Carl Safina—Provide your audience with information they care about

Carl Safina earned a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from Rutgers University while he worked as a Manager of the Scully Audubon Sanctuary on Long Island, and then started National Audubon Society’s Living Oceans Program. His focus broadened quickly to the conservation and preservation of marine organisms and ecosystems, founding the Blue Ocean Institute. From his early service as a Member of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, he recognized the importance of changing the paradigm of U.S. fisheries management from a focus on exploitation to a focus on recovering depleted marine populations. This required re-focusing risk communication from an emphasis on reducing exploitation of living marine resources to an emphasis on demonstrating the economic and social benefits of more aggressive ocean management for fish population recovery. Dr. Safina has a unique ability to foster dialogue around important environmental issues. His perspective is that information alone does not change minds, and that individuals filter information through their values and cultural perspectives. His conservation efforts and writing won him a MacArthur “genius” Award, a Pew Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He has book awards from Orion, Lannan, and the National Academies, as well as John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb Medals. His evocative essays and books provide strategic approaches to solving environmental problems. He was listed as one of the 100 top conservationists of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine). He has taught at Yale University. He founded the not-forprofit “Safina Center” at Stony Brook University, where he is the inaugural holder of the Carl Safina Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity. The name typifies his approach to risk communication. Carl Safina’s risk communication has always revolved around the major crises he sees in the world: mass extinctions, climate change, and global toxification. Although each has immediate and short-term effects, they are long-term threats that have their roots in our cultural and religious history. Each is an unending struggle that requires public engagement and action to slow—and sometimes reverse—the declines of species. Safina wants his audience to feel as deeply as he does. His communication is aimed at raising concerns and increasing engagement. Communication about his priority issues thus requires thinking about how we arrived at our current beliefs and situation, and how we can use knowledge and approaches to persuade people to protect the natural world surrounding us. Each of these major crises poses risks to the health and well-being of humanity, and to the natural world (Safina, 2018, 2020, 2021). We discussed risk communication about these ‘‘big’’ crises with Safina—A man dedicated to using communication to change the rules and reduce risk while empowering people to take action. He is equally at home talking with the next-door neighbor, commercial fisherman, angry audiences, unconvinced politicians, and anyone who will listen.