Becoming Wild Quotes

“Beings who've succeeded on earth for millennia don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong here as do we. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurtling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace

“The more humans fill the world, the more we empty it.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“Men saw in whales everything-except
whales themselves.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“Beauty is not superficial, or "mere", or a luxury. Beauty is the birthright of living beings. Imagine the unrelieved drudgery of a life without beauty. Subtract beauty, then consider all the grim imperatives and demands of finding food and shelter, competing, procreating; who would want to bother? Emerson wrote, "He thought it happier to be dead / To die for beauty, than live for bread." Beauty is the thing that makes life worth the time it takes. Beauty makes life worth the effort, the risks and the frights and the struggles that being alive requires. Beauty is the reward the frights and the struggles that being alive requires. Beauty is the reward our brains give us for making the effort to stay in the world. Beauty is what eases that effort into joy. Beauty makes our smiles, and gets us past the tears. I think it's that profound, that fundamental. I think that is what all beauties have in common, from the sight of a macaw and the song of a thrush to the deliciousness of good food, the touch of a loved one, or the fidgets of someone small who needs their diaper changed. So maybe we could write, "She found it happier to be here / To walk in beauty, than shrink in fear." Beauty makes us love what it takes to live.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“Darwin had no problem saying that animals had fun playing. But suddenly only people could “play”; a behaviorist might say that non-humans could merely “engage in affiliative activity.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“To learn is to become.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“I seek merely the miraculous, and for that I am
positioned in exactly the best of places: a mostly
wet, hard sphere in the third planetary orbit from
a star called sun, the place where miracles come so
cheap that they are routinely discarded.
Hard to believe, I know.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“An individual receives genes only from their parents but can receive culture from anyone and everyone in their social group. You’re not born with culture; that’s the difference. And because culture improves survival, culture can lead where genes must follow and adapt.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“The blue-gray sea is slick and hazy-bright. It is both eternal and instantaneous, and the whales that this ocean has brought forth seem, in their pacing and their scale, to reflect the enormousness of all things past and present. Something like time must be passing, but I feel suspended in an infinite moment that almost vibrates in place. Perhaps from the whales I have learned something about living.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“For a little while, I am where I am best, among living manifestations of greater powers that long preceded me and may long outlast us all. For the duration of the encounter, the beauties and truths of them overwhelm the heartache, cleanse everything. For a short interval of time, they have tapped me awake and I feel at home in the world.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“...the world appears beautiful so that the living may love being alive in it. Life has developed-and we have inherited-a sense of the beautiful to let us feel at home in the world, without further reason.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace

“The whales consider themselves different individuals, so we have to treat them that way. Think of tribes. Tribes of other beings. Other beings with other minds living other lives on the same planet. Different, certainly. But fundamentally not really very different. They mean something to one another, and so their lives mean something to them. Perhaps that should mean something to us.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace

“We might pity hunter-gatherers for their stuck simplicity, but we would err. They held extensive knowledge, knew deep secrets of their lands and creatures. And they experienced rich and rewarding lives; we know so because when they were threatened, they fought to hold on to them, to the death. Sadly, this remains true as the final tribal peoples get overwhelmed by miners, loggers, ranchers, and planters who value money above humanity, which is perhaps the most salient characteristic of our culture.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace