OUR 2021 UMVIKELI WILDLIFE PROTECTOR: CARL SAFINA

Carl Safina receiving the 2021 Umvikeli Wildlife Protector Award from Wild Tomorrow Fund’s Executive Director, John Steward.

Wild Tomorrow Fund was delighted to honor Carl Safina, world-renowned author, conservationist, and MacArthur genius, as the recipient of Wild Tomorrow Fund’s 2021 Umvikeli Wildlife Protector Award. Carl received his award at our Annual New York Gala on November 19th, at the glamorous 230 Fifth Empire Ballroom in New York City.

Now in its fifth year, Wild Tomorrow Fund's Umvikeli Wildlife Protector Award is an international award that recognizes an individual or organization working tirelessly to protect wildlife and wild spaces. The award recognized Carl Safina’s efforts personally, and through the work of The Safina Center, to connect people’s hearts to wildlife and make the connection so desperately needed to save life on earth.

It is an often-cited statistic: today 1 million species face extinction, caused by humans and our many pressures on the planet. We are causing nothing less than the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth. But as we’ve seen with climate change warnings that have gone unheeded and countless IUCN Red List reports & devastating poaching reports, facts alone don’t move people to act. That’s why the work of Carl Safina is so important.

Anchored in rigorous science, Carl Safina’s writing has awakened millions of people to the importance of biodiversity, provoking wonder and awe for the incredible species with whom we share our planet. Carl’s work creates an opportunity for readers to connect with and understand the emotional lives of individual species - to learn about their familial bonds and their beautifully complex lives. In doing so, the birds, rhinos, giraffe, and elephants become “someone”, with a family and culture. Not just another statistic on an impossibly long list of threatened species.

“Carl Safina’s words have helped us to articulate our own beliefs,” said John Steward, Executive Director of Wild Tomorrow Fund. “It enabled us at Wild Tomorrow to build empathy within our circles to connect individuals with the threatened species that we are protecting in South Africa. This emotional connection carries hearts across continents, moving supporters to take urgent action to save wildlife in wild places far away.” 

In Safina’s latest book, Becoming Wild, there are many connections between his work and Wild Tomorrow Fund’s. In the numbing statistics of the mass extinction of wildlife, there is still hope, Safina says. The rarest subspecies of giraffe, for example, was down to about fifty individuals remaining; today its numbers have multiplied to about four hundred. “When people want it to, saving species works. The animals just need room to live and to be left in peace to make their own choices,” writes Safina. “Same thing with the ospreys, the bald eagles, the whales,” he said in an interview with Wild Tomorrow Fund. “All of them have had tremendous recoveries because a few people would not give up on them. As long as there is life, there is hope.”

Wild Tomorrow Fund’s Reserve is saving wild space for 46 threatened species (and counting). The birth of each new animal is a symbol of hope, living proof that habitat restoration works. Animals at our reserve have been born on land that otherwise would have been lost to a sea of monoculture pineapple fields. Thanks to our urgent interventions, their home is now a legally protected Nature Reserve, where species have been re-introduced and are being born wild after decades of absence.

Our land also acts as an ecological corridor, reconnecting the landscape of our region, so wildlife can move and exchange genetic information, expanding and connecting their islands of habitat. A species that will greatly benefit from this connectivity is the African savannah elephant. Over the course of his working life, Carl Safina has been able to witness elephants roam across gigantic continuous swathes of land in Africa, in places that have now shrunk and broken apart. “It’s become shards of habitat. And life cannot live in disconnected shards of habitat because life is about connections and connectivity. You can save things by stopping the decline and destruction but to guarantee them any hope of a future, you have to connect what is left.” He emphasized: “It is crucial to save wild things because that is the world. That is the living planet. If you don’t save wild things, you are letting the world die. It’s totally fundamental. Life on Earth is the only place that we know that life exists.”

In his acceptance of the award, Carl shared with Wild Tomorrow Fund: “When you are a writer, you mostly work alone in a room, and then your products just go out in the world. It’s only through any recognition when people say “what you do means something to me” that it continues to be worthwhile to sit in that room by yourself. So, getting the recognition and getting the affirmation of this award really kind of means everything to me. I am so humbled to be honored among people who are really doing what matters on the ground.”

Safina’s work continues off the written page at The Safina Center in Long Island, New York. The creative mission of the Center has as its purpose “nothing less than making a case for life on Earth.” “When I talk about the idea that facts alone won’t save the world,” Safina says, “it’s because quite honestly people don’t care too much about facts. They care about what they love. They care about how they feel, and that’s what they act on. And so, hearts can save the world. And hearts must save the world.”

Past recipients of the Umvikeli Wildlife Protector Award include US Senator Chris Coons (2017) who co-sponsored the END Wildlife Trafficking Act; Dr. Dave Cooper (2018), a world-respected South African wildlife veterinarian who is working on the front lines of conservation, saving as many lives as he can from the devastating impact of rhino poaching; and Les Carlisle (2019), an esteemed South African conservationist who has spent his career tirelessly working to protect wild spaces, pioneering methods of wildlife translocation and establishing our next-door neighbor, Phinda Private Game Reserve.