Carl Safina

A  couple of weeks ago, Orion announced that my recent book, THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (Picador, January 2012) was among the finalists for the 2012 Orion Book Award. On May 3 THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT was named the winner!  View the announcement here. I could not [...]

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 [...]

Question from reader: I just finished reading View from Lazy Point and and I wanted to know how you craft such a lyrical, beautiful book using so much scientific reference material? Answer from Carl Safina: I have a bit of a system. I have an idea of what I want to cover. I travel to [...]

Check your local PBS listings for the first two episodes of “Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina“. And look for Carl’s new book, which was released on April 19th: “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout“ Click here for upcoming events, media appearances and ongoing reviews for Safina’s new book, The View From [...]

Booklist calls Carl Safina’s upcoming book, The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World,  “A book of beautifully modulated patterns and gracefully stated imperatives.” Click here to read the full review! Lazy Point will be available on bookshelves in January 2011 so stay tuned…