Carl Safina



Carl Safina (born 23 May 1955) is an author, environmentalist, marine ecologist, and professor at Stony Brook University.

Quotes

 * When two sympatric, closely related species appear to have very similar needs, we may ask whether mechanisms exist that enable them to avoid direct competition. Implicit in this questions the presumption that two species with identical requirements cannot coexist (Gause 1934).


 * The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent.


 * Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population.


 * Most of the oxygen we breathe is made by ocean plankton. And when animals left the seas in which life arose, they took seawater with them, in their bodies — an internal environment crucial for cellular survival. We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater.
 * (5 pages; quote from p. 2)


 * A couple of years ago I was participating as a writing coach in a "sea-mester," sailing 1,000 miles from Hawaii to, while students from Stanford University received lectures and closely supervised instruction and conducted independent projects on high-tech oceanography. These were smart kids, and the professors were superb. Five hundred miles from land, we got into a discussion on whether the ocean is a "wilderness." The consensus: Obviously it is; there was no sign of humanity, not another boat in sight. Everyone savored the thought: wilderness! But, I reminded everyone, we haven't caught a single  or seen a  or a . Wilderness? I don't think so. If the  were covered with water, you wouldn't see that the buffalo were gone, either. There is no ocean wilderness. The whole ocean feels our effects, through fishing, pollution, dying s, , immortal plastics, oxygen-asphyxiated s, , and.


 * From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems. And that is truly an addiction in the real sense of the word, an addiction by which people destroy their own bodies to continue to have a supply of something that is killing them.
 * (Talking to the author of "A Sea in Flames" about how offshore drilling has—and hasn't changed—since the Gulf spill — interview by Douglas Gorney)