Carl Safina

Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery. “My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the sea plane I’m climbing into.  “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.” We overfly the emerald maze of the vast Mississippi Delta. Capt. Coon-ass points, “There’s a big ole [...]

Text and photos by Carl Safina, with additional images by Jeffrey Dubinski as indicated – click here to view photo gallery.  Click here to view a video interview of Carl Safina after this boat trip. “This is what we call The Junk,” our boat captain Keith Kennedy says derisively as he steers us from Venice, [...]

Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery. So let’s give this blog a soundtrack. Listen to this as you’re reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKnTLrDbcw After we come back from Freemason Island we follow some boats out into the marshes outside Hopedale, Louisiana where the wind isn’t hampering boom deployment. It seems that [...]

Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery In Casey Keiff’s very fast, overpowered outboard we blast through a sliver of the astonishingly vast and intricate wetlands of Louisiana. The skeletons of oak forests stand starkly on marsh islands now subsiding as oil and gas has been pumped from under [...]

Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view full gallery Shell Beach, Louisiana.  The first thing that really impresses me is the immensity of the marshes and coast.  Marshes as far as you can see, too points of the compass.  Bewildering mazes of channels.  How could this whole coast be protected?  And [...]

I am now bouncing around the southern Louisiana delta region, through the mixture of poverty and affluence (mostly poverty) and the many visible scars and reminders of Katrina.  Sensing the spirit of people who’d been rebounding post-Katrina, but now feel truly scared that their economy and their future is ruined forever, is quietly horrifying. The [...]

The Reverend glances from computer to TV, then back to the blog he’s reading, and writes to his atheist friend, “And as I read this from you I’m watching the news on the oil spill.  Seems to trivialize it to call it a “spill.”  Milk spills. A can of oil spills. But this? Hard to have [...]

By Carl Safina Don’t believe the globe is warming? Fine. Whatever. Here’s one thing everyone agrees on: the fact that oil spills. Even without global warming—even if global warming is a hoax—we must, finally, eventually, kick the carbon-energy addiction. The fact that oil spills is among those reasons. As if New Orleans doesn’t have enough [...]