People

One golden evening in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard, I turn into a narrow driveway off a dirt road. The driveway is narrow and flanked by untrimmed bushes and piles of firewood. There’s a green old pick-up close to the house, a wonderful house: all natural wood with a wrap-around porch that touches up to the trees surrounding. There are conch shells—big ones—on wire hanging whimsically from the overhanging roof around the door, and they shimmer a little in the breeze. Inside it’s dark, cozy and spacious, very airy, with high ceilings. There’s a stove and fridge and great cabinets under a skylight’s slant; the 7 p.m. summer sun comes in. The place is decorated with tenderness and purpose. I’m handed two fat, fresh steaks of striped bass, and advised to cook them simply for best flavor, with some garlic. On the ferry ride home I realize how magical and strange it is that I was ever there, on Martha’s Vineyard, that I was bought ice cream by the old fisherman. We ate our cones together, chocolate dripping on the Menemsha fishing docks, before he wiped his hands on his knees and bailed rainwater out of his boat with a plastic bucket.

My summer was scattered with similar moments of wonder: how did I get here? There was the Gloucester Farmer’s Market Seafood Throwndown, my Vineyard community radio debut, the cup of tea in Stonington, Maine. These were profound encounters throughout my organizing for the New England Fish Forum’s first Conversation, which at last took place on August 18 in Rhode Island, right after the Women & Fisheries Project meeting that the Fish Forum co-sponsored.

When I proposed the Fish Forum for the Starr Fellowship, I did knew that networking and trustbuilding would be necessary to convene such a meeting, where fishermen, scientists and policymakers would come together not because it was required or official, but because they wanted to talk with each other. Still, as the summer unfolded, it became obvious that my principle work would not be holding the meetings, not even organizing for those meetings, but building interest and engagement in the New England Fish Forum’s goals, and above all, getting to know people and their concerns so that the New England Fish Forum could serve real needs. I did this by phone, email, and by meeting people. Some were discouraging or cautious, others very encouraging. Enough were encouraging that I continued to feel that my sometimes frustration and confusion were worth it, and that the New England Fish Forum was needed. A New England quality of life, the success of the region’s fisheries management, and a balance of environmental and social sustainability could only be achieved with better communication among fishermen, scientists and managers outside of the Council. I was bolstered by support and interest from people I met, and their enthusiasm was inspirational, even as the caution and skepticism I heard from others guided the design of the August 18 meeting.

I did not foresee how the networking and trustbuilding and organizing I would do would involve me directly with the lives of people up and down the region’s coast. I did not expect to see people’s houses, for instance, or to be called just to check in, and I am honored to have earned the respect and trust that I did. I wrote my thesis on New England fisheries management but I have learned more in this summer than I did in my last year of research, simply by talking with people, seeing their homes, seeing where they work. And for that reason, as August 18 approached, I became not only excited but terrified by what was at stake.

August 18: the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island’s East Bay Campus. The evening was designed as a duo of meetings. The first, a discussion meeting of women involved in fisheries management, was organized by the Women & Fisheries Project for research purposes, by professors at Brown University and URI. Members of industry, state representatives, fishermen’s wives and NGO employees were present. There had been serious discussion about how to schedule the Fish Forum conversation and the Women & Fisheries Project meeting, since both were similar, and I had been involved with the Women & Fisheries Project the summer before, but wanted to make clear that the New England Fish Forum was not for research but was a community-supported platform for productive interaction. In the end, I agreed with the Women & Fish PIs that the New England Fish Forum would co-sponsor but not organize their meeting, since one of their goals, to unite women in fisheries from various backgrounds around important social and environmental topics, was shared by the New England Fish Forum. It also served as a way to advertise the Fish Forum conversation meeting to women who might be difficult to reach. The decision about scheduling the two meetings back-to-back ended up being a valuable experience in itself, about how to cooperate and collaborate with other projects that have similar but different purposes but that can nonetheless help each other. Because of the complex social and geographical fabric of New England fisheries populations, the New England Fish Forum relies on these kinds of semi-alliances and support networks, not only for advice but to publicize its mission (Saving Seafood and the FishFolk mailing list, for example, were valuable ways to invite a wider audience than I, working alone, could have reached). In the future, the Fish Forum may develop some of these semi-alliances into official partnerships, as other fisheries organizations have done.

