Carl Safina, Ph.D.

Research

Carl Safina is president of the Safina Center, which studies how the ocean is changing and what these changes mean for wildlife and people. He has studied the ocean as a scientist, stood for it as an advocate, and conveyed his travels among sea creatures and fishing people in lyrical nonfiction writing. Safina used his Pew fellowship to research and write the critically acclaimed book Song for the Blue Ocean, published in 1998. The book documents his travels in the United States, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Palau, Hong Kong, and the Philippines) and the people he met who are working toward coastal conservation. It is a first-person, present-tense narrative for a general audience, which aims to show how these issues are important to people’s lives in very real and individual ways. Safina also utilized a portion of his fellowship funding to expand capacity of the newly launched Living Oceans Program. In particular, he supported a senior attorney who represented the National Audubon Society as an official member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations conference on migratory fish resources. The conference resulted in a strong draft treaty, and the environmental community was able to successfully pressure the U.S. State Department to adopt a much stronger stance at the conference than was originally intended.

To learn more about Safina, visit his bio online: http://safinacenter.org/people/carl-safina.