Carl Safina Quotes & Sayings

Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don't spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don't get diluted. — Carl Safina

Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves ... — Carl Safina

I don't mean to imply that I value the life of a fish or a bird the same way I value a human life, but their presence in the world has as much validity as does our presence. Perhaps more: they were here first; they are foundational to us. They take only what they need. They are compatible with the life around them. — Carl Safina

The compass of compassion asks not what is good for me? but what is good? Not what is best for me but what is best. Not what is right for me but what is right. Not how much can we take? but How much ought we leave? and how much might we give? Not what is easy but what is worthy. Not what is practical but what is moral. — Carl Safina

We are one knot in a great web of being, building out of the vast past and (with luck) continuing billions of years into the future, until the sun dies, the last of its energy reaches Earth, and our local light goes out. The most appropriate response to the world is to realize, with awe, the ferocious mystery of being alive in it. And act accordingly. The worst thing anyone should be able to say about their life is also the greatest thing anyone can say: 'I tried my best. — Carl Safina

Human progress has depended on enlarging the circle of compassion. — Carl Safina

For each of us, then, the challenge and opportunity is to cherish all life as the gift it is, envision it whole, seek to know it truly, and undertake -with our minds, hearts, and hands- to restore its abundance. It is said that where there's life there's hope, and so no place can inspire us with more hopefulness than that great, life-making sea -that singular, wondrous ocean covering the blue planet. — Carl Safina

One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, "What is the meaning of life?" is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, "Where is the meaning in life?" The place to look is: between. — Carl Safina

BP had a lease to drill. They did not have a lease to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. They did not have a lease to blow oil into the environment. They did not have a lease to disperse the oil and try to hide the body. They don't have a lease to clean up. — Carl Safina

humans are not the measure of all things. — Carl Safina

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

Poor people don't want to stay poor. But there's a misconception that it's somehow "unfair" to poor people, or, worse, racist, to let them in on the main secret of wealthy, educated and successful people: smaller families mean larger lives. — Carl Safina

Soon after George W. Bush took over the White House after losing the "popular vote" - which in other countries is called the "election" - — Carl Safina

If you want to make change, 'Show me how' can be a stronger, more effective approach than 'Just say no.' That's what I think. — Carl Safina

The revelation is this: don't wait for some revelation. We make our own luck. — Carl Safina

I am impressed anew by ... how much the harshness that challenges life is what causes the beauty. Birds fly because they must escape predators and search for food. Trees grow skyward because they compete fiercely with other trees for light. Living things need something to push off of. Each of us needs challenges to give us the right shape. — Carl Safina

Lessons: Diversity = resilience. Abundance = resilience. to survive catastrophe, you need a surplus, a reservoir, money under the mattress, food in the fridge. If you're already starving, you won't survive a famine. Take the world down to the bone and the only thing that flourishes are boneyards; the only thing that expands is collapse. — Carl Safina

We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside us - a world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races ... In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals ... understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. — Carl Safina

We put the murderer in charge of the crime scene. — Carl Safina

Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn't just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain's provenance is inseparable from other species' brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind. — Carl Safina

It does the things we're also most concerned about. It tries very hard to stay alive. It's motivated to reproduce. It gets hungry and goes to look for food. It gets frightened. Compared to other things in the universe, we and the albatrosses are almost identical. — Carl Safina

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion. — Carl Safina

The world belongs to us, the wise ones, we declare ... will we be pirates or captains, slumlords or godparents of time? Will we burn the furniture for heat or be good tenants? — Carl Safina

We each make our solo voyages to deep, expansive waters. Alone in our contest with the wider world, we test our mettle and seek our trophies, promotions, compliments, and accolades. We strive to be needed and to thereby know that there is a reason for us. We seek to be told we are good because we're too unsure of ourselves to know. Yet often we remain so focused on our neediness that we forget the creatures - human and otherwise - we're drawing into the vortex of our own passion play. All of us have compulsive loves we must forbear. We forget to see that we can engage the world without harming it. And although we fish for approval, the challenge is: to capture our prizes while bringing more to the world than we take. — Carl Safina

Knowing the songs - and I'm still learning - lets one envision birds you can hear but can't see. And as always, the ability to envision what is just out of sight is more important than merely seeing what's right in front of you. — Carl Safina

The ocean is not just blank blue space but rather the habitat for amazing wildlife, and we have to take care how we use it. If we want to keep having the goods and services it provides, we have to treat it more carefully in terms of fishing and dumping. — Carl Safina

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. — Carl Safina

For proponents of ecosystem-based management,the good news is that another new book, Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans, conveys the topic at its state-of-the-art level of development ... both Marine Ecosystems and Global Change and Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans are valuable troves that could profitably be mined, and any academic bookshelf would wear them well. — Carl Safina

do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they're largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry. — Carl Safina

Windy or not, a day this beautiful has to be lived. The day is bright and clear, the sky blue, and the dry air feels light. A northerly wind stirs a primal urge to move. The geese feel it, and so do I. Perhaps it is a last internal vestige from a time, long ago, when we migrated with the seasons across open plains, following the animals we pursued for food. Perhaps that is why the sight of migrating geese arrests our attention, why we feel the pull. We want to go, to travel in fresh or moody weather, taking in each newly revealed vista. — Carl Safina

