The people behind OCEAN
Dr. Carl Safina, on-camera host for the series, is a marine biologist by training, best-selling author of popular books about ocean subjects, and founder of the conservation organization, Blue Ocean Institute. Safina spent a decade studying seabirds’ relationships with prey- and predatory fishes, studied birds of prey on the East Coast and in the Arctic (and for a long while practiced falconry), fished part-time commercially and continues fishing recreationally and scientifically, joining other scientists conducting tagging and tracking studies of giant Bluefin Tuna and large sharks such as Makos. His studies of fish, seabirds, and fishing communities have taken him to oceanic realms from the Arctic to Antarctica, to coral reefs and coastal regions on every continent, and hundreds of miles at sea with scientists and commercial fishermen, sometimes for weeks at a stretch.
Safina has studied the ocean as a scientist, stood for it as an advocate, and conveyed his travels among sea creatures and fishing people in lyrical non-fiction writing. He has great empathy for the plight of both animals and people, but he knows that each is served by maintaining abundance and neither by creating scarcity. His hundred-plus publications and award-winning books include Song for the BlueOcean, Eye of the Albatross and Voyage of the Turtle, and his writing has been featured in National Geographic. He’s been profiled by the New York Times, Nightline, and Bill Moyers. His awards include a Pew Fellowship, Lannan Literary Award, John Burroughs Medal, and a MacArthur Prize, among others (not forgetting the Popular Science “Worst Jobs in Science” Award).
John Angier, series producer and executive producer, has been intimately involved in the creation of some of public television’s most successful national programming. He is a founding member of the team that created the Nova science series on PBS, and was one of the series’ original episode producers; at Chedd-Angier-Lewis he co-created and co-produced PBS’s first science magazine series, Discover: The World of Science, hosted by Peter Graves, and the long-running popular science magazine Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by Alan Alda. More than a hundred episodes of Frontiers were broadcast on the PBS national network over the course of its 15-year run.