About Carl Safina
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 Foundation, Orion Magazine, 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’s studies of seabirds earned him a Ph.D. in ecology from Rutgers University. He then spent a decade working to ban high-seas drift nets and to overhaul U.S. fishing policy before focusing mainly on writing.
His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and online at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere.
His books include the classics:
- Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World’s Coasts and Beneath the Seas
- Beyond Words: What Wolves and Dogs Think and Feel (A Young Reader’s Adaptation). Beyond Words has been adapted into a 2-volume young reader’s edition.
Carl also has an illustrated children’s book:
- Nina Delmar: The Great Whale Rescue
Carl Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is the 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.
Carl lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Where to find Carl Safina:
CarlSafina.org and
SafinaCenter.org
Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of?
This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community. You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is the second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations as an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt.
Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of non-human animals to show how other creatures teach and learn. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside portraits of various animals in their free-living communities, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. Readers are taken behind the curtain of life on Earth and asked to reckon with the most urgent of questions: Who are we herewith?
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