R. Kurt Osenlund, January 2013
R. Kurt Osenlund, January 2013
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Swimming With Sharks
Carl Safina is one impressive multihyphenate. Seemingly tireless in his exploits, the New York native is a conservationist, author, adjunct professor, founder of the eco-friendly Blue Ocean Institute, and all-around visionary in the world of ocean preservation. Through his career he has penned six books, including a children’s story, about the ways our oceans are changing, landing himself recognition from The New York Times and a handful of awards, including the John Burroughs Medal, the James Beard Medal, and the Lannan Literary Award. His byline has appeared on nearly 200 articles, for outlets as prestigious as the Times and National Geographic. He has a great deal of noble advocacy under his belt, leading campaigns to influence fishing policies and protect vulnerable sea life.
This past fall, Safina added television host to his list of accomplishments, exposing viewers to the issues he champions on PBS’s new show, Saving the Oceans. The program may look like your typical, modern environmental docu-series, but, to employ a fishing term, there’s a catch: Rather than following the apocalyptic trend set forth by films like An Inconvenient Truth, Saving the Oceans exercises a positive modus operandi, showing audiences solutions and active problem solvers instead of statistics that make everyone’s hair stand on end. It’s part of a hopeful mission that’s grown within Safina since his childhood, which was saturated with oceanographic knowledge, interests, and passion.
And yet, Safina remains a realist. In a candid interview, the 57-year-old speaks as much about the can-do outlook he aims to impart to others as he does the hard truths that cannot be ignored. Among other things, he opens up about over-population, the lack of worthwhile ocean-focused media, and the tough decisions that should be made on the heels of Superstorm Sandy. Safina reveals himself as a well-rounded man who, in addition to hitting the high seas professionally, wisely considers the same hot water that all of us are in.
So much of what we hear about the environment lately involves doomsday data and grim outlooks, but Saving the Ocean takes a more positive approach. Why do you think it’s more important to send a message of hope than it is to use scare tactics?
Because I think hope motivates the work that we want people to do—work that will helpsolve these problems. My definition of hope is the ability to see how things could get better. So, if you show people how things can get better, you give them hope. If people don’t think things can get better, they’re not very likely to work on something that they think won’t work. It’s a motivator that helps lead to solutions.
The show premiered with two pilot programs in 2011, and then it kicked off with its first full season this October. Can you describe how the project came together?
Sure. A mutual colleague introduced me to the producer on the phone, and we had a very good conversation about the possibility of doing something together, and we discussed what isn’t out there. What was out there was a lot of stuff that did not talk about the issues at all, or was very doomsday and very gloomy. So we thought, “Why not try to find the things that have good solutions and focus on them?”
In your travels for the show, are you encountering a lot of things and places you previously hadn’t seen in your other work?
Yes. To a very significant amount, we’re doing things that are new to me—places I have not been, and issues I have not been involved in.
Are any of your prior experiences influencing certain topics for the episodes?
Yeah, we’ve gone to a couple of places that I had visited before, and there are a lot of people whom we are visiting and working with who know about my work from things that I’ve done. So that’s helped to ease the entry in a number of cases.
I know the show doesn’t dwell on the negative, but what would you say is the single greatest threat currently facing our oceans?
The number of people in the world. And all the things that flow from them.
The Associated Press just released an article stating that a record percentage of Americans finally do believe that climate change is a very serious problem. Why do you think it’s taken so long for certain people to accept, or even warm to, that notion?
Because there’s a gigantically funded misinformation campaign. That’s the main reason. The other reason is it’s frightening. Another reason is that intentional change scares a lot of people.
I recently read on your blog your somewhat controversial opinion that it’s not worth rebuilding in a lot of the coastal areas that were devastated by Superstorm Sandy. Could you discuss those views a bit?
Yeah—there’s no sense building things that are going to get knocked down again. That’s pretty much the logic. Many of these things are rebuilt using tax money from everybody else in the country, and it’s policy to continue to put people in harm’s way, and infrastructure in harm’s way. It helps to literally ensure that it will happen to them again, and that everybody will be asked to pay for it again. So I think that people should be directed to relocate, but not to rebuild in flood areas. And we could start to see parts of the coast opening back up, and creating what the coast is supposed to be, which is a barrier against storms and a place for public access and public recreation…a place that people can pull back from when something very bad is coming their way.
