Carl Safina

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Netflix now offers Carl Safina’s PBS series Saving the Ocean. Join host Carl Safina as he chronicles the unsung heroes who are hard at work inventing and implementing solutions to save the world’s oceans. Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution and industry are having on the world’s oceans. It’s time for [...]

After running for port all night, we were met at the dock in the early morning by the buyer from Whole Foods. Blue Ocean Institute has been working with Whole Foods in helping them offer sustainably-caught fish at their seafood counter. Whole Foods is featuring Canadian harpooned swordfish as a sustainable, zero-bycatch source of swordfish [...]

The weather turned less friendly. Windy, white caps. The wind was sending seabirds like greater shearwaters and fulmars and storm petrels whizzing along the sea’s raw, undulating surface. Looking ahead to a challenging day of trying to see fins in such tossing seas, our first major sighting was particularly rewarding: a right whale, one of [...]

From my bunk I felt the seas come down and anticipated a calm day. I went on deck alone at 5 a.m. to greet the first light, and watched as dawn painted itself on the horizon and clouds. I could hear the plosive breaths of dolphins before I saw them, and greatly enjoyed watching them [...]

They’re incredible animals, magnificent, specialized predators. Yet most of what we know about them is how to kill them. We value them almost entirely only after we’ve turned them into meat. We miss almost all of what there is to appreciate about them as animals. Even in such intimate contact—as fish we catch, and as [...]

July 10, 2011 After a leisurely breakfast, we began looking for fish. Our boat’s captain and owner is Larry Sears. He’s also the vice-president of the swordfish harpooner’s quota association. This association decides, based on history, how many fish each boat will get to catch for the season. This eliminates a lot of the competition [...]