Date: 11/15/2016
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
Mac Classroom
Description
Carl Safina: “Beyond Words: How Elephants, Wolves, and Killer Whales Think and Feel”
Carl Safina spent time working with researchers who’ve spent decades studying particular families of wild elephants, wolves, and killer whales. He got to know these free-living creatures as individuals, along with their children and grandchildren. In this talk he tells us of amazing strategies and judgment calls these actual wild creatures have made to ensure their families’ survival in times of crisis.
Safina will explore up-to-date brain studies showing astonishing new discoveries about the similarities in our consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, non-verbal communication, imitation, teaching, the roots of aesthetics including music, and a surprisingly capacity for grief widespread among elephants, wolves, whales, and even certain birds.
The main thing that Safina will show is that animals think and feel a lot like people do—because after all, people are animals. He’ll show that many non-human beings know who their friends are. They know who their enemies are. They have ambitions for status, and their lives follow the arc of a career. Relationships define them, as relationships define us.
Carl Safina’s writing about the living world has won a MacArthur “genius” prize, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. His seabird studies earned a PhD in ecology from Rutgers; he then spent a decade working to ban high-seas drift nets and to overhaul U.S. fishing policy. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and runs the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, Audubon, and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and elsewhere. He is author of the classic book, Song for the Blue Ocean. Carl’s seventh book is Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. He lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Location: Special Collections Seminar Room, second floor, Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library (room E-2340), Stony Brook University (directions).
Please note: food and drink are not permitted in the seminar room.
If you have any questions, please contact:
Kristen J. Nyitray
Head, Special Collections & University Archives
University Archivist
Associate Librarian
kristen.nyitray@stonybrook.edu
(631) 632-7119
Registration
This event is fully booked.
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