Carl Safina

Author of A Sea in Flames

President & Co-Founder, Blue Ocean Institute

Carl Safina’s childhood by the shore launched a lifelong passion that led to scientific studies of seabirds and fish, a PhD in Ecology from Rutgers University and then a career as a leading voice for conservation. During his research and his recreational and part-time-commercial fishing, he noticed rapid declines in sea turtles, sharks, tunas, and many other fishes. It seemed to him as though a kind of “last buffalo hunt” was occurring in the seas.

Dr. Safina saw fish as wildlife and brought ocean conservation issues into the wildlife conservation mainstream. He helped lead campaigns that ultimately banned high-seas driftnets, overhauled U.S. fisheries law, used international agreements toward restoring tunas, sharks, and other fishes, achieved a United Nations fisheries treaty, and reduced albatross and sea turtle drownings on commercial fishing lines.

Dr. Safina founded Blue Ocean Institute in 2003. He and the Institute crew work to highlight and explain how the oceans are changing and what the changes mean for wildlife and for people. Safina is author of over one hundred publications. His books include Song for the Blue Ocean, Eye of the Albatross, Voyage of the Turtle, Nina Delmar: The Great Whale Rescue and The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World. Safina’s newest book, A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout will be released on April 19, 2011.

Carl Safina’s conservation work has received much attention in the national media, including from The New York Times, Nightline, The Colbert Report, PBS’ Need to Know, Democracy Now, NPR’s On Point, and Bill Moyers television special Earth on Edge.

Safina is an adjunct professor at SUNY’s Stony Brook University and co-chair of SBU’s new Center for Communicating Science. He is a recipient of the Pew Scholar’s Award in Conservation and the Environment, the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction, the John Burroughs Medal for literature, the National Academies Communications Award, Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo’s Rabb Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Prize.