Carl Safina

Writing about nature and animals. www.carlsafina.org

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The trunk is an elephant’s Swiss Army knife. Rounded on the outer edge, flattened on the inner, a great vacuum-sweeping, water-hosing, mud-flinging, dust-deviling, air-testing, food-gathering, friend-greeting, infant-rescuing, baby-reassuring caterpillar of a nose. Yoshihito Niimura of the University of Tokyo offers: “Imagine having a nose on the palm of your hand. Every time you touch something, you smell it.”

–from my new book Beyond Words; What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel, edited for readers age 10–16, published April 2019. It’s the first title in a two-part young-adult adaptation of my bestselling book Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel.

The Safina Center is excerpting bits of my book, pairing the newly published text with my original wildlife photography! Stay tuned for more.

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“The Joy of Elephants”

“Look how fat that baby is,” I say. The fifteen-month-old looks like a ball of butter. Four adults and three little babies are playing in a muddy pool, spraying water over their backs with their trunks, then sprawling on the squishy bank. It’s soothing just to watch.

The elephants seem happy. But when elephants seem happy to us, do they really feel happy?

“Elephants experience joy,” Cynthia Moss tells me. Cynthia is a scientist who has studied them for 40 years. “It may not be human joy,” she says. “But it is joy.”

****

“What has a lifetime of watching elephants,” I ask Cynthia, “taught you about humanity?” I glance to make sure my recorder’s light is on, then settle back a bit. Forty years of insight; this will be good.

What I don’t see coming is: I have the question almost exactly backward.

Cynthia gently deflects my question. “I think of them as elephants,” she says. “I’m interested in them as elephants. Comparing elephants to people — I don’t find it helpful. I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself.” It takes me a moment to “get” her comment. Then — I am stunned.

–from my new book Beyond Words; What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel, edited for readers age 10–16, published April 2019. It’s the first title in a two-part young-adult adaptation of my bestselling book Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel.

The Safina Center is excerpting bits of my book, pairing the newly published text with my original wildlife photography! Stay tuned for more.

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Act today! http://safinacenter.org/ocean-issues/#Pebble 

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My writing on Jeopardy!

As seen on TV:

...Nancy found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Galapagos: Plants & Animals” under the $800 clue with only one clue left after it. She was in the lead with $4,800, $1,200 more than Rob in second place. She bet $1,200 and went with a gull. That was WRONG.

“Darwin’s finches writ large” is how Carl Safina describes this soaring bird. The waved type here in the Galápagos is the only truly tropical type, and it has evolved distinct markings that help provide its name.

The answer: What is an albatross?

Nancy finished in the lead with $3,600. Rob was second with $2,600 and William was last with $2,200.

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Just after his new book comes out next week, on July 10, Safina Center Fellow Paul Greenberg will embark on a cross-country book tour! Learn more about The Omega Principle here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317361/the-omega-principle-by-paul-greenberg/9781594206344/

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I’m thrilled to announce the coming release (July 10, 2018) of Safina Center Fellow Paul Greenberg’s latest book, and accompanying book tour! Stay tuned for details and dates, but in the meantime, you can preorder his book (see our website) and read the advance praise for “The Omega Principle.”

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I invite you to participate in this exciting event on June 19, 2018, at the American Museum of Natural History!

It all starts with one question: On the ground or into the deep—which is more compelling, intriguing, and inspiring? Join comedian and journalist Faith Salie for a lively discussion about the pros and cons of sea or land fauna across a range of categories. This tongue-in-cheek “debate” pits luminaries in two areas of science against each other, and you decide who wins. Panelists include me, conservationist Carl Safina, and animal behavior expert and Safina Center Creative Affiliate Lori Marino (Team Sea) facing off against zoologist Jarod Miller and primatologist Mireya Mayor (Team Land).

A book signing and meet-and-greet to follow.

Date: June 19, 2018

Location: American Museum of Natural History - Enter at 77th Street

Time: 7 pm

Tickets: $25 ($22 seniors, students) $20 Members - https://ticketing.amnh.org/#/event/196864 

Science Throwdown: Sea vs. Land is made possible by OceanX, an initiative of the Dalio Foundation, as part of its generous support of the special exhibition Unseen Oceans and its related educational activities and public programs.

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Beyond Words gets a French review by Le Monde!

Read the review online, here!

Or download the PDF here!

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This week at the Safina Center: Sunscreen harms corals, plastic harms albatrosses and good news too!

Click here to read this week’s Safina Center e-newsletter!

Photo: Erica Cirino speaks on BBC World News about sunscreen and coral health

Not yet receiving our weekly updates? Subscribe here.

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Help stop a terrible mining project from moving forward by speaking out! You only have until the end of June to speak out against Pebble Mine. Learn more here: http://safinacenter.org/ocean-issues/

Photo: National Park Service, Alaska

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As part of a new book I’m working on, recently I visited chimps in Uganda. Stay tuned on my website for book updates! https://www.carlsafina.org/ 

Photo ©Carl Safina

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Carl Safina at the Extinction and Livestock Conference in London, 2017

The Safina Center is spreading your message—but we can’t do it without you!

Dear Friends,

Like you, I will soon be writing checks to my favorite non-profits. In that spirit, please consider The Safina Center in your giving. We help amplify your thoughts, your values. Your voice is our voice.

We’re different. We understand that for most people, values determine whether the facts matter. And so we fuse scientific understanding with emotional connection and a moral call to action.

