June 30: Carl Safina in conversation with Luanne Rice
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, ecologist Carl Safina will speak with Luanne Rice about his newest book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt, 2020) at 6pm ET on Tuesday, June 30.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, June 30 at 6pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace by Carl Safina (Published by Henry Holt)
Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you, too, experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You, too, are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. You receive it from thousands of individuals, from pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You, too, may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. The light of knowledge needs adjusting as situations change, so a capacity for learning, especially social learning, allows behaviors to adjust, to change much faster than genes alone could adapt. Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among non-human animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this book offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of life on Earth, and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?
Photo: Kizza Vincent
Carl Safina's work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards as well as the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the ten-part PBS series, "Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina." His books include Beyond Words, The Blue Ocean, and The Eye of the Albatross. He lives on Long Island, New York.
Photo: Kristina Loggia
Luanne Rice is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-four novels—including her most recent book, Last Day (Thomas & Mercer, February 2020)—as well as three YA novels. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages and adapted for television on CBS, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and Lifetime. She has been awarded an honorary degree from Connecticut College; an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from St. Joseph College in West Hartford, CT; and the 2014 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award. Rice, an avid environmentalist, is honored to be a creative affiliate of the Safina Center.