With Shifting Baselines we have generally advocated the idea of communicating more effectively with fishermen as a means to building healthier partnerships with them, rather than having to confront them so much. Chuck Cook and Rod Fujita of Environmental Defense have been doing exactly this for the past five years along the central California coast. Here's an article in the New York Times recently about Chuck's great work.
August 8, 2006
Unlikely Partners Create Plan to Save Ocean Habitat Along With Fishing
By JON CHRISTENSEN
MORRO BAY, Calif. — Fishery closings are generally not greeted as good news in ports like this.
Angry protests are more likely. So to find an environmentalist and two commercial fishermen quietly conspiring on the bridge of a fishing boat docked in Morro Bay as a far-reaching prohibition on bottom trawling went into effect on the West Coast this summer was unusual, to say the least.
The environmentalist, Chuck Cook, said he had been called a “conservation Nazi” in some ports. And Gordon Fox, who has been dragging fish and shrimp from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for nearly 30 years, admitted the conversation would be “perceived by some in the industry to be sleeping with the enemy.”
Together with other fishermen and conservationists, Mr. Cook and Mr. Fox have fashioned a plan that they hope will preserve the fish and, just as important to both of them, fishing here off the central coast of California.
Here's the rest of the story.
Posted by Randy Olson at August 22, 2006 06:38 PM