Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

human progress has depended on enlarging the circle of compassion.

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

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.

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?

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.

Species differ - but are often not very different. Only humans have human minds. But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because only humans have human skeletons, only humans have skeletons.

Bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behavior than any other known creature.) As Denise Herzing concluded, "Dolphins love to have sex and they have sex a lot.

When my experiences with dogs and other animals—and people—were fewer, I used to think it silly for people to speak of dogs as "family" or other animals as "friends." Now I feel it's silly not to. I'd overestimated the loyalty and staying power of humans and underestimated the intelligence and sensitivity of other animals. I think I understand both better. Their gifts overlap, though they are different gifts.

Beings who've succeeded on earth for millennia don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong here as do we. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurtling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Your body is run by a competent staff that's been on the job since before the company acquired consciousness. Too bad you can't personally meet your team.

If wildlife cannot exist there will be poor quality for human life. A better world for wildlife means a better world for human life.