Can you tell us about your career journey? How did you decide to pursue a career in marine ecology, and what made you decide to become an environmental writer?

I always loved animals and the natural world. So it’s a life journey, not just a career journey. I always had pets, went birding, camping, fishing, and learned bird-banding, and so on. In college, I majored in environmental science. There I met professors involved in bird work, and I got temporary jobs re-introducing peregrine falcons and studying seabirds called terns. After that, I got a job with the New Jersey Dept of Environmental Protection finding illegal toxic chemical dumps, and a year later—through connections I made volunteering—got a job with the National Audubon Society. I studied terns for the next ten years and got a master's and PhD doing that. Because I was on the water a lot with the terns, and fishing a lot, I could see that fish were being depleted by overfishing. So I switched my work and focused on changing federal fisheries law and also working internationally to protect bluefin tuna and sharks. That’s a long story but it had a lot to do with very actively pursuing connections with other environmentalists and fishing groups and being on a very steep learning curve. We succeeded in getting fishing quotas reduced and in writing and getting through Congress the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 19963. The follow-through with that was writing my first book, Song for the Blue Ocean, and I’ve been writing books and articles4 and speaking ever since. Now I also teach.

Throughout your work, you have achieved real-world policy changes such as a global fisheries treaty and a policy to reduce large marine vertebrate bycatch. Can you tell us about your journey through that? For instance, when you set out on those science communication campaigns, did you feel confident that you would achieve the changes you were asking for? Or was that just a happy byproduct of your efforts?

I was very far from confident. But the goals were very precisely articulated and the campaigns very targeted. Not at all byproducts. But the successes were certainly happy. When I was motivated to involve myself I had no idea what to do. How does one end overfishing? But I was very proactive and realized—though my view of myself was that I was kind-of shy and liked to work independently—that I had a surprising hidden talent for networking and organizing. I also realized that policy is not mainly science; it’s people, it’s law, it’s very much politics. I started on a local Long Island issue, then found out that boats from Asia with forty-mile driftnets had snuck into the Atlantic, and I threw myself into those things. I was very persistent about getting issues into high-visibility news outlets. That led people to me and me to people and we started working on banning this practice at the United Nations. I arranged to speak to other big national environmental groups to get them involved in these same issues. My main ability turned out to be writing, and I wrote articles about how fisheries policies were failing and how to fix the laws, and I published them in influential journals and then used them for amplified communication. I linked up with environmental lawyers who knew how to get things into Congress.

How did you develop your ability to communicate science in such an effective way as to drive action (through, for example, the creation of new policies)?

Practice. Learning by doing. Doing a lot of it. Networking with people who knew things I did not know about how to get things done. Working with them. Learning how to get grants from foundations for conservation policy work.

What about your work motivates you despite facing challenging situations?

I am much too privileged to justify wallowing in feeling bad about situations that do, in fact, make me feel sad and angry. My love and concern for the natural world and other species, for wild things and wild places, is the central driver of my life. I am good about balancing work and enjoyment of wild things. Pets, walks on the beach, fishing—some things have gotten much better, especially in the waters of Long Island, and I love seeing the whales, fish, and seabirds doing pretty well compared to when I started this work. Other things have gotten worse. The current political scene is by far the worst ever in this country. So there is good and bad. There is balance. And there is a lot of work to do. The writer E. B. White, who wrote Charlotte’s Web and many other things, said, “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” That pretty much sums it up for me.

For the graduate student/researcher who doesn’t feel the need to develop their ability to communicate outside their academic discipline, what would you encourage them to reconsider?

Well, there is an overwhelming need. Silence is the same as complicity. The biggest threat to anything is the people who say nothing. That’s how bad people win. That’s what is happening right now in the U.S. With science and reason and democracy under assault from within, this is not a time to be silent, or to sit and watch, or to hope other people will do it because you’re too busy with your own work. Your own work won’t be anything when all the science funding is cut.

For graduate students and early-career researchers who want to develop their science communication skills, but are not sure how to balance that with their commitment to academic work, and the need to publish for scientific audiences, what advice would you give?

No one can do everything. Everyone can do something. Do something.

Do you have any other inputs or advice for those who are starting their research/academic careers in this cultural/political moment that we are currently in?

Keep working. But don’t ignore what’s happening. Use your voice. And be patient, because the worst people always topple. And these are the worst people, and they’re incompetent too. Cracks are already showing in their façade.

How have public perception and the current political climate affected your work over the years, and how you have adapted to these changes? Considering your experience, how do you think the future of climate policy and communication will pan out in the long run? 

There is always a need for me to balance the current events against the big picture. I’m not a reporter, so I am not focusing my work only on current events. I am commenting on the present appalling political situation in social and mainstream media, but I am also working on a big-picture book about the scientific subject of sentience, in humans and other animals. So I am in the present day, and I am also trying to contribute to a broader understanding of deeper aspects of Life.

Has anyone served as a role model in your life through their science communication work or otherwise?

Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez.

What was your favorite book/piece to work on and why?

