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As we honor the life and work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, let’s celebrate the fact that she was right: we can peacefully co-exist with each other and with nature.
A great way to understand how is to look at community-managed sustainable fisheries.
As reported on NPR’s Morning Edition, when New England’s fish stocks became severely depleted, a lack of fish put a lot of fishermen out of business. One group of fishermen in Port Clyde, Maine, changed the marketing and processing of their catch in hopes of making more money on fewer fish. Chefs like Joseph Margate of Boston’s Liberty Hotel are fans of this approach. “Chefs are only as good as their ingredients; technique only gets you so far. And good ingredients would be impossible without healthy lands and waters,” Margate said in an interview with Nature.Org.
A few small sustainable fisheries make a big difference.
An international team of scientists has gathered the first conclusive evidence that even small protected areas can help the whole ocean. Their study, summarized in ScienceDaily has shown that even fish populations in areas open to larger-scale commercial fishing can benefit from small-scale protections.
Paso Pacífico has a new initiative for Sustainable Fisheries and Local Resource Management and we’ll keep you posted about it on our website and here on our blog. This community-building program is empowering citizen scientists to monitor and manage the natural resources their livelihoods depend on.
Sustainable fisheries are turtle friendly!
One of the reasons Paso Pacífico is so active in sustainable fisheries is to reduce the number of sea turtles caught in fishermen’s nets, so we’ll publish some of the findings from our initial fisheries assessment later this week, just in time for World Sea Turtle Day, June 16th. If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for our newsletter.
Update, June 14
The New York Times has published an Elinor Ostrom reading list: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/elinor-ostrom-reading-list/