The August 18 conversation (the first in a fall series) focused on the social impacts of Amendment 16 to the New England groundfish plan, a contentious and particularly critical development in fisheries management that came to a boil over the summer. The Fish Forum chose this focus after considering input from scientists, managers and industry members (the people I had spent the summer meeting, emailing and calling); it seemed that the scientific/environmental objectives of the amendment were quite clear, while the social objectives were not, despite the inevitable connection between social and environmental sustainability. Participants at the meeting were asked to envision what they thought groundfish management should accomplish socially in an ideal world, and what it would accomplish after Amendment 16 (how will communities, families, individuals be affected?). To make this and future conversations worthwhile to participants, and to foster discussion towards a tangible product, the meeting was framed around creating a list of recommendations to submit to the federal fisheries agency, which will soon design social impact monitoring of Amendment 16. The guiding question: What types of information should be tracked to monitor the social effects of Amendment 16 and future amendments to the New England fisheries management plan? The meeting, being in many ways a trial run for future meetings, was also a time for generating critical feedback from the people who attended, and I will write about the meeting specifically another time. In general, I was pleased that the twelve people who came were from a mixture of industry, science and social fisheries research, and that a couple of people made the trek down from Maine. I need to think more about how to prevent a few people from dominating the conversation.

The New England Fish Forum conversations are designed to accomplish two tiers of goals. The first tier is immediate and politically productive: to address important issues in fisheries management amongst fishermen, scientists and managers, and to empower people of different backgrounds and viewpoints to share their ideas on such issues (on August 18, this meant discussing the social aspects of Amendment 16 and groundfish management in general, and drafting a list to submit to a federal agency). The second tier goal is vaguer but perhaps more profound, and is the “true” goal of the Fish Forum: to build social capital in fisheries management, to alter the culture of communication by promoting non-Council, relatively informal interaction among people who might not normally meet or agree, so that successful natural resource management (which essentially manages people) can occur.

As I reflect back on the first New England Fish Forum conversation of August 18, and on the rest of my summer, its golden evenings in West Tisbury and all, I feel a sense of cautious accomplishment, but I do not think I have reached my goals, and it is largely because I have worked solo. Either the New England Fish Forum needs more full-time bodies working specifically for it (right now it’s only me, supported by several community leaders and advisers who have other responsibilities), or it needs to rethink the way it operates (a more directed snowball tactic than the one in place, a spiderweb of community organizers with the New England Fish Forum at the center), or the scale on which it can be sustainably effective (pick a place, pick a political season). The most important work of the summer—generating feedback and networking, often in person—is also the most difficult for a single body to accomplish. While the New England Fish Forum has generated a small buzz, thanks to community leaders, listservs, blogs, and word of mouth (I’ve gotten, “Oh, you’re that girl” or “Howdy told me about you”), this small buzz will have a difficult time sustaining itself and continuing to build momentum without a stronger, more continuous push. Fisheries is an area constantly bombarded by political effort and scholarly interest, and it is also an area whose people are constantly multitasking, their time and attention divided by many efforts, and they are wary of wasting energy. I operate as a realist-idealist, thinking a bit idealistically but working realistically, and this summer has also been a lesson in fisheries politics and fishing community-organizing. I could continue this fall as I did this summer, networking and publicizing for the next meetings more easily after three months in the field, and I plan to. But I hesitate to hurtle immediately back into planning for the next meeting (in October) when I have recognized that I am not enough. I have some ideas but this post is too long. For now, please advise if you have thoughts, and I’ll write soon about my plan for the Fish Forum’s sustainable future. I want to do this right. It’s not just about the fresh fish I’ve picked up. It’s about people.

Post-Maine trip thoughts

I just got back from a trip to Maine, where I finally met Meredith Mendelson at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, and met with fishermen and fishing community advocates in the Downeast region (and got in some Acadia National Park time, too!). It was exciting to talk with Robin Alden and Ted Ames at the Penobscot East Resource Center, and to meet Gary Libby of the Port Clyde Fresh Catch community-supported fishery (they’ll be starting one of the Amendment 16 sectors). I got valuable perspectives on Amendment 16 and organizing the Conversation around it. I learned a lot, too, about how Maine and other more remote parts of New England view the management conversation, what they need and could use from something like the New England Fish Forum, and so on. I also thought a lot about some of the challenges ahead. There are lessons I am learning that I didn’t know were in store at the start of this summer:

TAKING TIME TO CHAT

Meeting new people and building relationships with them is proving to be the most important part of my work this summer. It is by meeting and talking with people that I was inspired to start the New England Fish Forum, of course, and how I have learned (and continue to learn) about the state of fisheries management in New England. But establishing these relationships is no longer for research or background, though it serves that foundational purpose: this is my work. I am really recognizing that presenting and pitching the Fish Forum idea is almost secondary to what happens around those conversations: the informal chatting. This is how I get a sense of how people are feeling and what they’re thinking, and it’s also a way to un-jade the jaded and motivate the weary.

Last weekend I took a trip to Downeast Maine for the Fish Forum, to meet with some key community leaders and talk with community organizers and fishermen there. I had an agenda: to introduce the Fish Forum and its project, to gather feedback about how best to engage people in participation, to generate ideas for the points of discussion at Fish Forum meetings in August, and to put a face to the emails I have been circulating around the New England fisheries listservs. In Bar Harbor and Blue Hill and Stonington and Portland I did do these things, but I think the most important work from that weekend was not, in fact, the conversations that focused on my particular agenda. It was the hangin out, the straying from topic. There is a part of me that wants to be very efficient about all this, to go in, get my feedback, and use that time in as productive a way as possible, so that I can form the plan for the meetings and see some real effect from my work this summer. But communication can’t happen in a vacuum—in fact, communication requires intangible in-person relationships, and that’s what the Fish Forum is based on.

