Carl Safina Quotes

• 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

  Nature, Struggle, Logical

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  Compassion, Giving, Might

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.407, Henry Holt and Company

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• 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

  Children, Compassion, Justice For All

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.116, Macmillan

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• 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

  Ocean, Reality, Years

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• Whether on'e 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

  Children, Compassion, Justice

  16 Copy quote

• [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

  Spring, Reading, Science

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Ocean, Heart, Opportunity

  Carl Safina (2010). “Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas”, p.440, Macmillan

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• 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

  Ocean, Science, Blue

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• 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

  Light, Curiosity, Depth

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• Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

  Carl Safina

  Reality, Yield, Inquiry

  Carl Safina (2010). “Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas”, p.440, Macmillan

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• 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

  Light, Sharks, Long

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.304, Macmillan

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• 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

  Beautiful, Turtles, Sea

  23 Copy quote

• If you look right, you can see the whole world from wherever you happen to be.

  Carl Safina

  Science, Looks, World

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• 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

  Science, Fishing, Oil

  56 Copy quote

• 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.

  Carl Safina

  Thinking, Fishing, Two

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.130, Macmillan

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• 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

  Ocean, Science, Creating

  92 Copy quote

• To save the seas, we can eat sustainably and be conscious of the seafood we eat.

  Carl Safina

  Sea, Conscious, Seafood

  31 Copy quote

• But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.

  Carl Safina

  Waiting, Revolution

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.52, Macmillan

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

  Carl Safina

  Economy, Ecology, Economist

  Carl Safina (2011). “The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World”, p.126, Macmillan

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• 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

  Cutting, Sea, Trying

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• 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

  Believe, Science, Oil

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• 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

  Stress, Ocean, Blessed

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• 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

  Ocean, Blue, Pockets

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• 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

  Lucky Day, Oil, Risk

  "Deepwater Horizon, One Year Later: A Conversation With Carl Safina". Interview with Douglas Gorney, www.theatlantic.com. April 20, 2011.

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• 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

  Trying, Doe, Albatross

  4 Copy quote

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