About the Author
Carl Safina has studied the oceans as a scientist, stood for them as an advocate, and conveyed his travels among the seas’ creatures and fishing people in lyrical non-fiction writing. Safina mainly communicates how the ocean is changing and what the changes mean for people and wildlife. But his main message is that nature and human dignity require each other.
He is an unusually experienced observer of changes in ocean wildlife such as bluefin tuna, swordfish, sharks, coral reefs, sea turtles, and albatrosses. In the 1980s he noticed steady declines in fishes and sea turtles. His investigations revealed the problem was long-term and global. It seemed to him that a kind of “last buffalo hunt” was occurring in the sea. His slogan became “fish are wildlife, too.”
Risking his science career, he helped lead campaigns to ban high-seas driftnets, re-write and overhaul U. S. federal fisheries law, use international agreements toward restoring depleted populations of tunas, swordfish, and sharks, and achieve passage of a United Nations global fisheries treaty. More than anyone, he largely brought ocean wildlife conservation into the modern environmental mainstream.
Safina’s earned PhD is in ecology from Rutgers University (he has two honorary doctorates). He has authored more than 150 scientific and popular publications, including features in National Geographic and a foreword to Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us.
His six books probe the scientific, social, and moral dimensions or our relationship with nature. His first, Song for the Blue Ocean, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction selection, and a Library Journal Best Science selection; it won the Lannan Literary Award.
Eye of the Albatross, won the John Burroughs Medal and the National Academies’ award for year’s best book. Safina’s Voyage of the Turtle was a N.Y. Times Editors’ Choice. His children’s book, Nina Delmar; the Great Whale Rescue, appeared in 2010.
The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World is new. “A true masterpiece… The 21st century’s Walden,” wrote former Audubon editor Gary Soucie. “Suberb,” said Kirkus. Booklist called it, “A book of beautifully modulated patterns and gracefully stated imperatives.” Newsday noted, “Before Carl Safina, environmentalists wondered where the next Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold or Henry Beston might be hiding.” “With his grand sense of adventure, eye for beauty, heart for mercy and high hopes to shake us from our complacency, Safina seems a godsend among modern-day prophets,” wrote the Oregonian. “Safina’s book soars,” said the New York Times.
Safina’s Gulf blowout chronicle, A Sea in Flames, will also appear in 2011. Safina has been profiled on Nightline, on Bill Moyers’ “Earth on Edge,” and in the New York Times. He was among AUDUBON’s “100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century.”
Safina founded Blue Ocean Institute and is adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. Carl is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Pew Fellow, and received Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo’s Rabb Medal, among other honors. He was a 2010 Indianapolis Prize finalist.