Voyage of the Turtle by Carl Safina

Voyage of the Turtle by Carl Safina

The story of an ancient sea turtle and what its survival says about our future, from the award-winning writer and naturalist

Though nature is indifferent to the struggles of her creatures, the human effect on them is often premeditated. The distressing decline of sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate what can go both wrong and right from our interventions, and teach us the lessons that can be applied to restore health to the world's oceans and its creatures. As Voyage of the Turtle, Carl Safina's compelling natural history adventure makes clear, the fate of the astonishing leatherback turtle, whose ancestry can be traced back 125 million years, is in our hands.

Writing with verve and color, Safina describes how he and his colleagues track giant pelagic turtles across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent. As scientists apply lessons learned in the Atlantic and Caribbean to other endangered seas, Safina follows leatherback migrations, including a thrilling journey from Monterey, California, to nesting grounds on the most remote beaches of Papua, New Guinea. The only surviving species of its genus, family, and suborder, the leatherback is an evolutionary marvel: a reptile that behaves like a warm-blooded dinosaur, an ocean animal able to withstand colder water than most fishes and dive deeper than any whale.

In his peerless prose, Safina captures the delicate interaction between these gentle giants and the humans who are finally playing a significant role in their survival.

Magnificent . . . A joyful, hopeful book. Safina gives us ample reasons to be enthralled by this astonishing ancient animal--and ample reasons to care. -- The Los Angeles Times

Carl Safina's work has received MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, as well as Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary honors, as well as the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals for his writing. Rutgers University awarded him a doctorate in ecology. Safina is the first holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he also co-chairs the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science's steering committee and is the founding president of the non-profit Safina Center. He was the host of the PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina, which lasted ten episodes. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Orion, and others, as well as on the Internet at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com.

His seventh novel is Beyond Words. He currently resides on Long Island, New York.