|
 
Carl Safina, conservationist
Carl Safina is a prominent ecologist and
marine conservationist and president of the Blue Ocean Institute, an
environmental organization based in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. He has
also been a recreational fisherman since childhood. "I love the hunt and
know the thrill of the kill," Safina told William J. Broad for the New
York Times (September 22, 1998). "But I’m not sure we should be doing it.
They [the fish] need a break." After reaching the conclusion that, if
overfishing were to continue at the current rate, entire populations of
fish might cease to exist, Safina became an advocate for the very
creatures he grew up hunting. The winner of both a prestigious Pew
Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, Safina has written or co-written
three books—Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World’s Coasts
and Beneath the Seas; Seafood Lover’s Almanac; and Eye of the Albatross:
Visions of Hope and Survival.
Carl Safina was born on May 23, 1955 into a
middle-class Italian American family in the Ridgewood section of the New
York City borough of Brooklyn. His father, a schoolteacher, raised
canaries, and in second grade, Safina began breeding pigeons in the
family's backyard. When he was 10 the Safinas moved to Syosset, New York,
a short distance from Long Island Sound, off the north shore of the
island, where Carl and his father often went fishing for bass. As a
teenager Safina played the drums in various jazz and rock bands. (He
worked his way through college by entertaining at private parties and
weddings in the New York metropolitan area.) When a classmate from Syosset
High School recruited him to help with a bird-banding survey on Fire
Island, off the south shore of Long Island, Safina’s love for wild birds,
or "living jewels," as he has called them, was ignited. He attended the
State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase, where he earned a B.A.
degree in environmental science in 1977. He then trained hawks and worked
briefly with falcons for the Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit organization. He
also investigated suspected illegal toxic dumping sites for the New Jersey
Department of Environmental Protection. He next entered a graduate program
in ecology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; he received
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in ecology in 1981 and 1987, respectively.
Beginning in 1979 Safina had also worked
for the National Audubon Society, primarily studying hawks and seabirds.
While observing foraging terns in the waters around Long Island for his
doctoral degree, he noticed declines in creatures that shared the terns'
realm--striped bass, tuna, marlin, sharks, and other fish, as well as sea
turtles. Safina began to think that fish needed just as much protection as
the birds he had been studying. "People never thought of fish as
wildlife," he told Joe Haberstroh for Newsday (June 19, 2002). "They just
thought fish was something that wound up in the fish store, or on a plate
in a restaurant." One day in 1989, while he was fishing in the Atlantic
Ocean about 50 miles off the coast of Fire Island, he noticed some
fishermen catching "ridiculous amounts" of bluefin tuna, as he recalled to
William J. Broad. "Somebody got on the radio and said, ‘Guys, maybe we
should leave some for tomorrow,’" he told Broad. "Another guy came on and
said, ‘Hey, they didn’t leave any buffalo for me.’" That offhand comment
affected Safina profoundly: he realized that, through overfishing, entire
species of fish could literally vanish. He began referring to global
overfishing as "the last buffalo hunt."
In 1990 Safina founded the Living Oceans
Program at the National Audubon Society, where he served for a decade as
vice president for ocean conservation. Concurrently, from 1991 to 1994, he
served on the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council of the U.S.
Department of Commerce, to which he was appointed by the secretary of
commerce. In 2003 he co-founded and became president of the Blue Ocean
Institute, an organization dedicated to inspiring among humans a closer
relationship with the sea and helping more people realize its power and
beauty. The Institute is designed to inspire, rather than demand,
conservation by using science, art, and literature to build a "sea ethic"
and a greater appreciation for the oceans and their inhabitants.
Safina’s first book, Song for the Blue
Ocean: Encounters Along the World’s Coasts and Beneath the Seas, was
published in 1998 to rave reviews. In it Safina described his travels with
high-seas fish and fishermen; in the salmon rivers, forests, and coasts of
North America's Northwest; and among the coral reefs of the tropical
Western Pacific Ocean. He also recounted his experiences with individuals
whose work might destroy or preserve those locales. The book was praised
for its readability, poetic descriptions of the sea, and heartfelt pleas
for conservation. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year
and a Library Journal Best Science Book, and won a Los Angeles Times award
for nonfiction and the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction. According to
Contemporary Authors (1999), Richard Ellis characterized Safina for the
Los Angeles Times Book Review as "an ecologist with the soul of a poet"
and Song for the Blue Ocean "a frightening, important book."
In 2000 Safina co-wrote (with Mercedes Lee
and Suzanne Iudicello) Seafood Lover’s Almanac, a guide for those who love
to eat seafood but are concerned about depleting fish and shellfish
populations. The volume includes tips on recipes, suggestions for
healthful eating, and information on nutritional values, along with
alternatives to eating overfished species. Many reviewers lauded the book
for educating readers about how to balance a seafood diet with a
conservationist sensibility. The volume won the Renewable Natural
Resources Foundation's outstanding achievement award.
