Carl Safina is an ecologist, author, conservationist, and animal translator whose body of work probes how free-living animals experience life. His books Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace have won numerous awards. Audubon named Carl Safina among its “100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century.” 

Carl uncovers the rich truth that many species and animals have entire cultures, traditions, familial stories, and individual quests, that all are part of this symbiotic tapestry of tales that we call “nature”. He travels alongside the sweeping wingspans of albatrosses, the elephants of East Africa, the wolves of Yellowstone, the Orcas of the Pacific Northwest, sperm whales, seals, turtles, deciphering the role of matriarchs and elders, describing how individual personalities affect all kinds of behaviors, and how these creatures too experience mourning, loss, and grief. 

Here we speak about all these interlocking animal worlds and lives, their highly evolved and complex cultural systems, how the world is awash in waves of communication, the imperfect evolutionary work in progress known as human empathy, and how knowledge of their existence should drastically influence strategies of conservation and regeneration. We end on a profound note speaking to the role of beauty across species and minds.

(Tip: Listen to the end of this episode, the closing is particularly special...)

“Culture is Life itself adjusting and responding and expressing to the corner of this galaxy in which it finds itself” - Carl Safina

Episode Website Link.

Show Links:

• Carl Safina Website with links to books, articles, podcasts
• The Safina Center Non Profit
• Zebra Fish and empathy/oxytocin response
• The Mind of a Bee book
• Guardian: Australian Songbird forgetting love songs

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Photo Credit: Whales, Clark Miller 

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

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