the land, forcibly stripped naked, the stump-studded hills standing in goose bumps, suffering from exposure. When he flies over the Valley of the Giants in Oregon (named for the great evergreen forests), he sees “a far-and-wide landscape of mud, stumps, slash, bark and a few green sprigs. Is the extinction of the bluefin tuna, a creature that Safina lovingly describes as “half a ton of laminated muscle rocketing through the sea as fast as you drive your car,” the price we must all pay because some Japanese are willing to fork over $50 an ounce for sashimi? Are we going to lose the steelheads, Chinooks and coho salmon because local politicians are on the take from the lumber industry? Have we already lost 90% of the forests of the Pacific Northwest? Will we poison the exotic and distant coral reefs of the South Pacific? Safina’s “Song for the Blue Ocean” is a heartbreaking requiem for the world’s aquatic resources. He is an ecologist with the soul of a poet: a writer of graceful prose on ungraceful, disturbing subjects. Not as a snitch but, rather, as the person whose job it will be to inform the rest of us about what’s really going on in the world. I hereby nominate Carl Safina as Official Informer.
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