Despite the attention he devoted to fish in
his previous two books, Safina did not forget his first love, birds. In an
article for Time magazine's Earth Day edition (April/May 2000), he
considered the plight of the albatross, writing, "Like the albatross, we
need the seas more than the seas need us. Will we understand this well
enough to reap all the riches a little restraint, cooperation, and
compassion will bring?" His next book, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of
Hope and Survival (2002), followed a Laysan albatross, which he named
Amelia, throughout one breeding season, detailing both the dangers Amelia
and her kin faced and the remarkable feats they accomplished, such as
living for up to 60 years and flying, as individuals, millions of miles in
total. In a review for American Scientist (July 1, 2002), David Blockstein
called the book "an honest first-person account of field biology in
action." "Thought-provoking, witty and beautifully written," Blockstein
wrote, "the book recounts dramatic adventures (both human and avian),
philosophically explores life and death, and chronicles the relationship
between humans and nature." In 2003 Eye of the Albatross won the John
Burroughs Medal, which has been awarded annually since 1926 to works that
combine scientific accuracy, descriptions of fieldwork, and creative
natural-history writing. Eye of the Albatross also garnered the inaugural
National Academies Communication Award for explaining a scientific topic
to the general public better than any other book published that year.
Safina has engaged in many successful
conservation efforts. He has helped ban high-seas driftnets and overhaul
federal fisheries laws in the U.S., and has persuaded fishermen to call
for and abide by international agreements to restore depleted populations
of tuna, sharks, and other fish, as well as creatures that constitute
bycatch or bykill (marine life unintentionally captured by fishermen),
such as dolphins and sea turtles. In 1995 he was a force behind the
passage of a new fisheries treaty through the United Nations, and in 1996
the U.S. Congress incorporated some of his ideas in the Sustainable
Fisheries Act, which required rebuilding of marine-life populations
depleted by fishing. In the late 1990s Safina also raised awareness of
declining shark populations, and by 1998, in the absence of an official
recovery plan, he and other activists had succeeded in persuading several
prominent restaurateurs in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., to
remove swordfish from their menus. "Everyone has to be part of the
solution. There’s little use in commercial and recreational fishers
pointing fingers at each other," Safina said in an article for AScribe
Newswire (August 26, 2004). "Commercial fishing is not all bad and
recreational fishing is not all good. A fish doesn’t care if you are a
commercial or a recreational fisherman. It only cares if it surrounded by
water—or on ice."
In 2000 Safina won a John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as the "genius" grant.
He has been using the prize money, which is distributed over the course of
five years, to fund his research and the travel it entails. His other
honors include the International Game Fish Association Conservation Award,
the Pew Charitable Trust’s Scholar’s Award in Conservation and the
Environment, the American Fisheries Society’s Carl R. Sullivan
Conservation Award, and recognition from Rutgers University as the most
distinguished alumnus to graduate from the ecology and evolution program.
He has received honorary doctorates from Long Island University and SUNY.
Audubon magazine named him one of the top 100 conservationists of the 20th
century, and the World Wildlife Fund named him a senior fellow in its
Marine Conservation Program. Safina is a visiting fellow at Yale
University, an adjunct professor at SUNY–Stony Brook, and an elected
member of the Explorers Club. In addition to his books, Safina has written
upwards of 100 articles for scientific and popular journals. Seizing every
opportunity to enlighten the public about the continuing dangers to marine
wildlife, he also lectures. He appeared on the Bill Moyers PBS special
Earth on the Edge (2002). "I predict that over the next few years," he
wrote in Science and Technology (Summer 2003), "consumer education will
become the largest area of growth and change in the toolbox of ocean
conservation strategy."
Safina is greatly concerned, as he told
Current Biography, with the "embattlement of reason and science." He
believes "that information must be conveyed in the context of values, and
that we must reinvigorate veneration of reason and fuse it with a renewed
quest toward truly traditional values of peace, compassion, generosity of
spirit, and love." Although he is not religious in the conventional sense,
he finds spirituality in nature and the creatures he studies.
Safina lives in Amagansett, on Long Island,
with Patricia Paladines and her daughter Alexandra. They have several
pets, including a rescue dog, a king snake, a rose-haired tarantula, a
rabbit, and a goldfish. Like his work, Safina's leisure activities take
him outdoors; besides fishing, he enjoys snorkeling, scuba diving,
clamming, kayaking, and bird watching. His next book will focus on his
travels with sea turtles.
 |
