Carl Safina (born May 23, 1955) is an American ecologist and author of books and other writings about the human relationship with the natural world. His books include Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace; Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel; Song for the Blue Ocean; Eye of the Albatross; The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World; and others. He is the founding president of the Safina Center, and is inaugural holder of the Carl Safina Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University. Safina hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. Early life Carl Safina was born in Brooklyn, New York to Italian Americans (his grandparents were from Sicily.) At age ten he moved with his family into the new and rapidly expanding suburbs of Long Island, New York. As a teen Safina spent free hours fishing, camping, and hiking near his home. Rapid building and construction on Long Island caused him to witness destruction of woodlands and other natural habitats, which made another deep and personal impression. Eventually he chose to major in environmental science at the State University of New York at Purchase. Later at Rutgers University he earned master's and PhD degrees in ecology for his studies of seabirds. Career Carl Safina works to show that nature and human dignity require each other. His recent works probe the ways in which our relationship with the natural world affects human relations, and how the scientific facts imply the need for moral and ethical responses. His most recent books explore cognitive and emotional capacities of the minds of other animals, as well as individuality and cultural learning in free-living animals. His early research focused on seabird ecology. In the 1990s he drew attention to environmental issues in fisheries. He led campaigns to ban high-seas driftnets, to re-write U.S. federal fisheries law, to work toward international conservation of tunas, sharks, and other fishes, and to achieve passage of a United Nations global fisheries treaty. His more recent writings are about ecology, conservation, and humanity broadly. He has written about a wide array of issues and creatures of ocean and land, including tunas, salmon, sharks, sea turtles, seabirds, albatrosses, elephants, wolves, orca whales, sperm whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, macaws, forests, coral reefs, and sustainable food. Safina is an advocate of animal welfare. In regard to