The Safina Center
The Safina Center is a 5013 nonprofit nature conservation and environmental organization headquartered in Setauket, New York.
Organization
The Safina Center's mission is "Making the Case for Life on Earth," by fusing scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. To do this, the Safina Center’s Staff and Fellows produce creative science-based works including books, photography, films, visual art, sound art, and spoken-word works, which are distributed through major publishers, major talk venues, popular media, radio, television, events, and publication in professional journals.The Safina Center was founded in 2003 by Dr. Carl Safina,, a MacArthur fellow and inaugural holder of the Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University.
The Safina Center's board members have backgrounds in publishing, science, art, and other fields. The Center is funded primarily by foundations and individual gifts, according to GuideStar charity reports.
Areas of focus
When it was founded in 2003, the Safina Center, had a focus on ocean science and policy, primarily fish and fisheries. Over the next few years the organization’s focus widened as the increasing influence of climate-related issues such as global warming and ocean acidification made it necessary to address the global influence of energy, food production, material culture and the expanding human footprint on not just the ocean but on the living world generally. The Safina Center began wide exploration and interpretation of how humans are changing the living world, and what those changes mean for life-supporting systems, living nature, and people.As a result, the Center’s works range broadly through ecology generally, addressing the cognitive, emotional, and cultural lives of other species in their free-living populations; pollution, especially of plastics in the global ocean; deforestation; land use issues and defining wilderness; loss and preservation of natural habitats; trophy hunting; endangerment, recoveries, and abundance trends in free-living populations; zoos and conservation; human rights abuses in fisheries; as well as personal food choices and our food system generally. The broad portfolio of all the work is that any product that “helps make the case for Life on Earth” constitutes an appropriate area of inquiry, narrative, policy formulation, and expression for the Center’s Staff, Fellows and Creative Affiliates.
A primary contributor to the Safina Center’s body of works is Carl Safina, founding president of the Center. He is the author of seven critically acclaimed books about the human connection to nature. His 2015 book, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel, has been translated into a dozen languages. The New York Times calls Safina’s bestselling book “fascinating and expansive… Safina is a terrific writer, majestic and puckish in equal measure.” In April 2019, Beyond Words was adapted into the first of a two-part series for young readers, called Beyond Words; What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel. Safina is widely published in scientific journals such as Animal Sentience, PNAS, and Science, where recent subjects have included how fish experience pain and loss of oxygen in the oceans. His writings on humanity and nature appear in popular publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and others. His books and writing have earned Safina various prizes such as a MacArthur Genius Grant, Pew Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Orion and Academy literary awards, as well as John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb Medals. He has been a four-time finalist for the Indianapolis Prize for conservation.
Fellows’ works also focus on the human connection to nature, across a wide spectrum of themes. Paul Greenberg, award-winning author and essayist who is currently a Safina Center Fellow, is focused on the issue of sustainable fishing and ocean conservation. He has published three books: most recently, The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and Healthier Planet, in addition to American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood and Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Four Fish “is not only the best analysis I’ve seen of the current state of both wild and farmed fish – it’s a terrific read,” writes American food journalist Mark Bittman. Greenberg has spoken in live events and on radio programs such as NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and in a TED Talk, which has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. He has written widely about the human connection to fish and the oceans in publications such as The Guardian and The New York Times.
The Center’s works are not only meant to communicate science but also ignite a call to action. For example, as a Safina Center Fellow, Hob Osterlund, MSN, APRN, writer, photographer and conservationist, published her first book Holy Moli: Albatross and Other Ancestors. Reviewers such as Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place says, “Hob Osterlund is a witness to beauty. Her words ground that sacred witnessing on the page with joyous revelations, not without sorrow. The full range of emotion is hers. I look forward to her ongoing relationship of wonder with the albatross.” In addition to her book and writings in popular media, Osterlund photographs albatrosses and works in on-the-ground conservation efforts in Kauai, Hawaii, through the Kauai Albatross Network, and has created a documentary film about the life of a young Laysan albatross.
Other Fellows have turned to music to communicate their messages about humans and nature. These include sound artist and educator Ben Mirin and clarinetist and philosopher David Rothenberg, who are both currently Safina Center Fellows. Mirin, who is also a National Geographic Explorer, records birdsongs, which he mixes and beat boxes along with. In 2018 Mirin debuted an interactive online game called “BeastBox,” which allows players to “take sound recordings of wild creatures and transform them into loops, creating a wide variety of song clips. Players also learn about the animals and the habitats they live in,” Mongabay News explains in its review of the game. Rothenberg, on the other hand, most often plays his clarinet along to the live music of birds, whales and other creatures, which he records in audio and video. Rothenberg has been a prolific and noted music producer “…16 albums, three books, a documentary film, and international acclaim have brought Rothenberg’s work to the front of contemporary sound,” the Harvard Gazette writes. His latest works, released in April 2019, include a new book, film and musical collection titled Nightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound, which document his work playing live music with nightingales in Berlin, Germany.
Other Safina Center Fellows have a tighter focus on science. Katarzyna Nowak, wildlife scientist and current Safina Center Fellow, has established a citizen science program called the Mountain Goat Molt Project to collect data that she hopes will uncover how climate change is affecting the way wild goats grow their coats. She’s also helped develop the Request A Woman Scientist database. “Liz McCullagh, Katarzyna Nowak, and Jane Zelikova created the platform so that any time someone needs a scientist to speak, collaborate on a project, or share expertise, they’re connected with an extensive multidisciplinary network of vetted women in science,” writes Bitch Media, which honored Nowak, McCullagh and Zelikova in their Bitch 50 List of the most impactful women of 2018.
In 2017, the Center launched a new Fellows program for early-career conservationists called the Safina Center “Kalpana Chawla ‘Launchpad’ Fellowship. Recipients of this award include writers, lawyers, scientists and artists working on various projects across the globe. Notable works from Safina Center “Kalpana Chawla ‘Launchpad’ Fellows” include Erica Cirino’s photojournalism covering the story of plastic pollution and Kate Thompson’s award-winning PhD work on medical anthropology in Africa.
Accompanying Safina and the Fellows are a list of Creative Affiliates whose work is also united with the Center’s mission. The Safina Center’s list of Creative Affiliates includes notable figures with many different approaches to communicating the need for conservation, such as actress, author and creator of “Green Porno” Isabella Rossellini, environmental philosopher and writer Kathleen Dean Moore, and musician and musical adventurer Paul Winter.