The world is changing because we're changing it. And that makes me understand, at least, what kind of person I'd like to be. A person can seek ways, whether big or small, to heal the world. That, to me, is spirituality and one's 'soul.' Not some disembodied eternal wishfulness but a way of being that, most days, I can work on. Life is like walking with a flashlight on a dark night. You can't see your destination, but each step illuminates the next few steps, and, taking one after another, you can get where you need to go. Only now, we'll need to quicken our pace if we are to avoid major upheaval in this century. It's up to us not just as individuals but as citizens of nations and of the world. — Carl Safina

One can fully own a manufactured thing - a toaster, say, or a pair of shoes. But in what reasonable sense can one fully "own" and have "rights" to do whatever we want to land, water, air, and forests, which are among the most valuable assets in humanity's basic endowments? To say, in the march of eons, that we own these things into which we suddenly, fleetingly appear and from which we will soon vanish is like a newborn laying claim to the maternity ward, or a candle asserting ownership of the cake; we might as well declare that, having been handed a ticket to ride, we've bought the train. Let's be serious. — Carl Safina

We're obsessed with filling in the blank for a Mad Libs line that goes: "_ makes us human." Why? Scratch and sniff the "what makes us human" obsession and you get a strong whiff of something that could fit into that blank: our insecurity. — Carl Safina

Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology. — Carl Safina

Try to cut down drastically on plastic. Recycle. Use less energy and more renewable energy. We can all live better by doing better for ourselves and the sea! — Carl Safina

Maybe we'll live to see sharks recover. Right now, that seems as improbable as seeing all these falcons. Hope is the ability to see how things could be better. The world of human affairs has long been a shadowy place, but always backlit by the light of hope. Each person can add hope to the world. A resigned person subtracts hope. The more people strive, the more change becomes likely. — Carl Safina

Why would even I say we can't stop drilling in the Gulf? Because we have no alternatives. Whether or not we drill in the Gulf, or in Alaska, we will continue to wring the last out of anyplace else. — Carl Safina

The creatures of the sea hold special mystery, and they are among the most exciting, graceful, and beautiful on Earth. Just consider the living riot of a coral reef, the beauty of an albatross, the awesome power of a giant turtle, the grace of a dolphin. Now multiply that by the millions of creatures in the sea. Wow! — Carl Safina

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you've learned about the grand themes of life. It's time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds ... Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life ... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy. — Carl Safina

The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we're all thrill seekers here. — Carl Safina

Whales are vocal, but they lack a political voice. They, too, are like tribal people, like peasants, natives, like the poor and most of us: underrepresented, rolled by the big money of strong-armed, weak-minded people who never grasp that they already have too much, who are politically connected yet so lethally out of touch with themselves and the world. — Carl Safina

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we're struggling to regain. — Carl Safina

Most people fantasize that if they won the lottery, they would quit their jobs and immerse themselves in leisure, play, family, parenthood, occasional thrilling sex; they'd eat when they were hungry and sleep whenever they felt sleepy. Many people, if they won the lottery and got rich quick, would want to live like elephants. — Carl Safina

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. — Carl Safina

We are blessed with a magnificent and miraculous world ocean on this planet. But we are also stressing it in ways that we are not even close to bringing under control. — Carl Safina

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, we knew we were running out of oil; we knew that easy sources were being capped; we knew that diversifying would be much better; we knew that there were terrible dictators and horrible governments that we were enriching who hated us. We knew all that and we did really nothing. — Carl Safina

Several groups have information evaluating seafood sustainability. I wrote the first such guide, and seafood pocket-guides and detailed evaluations of different seafoods are available for download from the group I founded, Blue Ocean Institute. — Carl Safina

In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. "And what we see, "says the poet Mary Oliver, "is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish." As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, "I love you and I miss you: come home safe." Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn't it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes ... — Carl Safina

If you're overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you're creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system. — Carl Safina

As a teenage fisherman, I watched and followed terns to find fish. Later, I studied terns for my Ph.D. — Carl Safina

Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word "September," you'd think it was Latin for "evacuate." I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year ... It's an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year's productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that-despite the problems- still has what it takes to really produce. — Carl Safina

Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world - and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time. — Carl Safina

To save the seas, we can eat sustainably and be conscious of the seafood we eat. — Carl Safina

If you ask the fish whether they'd rather have an oil spill or a season of fishing, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd vote for another blowout. — Carl Safina

[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to. — Carl Safina

But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it. — Carl Safina

People have told me that a wolf looks right through you. But you know what I realize? That's because a wolf isn't interested in you. It's always hard for humans to accept that we're not the most important thing anyone's ever seen. — Carl Safina

The last glow of sundown dims away. Stars appear in the east. Night encloses us. The ocean seems to enlarge. When you're adrift at night, imagination and perception merge. They have to. You can't see as well, as far, as deep. You tie knots by muscle memory, and you operate your reel mostly by feel. Your boat drifts, your thoughts drift. You sense the sweep of tide and water, and the boat gets rocked in turbulence just past each undersea ridgeline and boulder field. You, too, are looking up, searching constellations, dreaming. You fell again how flexible and expansive your mind can be when it's working right. And you slip your leash to explore the vast vault of sky and great interior spaces. — Carl Safina

It's hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what's moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it's easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal. — Carl Safina

A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us. — Carl Safina