Carl Safina

original blog posted in Huffington Post on 1/17/12: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-safina/oil-and-herring-dont-mix_b_1211077.html When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, it unleashed a regional catastrophe whose effects continue to play out these two decades later. One such apparent effect was the subsequent collapse of the region’s herring. Now we have a new study of herring, [...]

A federal law, as amended in 2007, required all U.S. fisheries to have management plans, and catch limits that would end overfishing by 2012. And look what year it is! Way back in 1991, I was federally appointed to one of the eight federal “Fisheries Management Councils.” These councils’ main job is to write federal [...]

Part 2: Finding Hope? To continue making money, fisheries should be careful not to deplete the fish. But they tend to do the opposite, pursuing short-term gain in a race to the fish, driving many fish populations to all-time lows. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Duke University, Stanford University, University of British Columbia, [...]

Part I: Fishing Down In 1631 England’s King Charles I may have been the first person to ban a new fishing gear, writing: “The former abundance of fish is turned into such scarcitie and deareness, that… our citie of London, and even our owne Court, are many times unprovided for their necessary dyet…therefore…the nets heretofore [...]

Monday, I had the pleasure of taking Peter Matthiessen (not only an iconic writer but also a personal hero of mine) out fishing off Montauk, New York, to witness the truly incredible spectacle of the autumn striped bass migration.  My sister Lydia also joined us and is in one of the photos. The striped bass [...]

Are cod beginning a recovery in New England? That’s a question we’re looking at for an episode of our PBS series Saving The Ocean. For centuries, cod were a major economic driver in New England and Atlantic Canada. They spurred settling of the New World and sent food everywhere from Europe to the Caribbean. They [...]

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 [...]

Salmon have lots of problems in many places. But some places have solutions. One is the Nisqually River in Washington State. There, wild Chinook Salmon were eliminated decades ago by overfishing and habitat loss. Now, an unusual coalition of politicians, civic planners, wildlife managers, farmers, fishing folks, and the Nisqually Indians are engaged in a [...]

The fish called Menhaden (its American Indian name), a.k.a. bunkers, is crucial to the food-chain of the American East Coast, Gulf Coast, and southern New England. But it is deeply depleted. There’s a big fight going on now about fishing limits. And you can get informed and involved. Here’s a note about the fish from [...]

For the next episode of our PBS television series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina, we visited the National Archives outside Boston with noted marine historians Bill Leavenworth and Karen Alexander. Seeing the stacks and stacks of information was bewildering. But our guides for this expedition led us directly to 150-year-old fishing logbooks that they [...]