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Carl Safina grew up loving the ocean and its creatures. His childhood by the sea led him into scientific studies of seabirds and fish, and to his doctorate in Ecology from Rutgers University. During his research and his recreational and part-time-commercial fishing, he noticed rapid declines in white marlin, sharks, tunas and other fishes, and sea turtles. It seemed to him as though a kind of last buffalo hunt was occurring in the sea. This motivated him to become a voice for the conservation and restoration of life in the oceans. Since then, Dr. Safina, born in 1955, has worked to put ocean fish conservation issues into the wildlife conservation mainstream. He has helped lead campaigns to ban high-seas driftnets, re-write and reform federal fisheries law in the U. S., use international agreements toward restoring depleted populations of tunas, sharks, and other fishes, and achieve passage of a United Nations global fisheries treaty. In 1990 he founded the Living Oceans Program at the National Audubon Society, where he served for a decade as vice president for ocean conservation. He is now president of Blue Ocean Institute, which he co-founded in 2003. Blue Ocean Institute's main focus is using science, art, and literature to inspire a "sea ethic" a closer relationship with the sea. Safina is author of more than a hundred scientific and popular publications on ecology and oceans, including a new Foreword to Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. His first book, Song for the Blue Ocean, was chosen a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction selection, and a Library Journal Best Science Book selection; it won him the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction. He is also author of Eye of the Albatross, which won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing and was chosen by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine as the year's best book for communicating science. Safina is also co-author of the Seafood Lover's Almanac. He has been profiled in the New York Times and on Nightline, named among "100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century" by Audubon magazine, and featured on the Bill Moyers PBS special "Earth on Edge." He is a visiting fellow at Yale University and adjunct full professor at Long Island University and at SUNY at Stony Brook. Safina is an elected member of The Explorers Club, a recipient of the Pew Scholar's Award in Conservation and the Environment, a World Wildlife Fund Senior Fellow, and winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. | 