Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival
Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival
Sections
2011 Festival Keynote Speaker & Special Guest
Artist
Festival Keynote Speaker
Carl
Safina grew up fascinated by the ocean and its
creatures. His childhood by the shore led to
scientific studies of seabirds and fish, and to his
doctorate in Ecology from Rutgers University.
For twenty-five years Carl 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 non-fiction writing. He has great
empathy for the plight of both animals and
people but he knows that each is served by
maintaining abundance and neither by creating
scarcity. He strives to convey a Sea Ethic to
complement Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic, wherein our
sense of community extends beyond humanity to
encompass the wider living world. Carl believe in
using the oceans, but not using them up. His current
work explores and communicates how the ocean is
changing and what it means for animals and people.
His organization Blue Ocean Institute seeks to
inspire people with hope and the knowledge that all
current problems are solvable using what we already
know.
Carl is the author of over one hundred
publications, including the books Songs for the
Blue Ocean, Eye of the Albatross, and Voyage
of the Turtle, his writing has been featured in
the National Geographic. His conservation
work has been profiled in the New York Times, on
Nightline, and in the Bill Moyers television special
"Earth on Edge". He is a recipient of the Pew
Scholar's Award in Conservation and the Environment,
a World Wildlife Fund Senior Fellowship, the Lannan
Literary Award for non-fiction, the John Burroughs
Medal for literature, National Academies
Communications Award, Chicago's Brookfield Zoo's
Rabb Medal, and a MacArthur Prize. Carl is an
adjunct professor at Long Island University and
State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is
president of Blue Ocean Institute, a non-profit that
he co-founded in 2003. Inspiring ocean conservation,
Blue Ocean Institute uniquely works through science,
art, and literature to inspire solutions and a
deeper connection with nature. The Institute shares
reliable information that enlightens personal
choices, instills hope, and helps restore living
abundance in the oceans. For more information and to
lend your support, visit
www.blueocean.org.
Carl Safina will discuss, read from, and show
images from his new book The View From Lazy
Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World. A
deeply personal book with a broadly global message,
The View from Lazy Point is an exhilarating
journey with a distinctly coastal flavor. In this
intertwined story of humanity and the natural world,
Safina shows that nature and human dignity require
each other.
On Safina's coasts, nature pulses to a continuous
series of migrations. We are alongside him as birds
and fishes flock to and from his Long Island shores.
Then we go global. During the span of a year's four
seasons, we travel with him from the intimacy of his
home to the four points of the compass, from the
high Arctic to Antarctica and across the tropics
from the Caribbean to the west Pacific.
While we revel in the resilience of wildlife
migrations and the magnificence of natural
spectacles, we meet Eskimos and islanders, face
foraging bears and visit breeding penguins, and sale
to formerly devastated reefs that are recovering
with human help. We see a world brimming with
vitality but changing. Safina's lively stories grant
new insights into what the changes mean for wildlife
and people.
Along the way, Safina shows that we run our lives
and our world with ancient and Medieval ideas; that
our philosophy, ethics, religion, and economics were
all devised before anyone realized the world was
round. Resisting change, these institutions do not
correspond to what we have learned in the last
century. THey are out of sync with how the world
really functions. The View From Lazy Point
shows how this makes them unable to detect dangers
or respond to new realities.
Safina's answer is not merely more scientific
information but an ethical rebirth. "I have come to
see that the geometry of human progress is an
expanding circle of compassion", he writes, "and
that - if the word sacred means anything at all -
the world exists as the one truly sacred place."
Carl Safina will present his book A Seas in
Flames, about the oil well blowout in the Gulf
of Mexico in the summer of 2010.
A Sea in Flames is a blistering account of
the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a
region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across
the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and
its often nonsensical twists, Safina expertly
deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments
that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout,
zeroes in on BP's misstatements, evasions, and
denials, reassesses his own reaction to the
government's crisis handling, and reviews the
consequences of the leak - and what he considers the
real problems, which the press largely overlooked.
With him we get deep inside the faulty thinking
that caused the lethal explosion. We join him on
aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We confront
pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe
fades to black. Safina skewers the excuses and the
silly jargon - like "junk shot" and "top kill" -
that made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors
- and highlighted Big Oil's appalling lack of
preparedness for an event that was inevitable.
Based on extensive research and interviews with
fishermen, coastal residents, biologists, and
government officials, A Sea in Flames has
some surprising answers on whether it was "Obama's
Katrina", whether the Coast Guard was as inept in
its response as BP was misleading, and whether this
worst unintended release of oil in the history was
really America's worst ecological disaster.
Impassioned, moving, and even sharply funny, A
Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of
America's main addiction. Safina writes: "In the
end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain - and
hope. Hope that the full potential of this
catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the
harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope
that even if we did not suffer the absolutely worst
- we would still learn the big lesson here. We may
have gotten two out of three. That is not good
enough. Because: there will be a next time."