About

BIO — IN BRIEF

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.

BIO – IN DETAIL

Carl Safina’s work explores how we are changing the natural world and what the changes mean for human and non-human beings. Carl sees that the durability of human dignity and survival of the natural world will depend on each other; we cannot preserve the wild unless we preserve human dignity, and we cannot conserve human dignity while continuing to degrade nature. His lyrical non-fiction writing fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action.

His work has won the Lannan Literary Award, Orion Book Award, National Academies’ Science Communication Award; the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals; Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.

Safina was born to parents whose Brooklyn apartment was filled with singing canaries—his father’s hobby. Trips to New York’s zoos, aquarium, American Museum of Natural History, and his uncles’ boat lit a city kid’s early fascination with animals. He began raising homing pigeons at age seven, and spent his teen years training hawks and owls, and immersed in fishing, bird-banding, and camping. Soon these passions took him on adventures in Kenya, Nepal, Greenland, Arctic Canada and eventually to all continents and oceans.

Safina’s seabird studies earned him a Rutgers University PhD, then for a decade he worked on overhauling fishing policies, helping restore ocean wildlife. In the 1990s he helped lead campaigns to ban high-seas driftnets, overhaul U. S. fisheries law, improve international management of fisheries targeting tunas and sharks, achieve passage of a United Nations global fisheries treaty, and reduce albatross and sea turtle drownings on commercial fishing lines. Along the way, he became a leading voice for conservation, widening his interests from what is at stake in the natural world to who is at stake among the non-human beings who share this astonishing planet.

Carl Safina’s books include Song for the Blue Ocean, The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, and others. He hosted the 10-part PBS television series Saving the Ocean (which can be viewed at PBS.org). Carl contributes frequently to CNN.com, National Geographic, The New York Times, Audubon, The Huffington Post and others. His most recent TED Talk received a million views in its first month.

Audubon magazine named Carl Safina among its “100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century.” Utne Reader listed him among “25 Visionaries Changing the World.”

He is the Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He has honorary doctorates from Drexel and Long Island Universities and the State University of New York.

Safina has been profiled in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and on Nightline, and has been featured on National Public Radio; Bill Moyers’ special Earth on Edge; and on TV shows ranging from The Martha Stewart Show to The Colbert Report.

His bestselling book, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel, affirms his role as one of today’s leading voices for nature. In The New York Review of Books, Tim Flannery wrote: “Beyond Words is gloriously written… Along with Darwin’s Origin and Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, Beyond Words has the potential to change our relationship with the natural world.”

His most recent book is Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe.

He lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.