Synopsis
Carl Safina advocates that animals think and feel much like people do – because, after all, people are animals. Animals have inner lives but how does that call into question what really makes us human, how can it change our relationship with the natural world?
Beyond Words is a landmark that challenges the boundary between humans and nonhumans. Weaving together up-to-date scientific discoveries into consciousness with intimidate observation of free-living animals, from herds of elephants in Kenya to a wolf pack in Yellowstone National Park and schools of killer whales in the Pacific, Carl Safina takes the reader into their lives and minds.
Do elephants love their babies?
Wolf territorial fights resemble human tribal warfare.
In understanding that animals think, mourn, and have unique personalities (as well as having distinctive roles within their social structures) as well as the capacity for perception, self-awareness and emotional connection Carl Safina demonstrates how humans – with their friends, families, career plans – are similar to other animals that live in structured groups, from elephants and great apes to dolphins.
A group of killer whales can be spread across 150 square miles – and all be in vocal contact.
Beyond Words re-evaluates our relationship to the other species around us. Animals are directly affected by human pressures, and in encountering (and listening) to the minds of other animals Carl Safina hears what animals need humans to know about our shared life.
Carl Safina is the founder of the Safina Center, which works to fuse scientific understanding of nature with a moral call to heal the natural world.
He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University and holds the chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University. Carl Safina has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation 'genious' Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and hosts the 10-part television series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina.
About the Author
Carl Safina's work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Orion, and other periodicals and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com. Beyond Words is his seventh book. He lives on Long Island, New York.
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