Amagansett, N.Y.
FOR Carl Safina, the road to becoming a world-traveling ecologist, marine conservationist, author and winner of a MacArthur “genius” award began, one might say, in his backyard in Brooklyn, where he raised homing pigeons as a boy.
His father, a teacher, bred canaries resulting in a house and yard always filled with birds. Both in Brooklyn and in Syosset, N.Y., where he lived after age 10, young Carl would also go fishing with his father, and sometimes, two uncles would ask him out on their boat.
Those invitations were “the most exciting thing that happened to me,” Dr. Safina, 55, recalled this winter in his compact house here. Filled with furniture that he made from driftwood, it is near the beach at Lazy Point, a peninsula jutting into Napeague Bay.
The location figures centrally in his latest book, “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World” (Henry Holt), which came out last month. It recounts his travels, mostly in 2008, to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Caribbean and the western Pacific what he calls the “four points of the compass” toggling between these exotic destinations and life at Lazy Point.
So, did he have a favorite port of call?
“Southeast Alaska was really wonderful,” Dr. Safina said. Alaska “had a lot of wilderness, and it had modern people, with regular boats and fishing tackle and all that stuff.”
“You don’t have to live primitively to have wonderful nature, and nature doesn’t impede being modern,” he said. “What ruins it really is if we overdo it.”
How we overdo it is one theme of “The View From Lazy Point”; writing in The Times Sunday Book Review, Dominique Browning praised its “impassioned, informed urgency,” as well as its “graceful and engaging” prose. Dr. Safina will read some of that prose on March 26 at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.
His reading is likely to include the book’s good news: “I’m continually struck by how much beauty and vitality the world still holds,” he writes. And it will almost certainly also convey the bad: the world remains “unaware of how imperiled it is” by greed and a blindness to the connectedness of man and nature.
“Most people don’t have any idea of what’s around them,” Dr. Safina said as he and a visitor set out for a walk on the nearby beach.
On this sunny but cold day, Lazy Point seemed just a stretch of deserted sand; across a small channel was what appeared to be another empty beach and some gravelly dunes.
Then things changed. “There’s a seal; it’s sleeping,” Dr. Safina said quietly, pointing to the sandy mass actually, Hicks Island in the channel. Sure enough, the all-tan vista now revealed (with the help of binoculars) a beige harbor seal, snoozing in the sunshine.
Add the herring gulls flying overhead and the ducks (both long-tailed and black scoter varieties, he said) in the water, and his point was made: What had seemed a largely empty expanse was, in fact, brimming with life, even in winter.
Though he is an avid fisherman, Dr. Safina has had the occasional run-in locally with those whom he describes as shortsighted or cruel in the name of commerce or sport. (That includes duck hunters who do not gather and eat what they shoot, instead leaving dead and wounded birds in the dunes; a recent encounter with such a party “was very disturbing to me for days,” he said.)
Dr. Safina, who earned his Ph.D. in ecology at Rutgers University, has received numerous honors, most notably the 2000 MacArthur award, and is a co-founder of the nonprofit Blue Ocean Institute, an organization dedicated to conservation of the sea.
He is also an adjunct professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. (He and his companion, Patricia Paladines, who is on the staff of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at the university, divide their time between Lazy Point and East Setauket, about 52 miles to the west.)
Last month, Dr. Safina did some more traveling, accompanying Stony Brook journalism students to the Gulf Coast, where the students investigated the impact of last year’s oil spill. (He has a book about the disaster, “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout,” due out in April.)
For all his travels, Lazy Point always beckons. “It seems like you can see the whole world” from Lazy Point, Dr. Safina said, “which I think is true for anybody anywhere, really.
“If you look right, you can see the whole world from wherever you happen to be.”