Saving Half the Planet with Carl Safina | S2E32

Carl Safina is an American ecologist and author. He writes about our relationship with the natural world and the other beings that share it.

‘In my writing I explore our relationship with the living world—and how it could be better. My more recent work also probes how free-living animals experience life. What drives my work is a devotion to free-living things and wild places. And what drives that devotion is my deep love and wonder for the living world. ’  (from Carlsafina.org).

During our conversation, Carl expressed his deep concerns with overpopulation, pollution, climate change, habitat destruction,  and the cruelty we inflict on other species. He attributes these issues to a fundamental failure of the education system:

“What do we learn by the time we’re out of high school? We learn to buy things. We’re equipped to just be consumers, not human beings. We don’t really learn ethics, we don’t learn how to take care of each other, how to take care of the world. We don’t learn any kind of perspective that would give us wisdom, let alone some of the humility that you would see in indigenous cultures who revere the world. 

And what do we all do in the way that we live? We use stuff up. We use things that we don’t understand the consequences of. We don’t understand their origins. We don’t really know anything.”

Carl's books include Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace; Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel; The View From Lazy Point, and others.

He is the founding president of the Safina Center which explores how humans are changing the living world and its ecosystems.

Click here to visit Carl's Website

Click here to visit The Safina Center Website

Click here to read Carl's article on protecting half of Earth

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