Sea in Flames Book Release Today

Carl Safina released his new book today, Sea in Flames. It is a great book about BP's Gulf disaster that we'd like to forget but cannot (and should not).

The book is definitely one to add to your stack of to-be-read, probably closer to the top of that stack.  Meanwhile, listen for Carl on radio talk shows, and keep an eye out for his new PBS special "Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina".

He has a very rational and simultaneously poetic way of looking at the natural world and our interaction, or lack there of, with it. It is easy to listen to him calmly talk about birds or clean energy, and come away sufficiently affected, likely angry, but certainly inspired.

In Sea of Flames, Safina writes: “In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catas­trophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolute worst—we’d still learn the big lesson here. We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. Because: there’ll be a next time.”

Other recommended books by Carl: View from Lazy Point and Song of the Blue Ocean. 

Carl has the creds too:

Carl Safina is the founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute. He was recently named by Audubon magazine among the leading one hundred conservationists of the twentieth Century. His books have won him a Pew Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

He’s been profiled by The New York Times and on Nightline and Bill Moyers Journal. Safina has also appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR, and CNN.

Safina has engaged in many successful conservation efforts. He helped ban high-seas driftnets and overhaul federal fisheries laws in the U.S., and persuaded fishermen to call for and abide by international agreements to restore depleted populations of tuna, sharks, and other fish, as well as creatures that constitute bycatch (marine life unintentionally captured by fishermen), such as albatrosses, dolphins and sea turtles. In 1995 Safina was a force behind the passage of a new fisheries treaty through the United Nations, and in 1996 the U.S. Congress incorporated some of his ideas in the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which required rebuilding of marine-life populations depleted by fishing.

Check out his web site.