Carl Safina

I can’t recall ever seeing a Monarch Butterfly near my home after late October. So I was very surprised when I saw a Monarch Butterfly migrating along the beach in Montauk, Long Island, New York on November 26, 2011, about one month later than ever before.  Considerably south of here, in Cape May at the [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. The first century of the Industrial Revolution, the 1800s, was powered by coal, whale oil, and slaves. The 20th was the century of petroleum (though 40 percent of U.S. train freight is still coal). World electricity generation is still two-thirds combustion (40 [...]

A few days ago I drove to the beach at Fire Island, New York, looking for migrating Peregrine Falcons. When I was in high school, DDT and other pesticides had so thinned their eggshells that they could not bear their parents’ weight. I was a senior when the New York Times Magazine ran an article [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. Out of about 300,000 named plant species, we get 90 percent of our food from just 103 species, and we get 70 percent from just three: wheat, corn, rice. But—between 200,000 and 400,000 varieties of rice exist in the world. Some grow [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. Twenty thousand years ago when the Ice Age froze an enormous quantity of Earth’s water, sea level was nearly 400 feet (about 120 m) lower than today. Vast areas that are now seafloor were plains grazed by herds of animals. But the [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. Learning how to start and control fire changed human evolution. But humanity did not change fire until the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, using fire always meant an open flame. Much later, someone realized that the steam from boiling [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. A seaweed-seeking parrotfish is grinding into a coral with its fused, beak-like teeth. Each time it hits the coral, I can hear it from ten feet (3 m) away. Any coral a parrotfish ingests returns as fine sand. Enough parrotfish, over centuries, [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. Hard corals first appeared several hundred million years ago. That’s a long time ago. But forms that could attach to each other and build reefs didn’t evolve until around 25 million years ago. That’s still a long time. A coral reef is [...]

Adapted from: 2011. The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York. Hot water can kill corals. But even if corals could adapt to the heat of global warming, they’ll still run into the pH problem: carbon dioxide is not just warming the world; it’s also changing the ocean’s chemistry, making the water more [...]

Dieter Paulmann, founder of Okeanos, and the man who’d conceived of an audacious Pacific voyaging project (see PacificVoyagers.org), had invited me to lunch just before I left the Hawaiian isle of Kauai. The setting—overlooking Hanalei Bay and the seven traditional-style Pacific voyaging craft called vakas that had just arrived the night before (including the one [...]