The Canio's Books Blog

Carl Safina’s eloquent new book The View From Lazy Point: a Natural Year in an Unnatural World isn’t just a view from that idyllic place on eastern Long Island. It’s a view that takes in the northern Arctic, down to Antarctica and through the tropics. As he told a tightly-packed house Saturday night, you can see the whole world from just one place. But Safina, world-renowned ecologist and founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, actually traveled these places and saw for himself the ice melt, the loss of habitat, the disruption and displacement of climate change. The book is a lyrical report from the field, a lament, but also a paean to this Earth, the one truly sacred place, as Safina describes it. What’s needed to protect and preserve our precious watery home is nothing short of a moral imperative to do so. Our major institutions, economic, religious, Safina said, have become decoupled from reality, from the world as we know it today. Yet perhaps it’s in the fields just outside the walls of these monolithic and crumbling institutions where we might be able to sew not the grapes of wrath, but the seeds of peace.
Mr. Safina promised to return to Canio’s Books later this year to read from his forthcoming Sea in Flames:The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout. From our small corner of the planet, we are honored to host these events while the world is a better place for the work of Dr. Carl Safina.