Voyage of the Turtle

 

"Carl Safina is like some extraordinary astronaut who goes into space and comes back with fantastic tales of other planets and the creatures who inhabit them. Except that the marvelous planet is our own. This is a story of stoicism and wonder that will make the oceans seem that much richer to all who read it."—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy
 
"That remarkable voice for the marine realm, Carl Safina, reveals the riveting tale of that most extraordinary creature, the Leatherback Turtle, overlain with the drama and hope of the battle for its conservation. No naturalist or planetary citizen can hope to be complete without Voyage of the Turtle. A fabulous book."—Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment

"MacArthur fellow and John Burroughs Award–winner Safina presents an impassioned account of the plight of ocean-dwelling turtles, especially the largest, the leatherback, 'the closest thing we have to a living dinosaur.' Leatherbacks, which can weigh over a ton, range the oceans to nesting sites on beaches along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Safina travels to many of these sites, bringing the reader into the turtles' world as he describes how the females leave the ocean, cross sandy beaches, dig huge pits using their flippers as spades, lay their eggs and then creep back into the sea. He shows how precarious this world is; nature's dangers are always present, but it's human activities that threaten the turtles with extinction: poaching, longline fishing nets in which the turtles can drown and depletion of the turtles' food supply due to overfishing and global warming. There are remedies, such as intensive nest-saving programs, but these take time to implement, and time is running out for the turtles. Safina's eloquent book is a battle cry in the struggle for the survival of one of the world's most beautiful and endangered creatures."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)