That’s like asking a parent who their favorite child is. I will say that I was very unsure I could complete my first book. I did not know what I was doing and halfway through, the project was a mess verging on disaster. Now when the project is a mess, I know I will figure out how to make it work. I’ve learned to have a little faith in myself.

What are the “coolest” places you’ve visited for your research or fieldwork?

What comes to mind right away are Laysan Island and Palau. But I have been so, so fortunate to have visited every continent from the Arctic to Antarctic and across the tropics, and I am still getting to do new things in new places. Luck has helped my work, but my work has created an incredible amount of luck. My life has turned out much better, and much more interesting than I ever thought possible. When I was in college, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to go anywhere or do anything that mattered. I am glad I was wrong about myself.

Footnotes:

1 https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/somas/people/_profiles/carl-safina.php#BioResearch

2 https://www.carlsafina.org/

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Fisheries_Act_of_1996

4 https://www.carlsafina.org/

Could you please describe to me any current research you're involved in? 

Current research I'm involved in. Well, I'll have this very, very long standing research project that I've been working on for like 25 years. That involves sign language and it started, well, more than 25 years ago. I guess 30 years ago, I had a visitor who was here from Israel who managed to convince me that sign language was something that had properties that would interest me, because I'm interested in how words are formed, the internal structure of words. And anyway, we went back and forth and I spent some time in Israel working with her, and then just by chance we came across a sign language that had emerged in a Bedouin village in the desert in Israel, and we spent about a dozen years studying this language and mostly trying to figuring out what it meant to create a new language. And so we've been working on that for a very long time and a couple of years ago, she started a related project that involved, in this case, people who had come to Israel from Russia, who used Russian sign language, and then looking at the interaction between their Russian sign language and the Israeli sign language. Unfortunately, I was supposed to go to Israel in November of 2023. and I didn't, for obvious reasons, because of the war that started in October, and I haven't been able to go since. So that just sort of came to a halt, so that's sort of one thing that I've been doing, but that sort of has not happened for a while. The other thing that I'm involved in is looking at new ways of forming words. In English in particular, I'm looking at words like, ‘combo’ for ‘combination’, so that these are like two syllable words that you take a word and you shorten it, two syllables. And that turns out to have all kinds of interesting properties. And then another thing that I've been working on, how to start this, you know, in a university like Stony Brook, you gain status by doing research. You do not gain status by teaching. So, I'm not sure whether it's perversely or whatever, but I've always had a strong interest in teaching. And so one of the things that I've done over the last ten years or so, is I've become interested in online asynchronous courses. So I've created, with other people, some very successful online asynchronous courses, and that's right now, I've been working on an online asynchronous version of the introductory linguistics course, and I've been doing that for about three years now. It’s kind of in the very last stages. We haven't really thought about it, but in September, we're gonna try and teach it as a regular course. Because I think that's sort of that really is the future or one aspect of the future of education. 

To come back to what you mentioned, the war halting your research. Other than that, do you have any other research challenges that you've recently encountered, and if so, how did you overcome those? 

Oh, wow. I mean, a big challenge is that I often try and do things that I don't have expertise in. So I end up having to find people who can do the sorts of things that I want to do. And so that's a challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, but it's a challenge because you get to meet people and that sort of thing. And so it doesn't always work, right? So that's kind of a perpetual challenge, and then you have to deal with what happens, right? So, if you’re working in a different community, you have to be able to work collaboratively so that you're not the only one who's getting what you want, right? Other people have other goals.

You're talking about collaboration here which ties into another question that I have for you. That is, what has interdisciplinary collaboration taught you about language that you may not have discovered strictly through the lens of linguistics? 

Yeah, I mean, so I have this interest in written language versus spoken language. So linguists, when you take an intro linguistics class, you learn from day one that language is basically spoken and that written language is just sort of secondary. But that's not, of course, what you learn at school, because when you go to school the first thing that you learn in school is learning to read and write, right? So I've had, I guess, a long, long fascination with reading and writing and writing systems. And so I've worked for a long time with many different people who are interested in reading. And most of those people know something about linguistics, but it's not their primary interest. I've worked with psychologists from very early on, when I first came to Stony Brook. I started working with experimental psychologists, and again, I think their interests are different, but we can help each other in various ways.

And you feel like that collaboration has impacted your research? 

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's the same with computer people that can do things that I really cannot do, and they have questions that I don't. They may have different questions from mine. But by working together, we can sort of figure out things that we're both interested in.

What are some of the most significant advancements you’ve seen in linguistics over your career? 

