a human phenomenon. But that's not true! Culture is passed down from parent to child in all sorts of animal communities. It is the common ground that three very different animals - chimpanzees, macaws, and whales - share.Discover through the lives of chimpanzees in Uganda, scarlet macaws in Peru, and sperm whales in the Caribbean how they - and we - are all connected, in this wonderous journey around the globe.
Inspired by a true story, Carl Safina's first children's book takes you on an adventure through the Pacific Ocean as Nina Delmar struggles to save an entangled Humpback Whale. A chapter book aimed roughly at ages 7 to 11, this coming-of-age story is perfect for ocean enthusiasts of all ages!
by Carl Safina
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
Carl Safina, Meeresbiologe und Autor des internationalen Bestsellers «Die Intelligenz der Tiere», nimmt seine Leserinnen und Leser in die Lebenswelten von Tieren mit, die an den wenigen noch verbliebenen wilden Orten der Erde zu Hause sind. In ergreifenden Geschichten erfahren wir, was Tiere tun, warum sie es tun und wie sich das Leben für sie anfühlt.Manche Menschen halten Kultur ausschließlich für eine menschliche Errungenschaft. Doch das ist Auch Tiere sind nicht allein durch ihre Gene zu dem geworden, was sie sind. Auch sie ziehen vielleicht Kinder auf, kennen die Schönheit oder kämpfen um den Frieden. Und auch ihre Kultur verändert sich und entwickelt sich weiter. Anzunehmen, Tiere hätten keine Kultur, weil sie keine menschliche Kultur haben, ist vergleichbar mit der Ansicht, andere Wesen kommunizierten nicht, weil sie keine menschliche Kommunikation haben. Sie haben ihre Kommunikation. Und sie haben ihre Kultur. In «Die Kultur der wilden Tiere» wirft Safina einen so neuen wie provozierenden Blick hinter den Vorhang des Lebens und fordert uns eindringlich auf, Tiere als Mitgeschöpfe und Reisegefährten auf dieser Erde zu betrachten.
by Carl Safina
by Carl Safina
by Carl Safina
Lorsque Carl Safina recueille Alfie, petite chouette orpheline, il ne sait pas qu’il va s’embarquer dans une aventure qui le conduira, non sans mal, à rendre à la vie sauvage l’oisillon devenu grand tout en s’interrogeant sur la manière dont les hommes, quelle que soit leur culture, ont envisagé leur rapport à la nature.
by Carl Safina