And people respond. They’re reading our books, listening to our audiotapes and watching our TED talks and seeing us on PBS television. Our Sustainable Seafood Program helps guide Whole Foods Market’s buying and our logo is featured at all Whole Foods seafood counters. We’re working in the Pacific Ocean and Hawaiian Islands, the Antarctic, the high Arctic, Indonesia, Peru, Norway, Alaska, Madagascar, and New York’s Bronx Zoo. We are working on protected areas for seabirds, manta rays, and other wildlife; on ocean policy, ocean plastics, and wildlife trade. We’ve been doing science and creating images, film, and sound-art. We are in the field and at the conferences. We are in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and many others. And—we teach, helping shape what’s on the minds and lips of the next wave.

That is reach! Our message is your message.

The details are in our Annual Report. And if you wish, you can advance great worldwide work by our brilliant, valiant crew. Because—we’re different.

Please consider lending your support. You can easily contribute online: www.safinacenter.org/donate.

It’s such a privilege to be involved in such great work with such exceptional people. Please be part of us.

Best wishes for the Holidays and beyond!

~ Carl Safina

DOWNLOAD THE 2017 SAFINA CENTER ANNUAL REPORT HERE.

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New story: “Elephants mourn. Dogs love. Why do we deny the feelings of other species?”

Scientists are discovering more and more about the internal lives of animals. But what does this mean for the way humans behave? I answer this question in my latest story for The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/11/elephants-animal-welfare-why-do-we-deny-ignore-feelings-other-species 

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A Presence in the Ocean

“There exists a presence in the ocean, seldom glimpsed in waking hours, best envisioned in your dreams. While you drift in sleep, turtles ride the curving deep seeking their inspiration from the sky. From tranquil tropic moonlit bays, or nightmare maelstroms hissing foam, they come unseen to share our air. Each sharp exhalation affirms: ‘life yet endures.’ Each inhalant gasp vows, ‘life will continue.’ With each breath they declare to the stars and wild silence. By night and by light, sea turtles glide always, their parallel universe strangely alien, yet intertwining with ours.

Riding the churning ocean’s turning tides and resisting no urge, they move motivated neither by longing nor love nor reason, but tuned by a wisdom more ancient—so perhaps more trustworthy—than thought. Through jewel-hued sultry blue lagoons, through waters wild and green and cold, stroke these angels of the deep, ancient, ageless, great-grandparents of the world.”–Carl Safina, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur 

Get your copy of Voyage of the Turtle here.

Photo by Carl Safina. Leatherback turtle in the Caribbean.

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Warning Display

“Some divers rate the gray reef shark as the world’s third most dangerous, after the great white and tiger. Virtually all attacks result from a diver’s intruding into the shark’s territory, violating the animal’s sense of secure space. From the shark’s point of view, such attacks are defensive. The sharks are not trying to eat the person, merely to drive the diver off with their teeth. They would prefer that the intruding human leave peacefully and without contact, so a warning display precedes the attack. When displaying, a shark comes on with back arched and pectoral fins down. This is the shark’s polite invitation to please leave. Divers who do not recognize this, who fail to back off immediately, may get hit with one devastating bite that usually makes the point.

I am wondering just how close the current has to carry me before I begin to infringe on millions of years of customary etiquette. They say old habits die hard. One large shark veers ever so slightly toward me at an oblique angle, that reaper-grim mouth inching closer. I am riveted to its body’s every flexion, and I see its pectoral fins drop ever so slightly, just enough to suggest strongly that in that pea behind its eye an evaluation of space and motion may be going on in superior confidence.

Some people meditate for years before achieving the focused presence and clarity of concentration I am now experiencing. As I begin to suppress a degree of attention that is escalating toward fright, the gray velvet creature angles slightly away, passing me and continuing up-current — just as the scientific part of my brain was virtually certain it would.” –Carl Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean

Get your copy of Song for the Blue Ocean here.

Photo by Kydd Pollock. Grey reef sharks, Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, 2014.

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The shark “People are hungry to make their mark in the world. Every shark would understand. Or would they? The shark has a hunter’s attitude, but there’s nothing social in its killing. It gains only nutrition, knows no pride. The shark does only what it needs, and needs only what it does. Of the burden of needing to make an impression, the shark is free. Yet we cause the whole world, even the sharks of the blue ocean, to bear the burden of our egos.” –Carl Safina, The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year In An Unnatural World

Get your copy of The View From Lazy Point here.

Photo by Carl Safina. Great white shark. Dyer Island, South Africa. 2015.

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Alive!

“This place is alive! In every direction now, creatures far larger than dinosaurs cavort and carry on, blowing voluminous clouds of breath and breaking the sea’s surface in rings of foam. The scene is ages old. Pleistocene Park. Everything here is giant. The mammals are giant; the fishes, giant; the scale of creatures expanded to match the oceanic scale itself. The vast sea itself seems boundless and expansive. From our commanding view the ocean stretches off like a tight azure drum around the rim of the world, and here against the center of this drum pounds the rhythm of the living. I feel utterly captivated — connected and rhapsodic; I feel that somehow a sweepingly enlightening, profound realization awaits just beyond consciousness — like a forgotten dream sensed upon waking — if I can take this scene in for a few more moments, just long enough to let myself open fully and encompass it.” –Carl Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean

Get your copy of Song for the Blue Ocean here.

Photo: Killer Whales in Scotia Sea; lead whale is carrying a large chunk of meat, possibly from a Minke Whale. ©Carl Safina