63 Quotes by Carl Safina

I am impressed anew by... how much the harshness that challenges life is what causes the beauty. Birds fly because they must escape predators and search for food. Trees grow skyward because they compete fiercely with other trees for light. Living things need something to push off of. Each of us needs challenges to give us the right shape.

But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's 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.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

Maybe we’ll live to see sharks recover. Right now, that seems as improbable as seeing all these falcons. Hope is the ability to see how things could be better. The world of human affairs has long been a shadowy place, but always backlit by the light of hope. Each person can add hope to the world. A resigned person subtracts hope. The more people strive, the more change becomes likely.

Beneath the skin, kin.

A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound emanated from a speaker hidden in the thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead’s elephant daughter called for days afterword. The researchers never again did such a thing.

Niektóre eksperymenty świadczą głównie o badaczach. Gdy naukowcy nie potrafią zrozumieć myśli lub punktu widzenia zwierzęcia, oznacza to, że wielu ludzi nie jest w stanie zastosować teorii umysłu do istoty niebędącej człowiekiem.

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.