Well, yeah, I mean I sort of think this is true in every academic field where you say in a way, the more you know, the less you know, and so one of the things that I would say is that people see that language is much more complex than they ever thought it was. And different ways that it is used. I mean, some aspects of language really haven't changed at all. One of the things I think, which I would regard as an advance, but more of a political and social advance, is that people have become much more accepting of the fact that there are many different ways of speaking and many different kinds of languages. So one of the things I would say is a great advance in the last 50 years is the acceptance of sign language. So, when I was growing up, when I was very young, I think, people really thought that sign language wasn't really language. And linguists, even linguists. I mean, most linguists, if you ask them about sign language, would have said, oh, sign language isn't really language. It's something else that these poor people can't speak so they have to use sign language. and that's changed a lot and people have become much more accepting. And also, people have become much more accepting of different varieties of English. So, if you think about it, just in things like I think the best evidence of this comes from ads on television. So, if you watch ads on television, it's not just that you see many more different kinds of people, but that the different kinds of people are talking in different ways. So I would say even 20 years ago, hearing somebody using, let's say, southern English, or black american English in a TV ad would be just I mean, it just didn't happen. People on TV ads spoke some sort of, I don't know, standard English, and that's no longer the case. [Now] you can hear people talking all different kinds of ways on TV ads.

Where do you see the future of your research evolving?

Well, I know I'm old. I'm really old. I mean, the fact for me is that it evolves at all. 

Do you think others will carry on your work? 

Oh, yeah, one of the things that I like most and I appreciate most is that I see people continuing along these lines of work that I've done, and people doing new stuff. And I like it when people do things that I can't do, to me, that's the best. I say “okay, look, I'm taking what you're doing, and now I'm doing this new stuff that I can't do.” It's these, newer people who can do it. So we're talking about computers. They're all kinds of things that people now do, computationally that are just way beyond anything that I can. And cool stuff. 

You've been at Stony Brook since receiving your PhD, how has your perspective on the field of linguistics changed?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think in general, when I first started out, people were trying to narrow things down because they felt that if you simply dealt with a very narrow range of phenomena, that could help you to understand things better. I think that has changed a lot. People are looking at much richer types of data than they were willing to look at. Yeah, it's always a good thing. I think. 

For those who may be unfamiliar with your field, could you describe why you believe it's an important field of study?

Well, it's pretty easy, right? I mean, just so, if you ask yourself, well, what do humans have that nobody else has? Right? And I mean there's a standard joke of how you define humans, and you could look it up and figure out who it came from because I can't off the top of my head remember, but the definition of humans is that humans are featherless bipeds. Right? Because what other creature walks on two legs and doesn't have any feathers? Right? But, you know, it's a joke because it misses [so many other characteristics that differentiate birds from humans]. There is no other creature that walks on two legs and doesn't have feathers, but does that really tell you anything about humans? But if you ask yourself, okay, what is it that humans do that nothing else does, and the answer is that all humans have language, every human community has a language. And not only that, but they have different languages. Right? So that to me is if you really are interested in finding out how people work, and I presume that that's something that people are interested in because they're people. So, if we're interested in figuring out ‘how do we work as people?’, then the most obvious thing to look at is language, right? Because that's what's unique to humans, right? And so to that extent, I think, you know, that's why language is important, and nowadays from a purely practical point of view, ‘what is the biggest thing in the world today?’ The biggest hot topic in the world today is artificial intelligence. And what is artificial intelligence about? It’s actually about language. I mean, yes, there are aspects of artificial intelligence that don't have to deal with language, but it's a different fraction. Almost all of artificial intelligence has to do with language. There's an interesting question that my colleagues are looking at, not so much me. Is it the way in which artificial intelligence understands language, is that really that helpful and the added risk as well, maybe, but not entirely, you know, does it have it? So the um what we call in the business, large language models. Basically what you do is you have these very powerful computers that collect huge amounts of language. That's what they're collecting, huge amounts of language for the most part. And then using those to produce new language as the way it works. But, is that what's actually going on? And one of the reasons why we think it might not be going on is because if you look at how children acquire a language, it turns out that they need very small amounts of language. They don't need a lot. Yeah. So I have colleagues who look at that, in other words, if you take a child from age zero to age five, let's say, which is when they're pretty much fully speaking, how much data have they been exposed to? And it turns out not a lot. And yet, even though they haven't been exposed to a lot of data, they have learned the language. So the question is, what are they doing that the computer doesn't seem to be able to do? Because you really need to give the computer a vast amount of data, which is one reason why we're having problems with electricity because computers are now using much more electricity than they ever did. And they're doing that because they have to look at much more data than they ever did. So, yeah, I think as long as there are people, then the study of language will be important, because that's what people do and nobody else does. Right?

What is the most common misconception about linguistics you encounter when teaching or mentoring students either from within linguistics or from other disciplines?

Well, two things, first of all that there's a right way and a wrong way of talking. That's the most common. I mean, there is no intrinsically right or wrong way. It has to do with the community. So that's one and then the other one that we talked about before, which is people think of language as somehow written, but most languages are not written. Written language is actually very, very recent. It's maybe 5000 years old, whereas the human species is committed at this point, probably at least a quarter of a million years ago. I mean, it keeps on going further and further back, but we'll say a quarter of a million. So those are the two, I would say most common. 

What advice would you give to aspiring linguists or those who might be interested in jumping into the field of linguistics? 

Take my linguistics 101 course that we're gonna put online, it’s an asynchronous online course. And what I would say to everybody, not just not just linguists, is you need to know something about computing. It's not that it's the future of the field, it's that people will not be able to really negotiate without being able to use computers in various ways. In any academic discipline.