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 has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.

CARL SAFINA

So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy.

What we call killer whales or orca whales, they travel about 75 miles a day. Where they travel, the visibility is almost never more than about 50 feet, and yet they go to different destinations that may be hundreds of miles apart from where they've been before. And two or three decades after somebody has started to study a particular group, they will see the exact same individuals still together because they recognize their voices in the ocean when they cannot see each other, and they know who is in their group and what group they belong to. And that is not an accident. If a whale is next to the same whale it was next to 30 years ago after traveling thousands of miles in the ocean, it's because they have lives. They're not just bumbling around. They're not just unconsciously swimming forward, gulping down things that they're motivated to eat. They do understand a lot about what they're doing in the moment.

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At the Safina Center, we're trying to work on values. Values I think are the fundamental thing. If you resonate with the values we're expressing, you would feel differently about the prices of things, just, for instance, oil and coal are really very cheap. They are priced cheaply. The price, the value, and the cost of things are three really different things.

So the price of oil and coal is very cheap, but the cost of those things involves, well, let's just say coal for one example, it involves blowing the tops off of mountains throughout Appalachia, occasionally burying a few people, giving lots of workers lung disease, changing the heat balance of the entire planet, and acidifying the ocean. That's the cost of it. It's nowhere in the price.

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We are the extreme animal. We're certainly, technologically speaking, there's no comparison to what humans can do among all the animals that make some tools, even though we should keep in mind that for close to 200,000 years, humans who were essentially identical to us had no tools that were more complicated than a bow and arrow.

I think the most crucial thing is that while we are such extraordinary tinkerers that we can keep doing trial and error and figure things out, creating unbelievable kinds of technologies, we are not very smart about what we do with those things or seeing them through to the implications of what happens when we do these things.

If we were wiser about it, we would conduct ourselves much more differently than the all-out charge that we conduct, where often we just follow some technology along without worrying about the implications of what will happen ultimately, or caring about what will happen ultimately, or denying what is happening as a result of the overuse of those technologies or the overpopulation of the world by human beings. And those are causing many of the problems that we have.

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While humans are putting unbelievable pressure on almost every living thing, almost every wild population in the world is at its lowest level that it's ever been in since humans appeared on the planet. And that has certainly accelerated in the last hundred years or so. So all of these creatures have to figure out a way of coping with our presence. And if they can't, then what happens is their population disappears. If enough populations disappear, the species goes extinct. In a few cases, animals have adapted to our presence in various ways. Some of them create conflict because humans invade their area. They plant farms and then the animals eat what is growing on the farm. And that's a way that they are trying to adapt. That creates conflict that is often fatal for them.

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Our economy doesn't really care about education. What we care about is making consumers in the United States. We have free education, a form of socialism for everybody until grade 12. At grade 12, they're not really skilled at anything except buying stuff. And then we say, Okay, that's the end of your free education. If you want to be a better citizen and more educated, you're on your own now. Good luck. And that has a lot to do with the pricing of things and where we put our money based entirely on our values. If we really cared about having an informed citizenry that was skilled and creative, we would simply extend free education through college.

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The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being.

Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda, Courtesy of Carl Safina

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Eveline Mol with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Eveline Mol. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).