Carl Safina Quotes

#1. Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn't just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain's provenance is inseparable from other species' brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind. - Author: Carl Safina

#2. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#3. Human progress has depended on enlarging the circle of compassion. - Author: Carl Safina

#4. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#5. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#6. 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? - Author: Carl Safina

#7. We put the murderer in charge of the crime scene. - Author: Carl Safina

#8. The revelation is this: don't wait for some revelation. We make our own luck. - Author: Carl Safina

#9. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#10. As a teenage fisherman, I watched and followed terns to find fish. Later, I studied terns for my Ph.D. - Author: Carl Safina

#11. Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology. - Author: Carl Safina

#12. BP had a lease to drill. They did not have a lease to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. They did not have a lease to blow oil into the environment. They did not have a lease to disperse the oil and try to hide the body. They don't have a lease to clean up. - Author: Carl Safina

#13. Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves ... - Author: Carl Safina

#14. 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! - Author: Carl Safina

#15. People have told me that a wolf looks right through you. But you know what I realize? That's because a wolf isn't interested in you. It's always hard for humans to accept that we're not the most important thing anyone's ever seen. - Author: Carl Safina

#16. Soon after George W. Bush took over the White House after losing the "popular vote" - which in other countries is called the "election" - - Author: Carl Safina

#17. humans are not the measure of all things. - Author: Carl Safina

#18. do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they're largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry. - Author: Carl Safina

#19. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#20. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#21. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#22. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#23. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#24. Why would even I say we can't stop drilling in the Gulf? Because we have no alternatives. Whether or not we drill in the Gulf, or in Alaska, we will continue to wring the last out of anyplace else. - Author: Carl Safina

#25. If you want to make change, 'Show me how' can be a stronger, more effective approach than 'Just say no.' That's what I think. - Author: Carl Safina

#26. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#27. 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. - Author: Carl Safina

#28. But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it. - Author: Carl Safina

#29. To save the seas, we can eat sustainably and be conscious of the seafood we eat. - Author: Carl Safina