63 Quotes by Carl Safina

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.

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.

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

Economists don’t seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.

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.

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.

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.

Whether on’e 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.

Whales are vocal, but they lack a political voice. They, too, are like tribal people, like peasants, natives, like the poor and most of us: underrepresented, rolled by the big money of strong-armed, weak-minded people who never grasp that they already have too much, who are politically connected yet so lethally out of touch with themselves and the world.