I’m going to switch gears a bit and discuss some of your writing. You seem to be very prolific. How do you find the time to write and still do so much work in the field?
Oh, it’s all a trade-off. If I could just focus on writing, I would write a lot more, and if I could just focus on all the other things that I like to do, I’d do a lot more of those, too. So everything is always competing for time. There’s not a very carefully engineered way of just getting up to a certain number of books, or approaching a certain number of hours of advocacy work. It’s not so orderly. I’m always frustrated that I’m not doing a lot more, because there’s a lot more I wish I had time to do.
Are you busy working on another book?
Well, I’m busy, that’s for sure, and I’m trying to get started on another book. But, again, there are a lot of other things competing for time. If I could, I would prefer to focus on the book.
Of course, we’re speaking in the wake of the presidential election. Any specific actions or policy changes you’re hoping to see in the next four years, particularly in relation to the issues you champion?
Well, I think that energy policy, and a lot more encouragement of sustainable energy from the federal government, would be ideal. Because right now we have all the fossil fuel people sending all their lobbyists around to make sure nothing good happens.
There have been a lot of films and media in recent years that have covered the state of the world’s oceans. Are there any in particular that you’ve seen that have gotten it right?
No. I haven’t seen anything that I really loved. I think all of them have done some good things, but all of them have fallen short of being really perfect, or at least of being dead-on with their particular message.
Being a seafood eater, one of the things I’m always wondering about is the ethics of that market, and whether or not I’m being a responsible consumer, what with all the overfishing and depleting species. Is there a way to be a responsible seafood eater?
Well, we have a partnership with Whole Foods, and I know that they do not sell anything that you’d rate in the so-called “red category,” which has a lot of those problems. And I believe that they are very, very sincere about not outsourcing from the kind of fisheries that have a lot of problems. And they’ve been building what they’ve been doing over the last few years. So that’s one way.
You grew up by the sea, and you’ve become a conservationist, of course, making a lot of personal strides to save the oceans beyond just study. Was there anything else in your upbringing that fostered any of this? Were your parents involved with any of these issues?
No, they were not. They introduced me to fishing, and they introduced me to wildlife, but they were not active with conservationism or anything like that. But I knew from visiting the zoo, or the Museum of Natural History in New York, or the New York Aquarium, that animals were having problems. I learned about habitat loss, and I knew the word “endangered” at an early age, and that all seemed to enter into something that I would want to work on. But, then, just watching decline myself—seeing fishing getting worse, seeing things disappearing. That was a tremendous motivator for me to do something.
So far, Saving the Oceans has covered sharks, swordfish, whales in Baja—what else can viewers expect as the show continues?
There’s a really nice river project in the Pacific northwest involving some of the Native Americans there, and other local communities. There’s a really good episode about sea turtles, and there’s a show about when cod can come back, and what it will take to bring cod back. So, a good variety of things.
The philosophy behind your work seems to be a certain faith in the human spirit merged with environmental responsibility. Do you see the global culture as evolving to embrace that philosophy, or is the world, in general, still too cynical about these issues?
I think it’s very much a mix. I think, in general, we’re more aware of these problems than ever before, but because the human population has doubled in my lifetime, the pressures to keep doing things the wrong way or do things better but not better enough to get ahead of the curve of our still-expanding numbers, are very substantial, and they’re pretty overwhelming at the moment. This is not just a question of ‘can we grow enough food.’ It’s a matter of our increasing pressure on freshwater, forests, reefs, the atmosphere and the ocean, and all the other species that are in a downward spiral, including the big icons like lions, tigers, bears, apes, giraffes, elephants. The species we like to paint on nursery walls to welcome children into a world rich with fellow creatures are all plummeting in numbers. Imagine nursery walls that are blank. The faith I have is that we know the solutions. Teaching girls to read and write lowers the birth rate; that’s win-win-win. The question that remains is how much will we continue to degrade the planet’s life-support systems before we hit an inflection point that will begin relieving the pressure? And what will be left to work with by then.
R.Kurt Osenlund is the managing editor of OUT Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @AddisonDeTwitt.
Email: rkurtosenlund@gmail.com.
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A busy and beloved conservationist and author, Carl Safina now serves as the host of PBS’s
Saving the Ocean, a docu-series. The show takes the rare positive approach
to informing viewers on how to save the seas, but Safina surely imparts
that these issues are still no laughing matter.