I spent seven hours with Howdy Howton on Sunday. He’s the groundskeeper at the College of the Atlantic and a retired fisherman. For seven hours there was no lack of conversation as he drove me from Mt. Desert Island to Deer Isle and points in between, to meet with fishermen, a biochemist and the director of a fishing community foundation. We talked about the local food movement, maca powder, yogurt, music, local radio, and, of course, fishing. And sitting under a tree in a parking lot in Blue Hill at a community-supported fishery pick-up (works just like a CSA), I joined in a conversation with a couple as they talked about their in-laws, pesticides, beer, and, of course, fishing. I was there to learn about Amendment 16, but what happened was the establishment of relationships. At the risk of inefficiency, I wouldn’t have it another way. Because of those conversations, with their loose ends and meandering topics, these generous people provided me with the names and numbers of other people, invited me to visit their shipyards—gave me an in to an even wider community. You can’t rush these things. But then, Downeast Maine is pretty effective at slowing a New Jerseyan down.

WHO TO TRUST?

I’m learning a lot about the politics of starting an organization, especially a social/cultural one. The New England Fish Forum depends on relationships and social networking. In some ways this poses a challenge for thinking about the sustainability of the Fish Forum—something I’ll write on later—but it also poses a challenge for getting the right relationships that will advance the goals of the program rather than undermine their success. The Fish Forum relies on mentors and community leaders to spread the word, convince scientists, policymakers and fishermen that participating is worthwhile, and distribute some of the responsibility of planning these Conversation meetings so that I, as the official organizer, simply don’t have the resources or connections to do. In other words, the momentum of community outreach about the Forum relies on community leaders to do that outreach and on mentors who know the dynamics of these relationships to offer their expertise.

But how do I know who to trust? How do I find mentors and community leaders and then, how do I choose mentors and community leaders who will contribute to the culture I hope to influence, instead of undermining it? Answering these questions can be difficult and pose legitimate concerns. Individuals have political agendas, ideologies, good and bad reputations, and their own interests, and the Fish Forum can be a platform for opportunists. I expect that most everyone who participates in the New England Fish Forum has his or her own interest and motivation for doing so. But I want to keep the forum from being associated with any given group, movement, or personality, since these associations may undermine the open, transparent, trusting culture I am working to foster.

Sometimes I feel like the more people I talk to in commercial fishing—be it a fisherman, a head of a organization, a Council member or a scientist—the more confused about everything I become. I also recognize now more than ever the biases of individuals, the nuances of individual opinions, the complexities and diversities of “industry,” and the drastically different attitudes among individuals, which range from completely burnt out to stubbornly idealistic.

By now I am used to mentioning a person’s name to someone and getting a highly negative or highly positive reaction back. The positive reactions are great; the very negative ones can be alarming. In some cases I have relationships with the people with certain reputations, as I do with their critics. My strategy has been to be observant, open-minded and cautious, friendly with everybody because I can learn something from everybody, and to establish myself as constantly neutral. It is through recurring conversations with individuals that I can evaluate those people and their helpfulness as Fish Forum allies.

COMMUNITY SCHEDULING!

I want to coin the term ‘community scheduling’ if it doesn’t already exist. This is hard, especially for the New England Fish Forum. The dates for the first Conversations keep getting pushed back. As of now there will be two meetings early in August, at the Coastal Institute at the URI Bay Campus.

Community scheduling requires flexibility, and balancing the desire to ‘get it right’ and start off on the right foot with the recognition that things always have to start somewhere, and can’t go anywhere without a beginning. These two desires don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they can sometimes seem to conflict. It can be frustrating to want to see some clear results for my work, and to have these meetings be well-attended and regular, but to be faced with the reality of scheduling.

Things have been a bit difficult not only because of the nature of people’s work and personal lives (geography and variable work hours keep many individuals from attending New England Fisheries Management Council and other meetings), but because of the particular timing. In June, everyone was busy either preparing for the major NEFMC meeting in Portland, where Amendment 16 to the groundfish FMP (fisheries management plan) was passed, or they were hard at work fishing (both groundfish and fixed gear have heavy seasons throughout June and the beginning of July), or they were juggling both. In early July, the groundfishing season was still in full swing, and people were weary of meetings after the exhausting haul of Portland. But now things are settling, fishermen are grappling with the decision to join a sector or the common pool category, scientists are working on the catch limits and everyone has had some time to think a bit harder about the future, anticipated problems, strategies with which to proceed, and what the real impact of Amendment 16 will be.

The first New England Fish Forum Conversations will provide the space to talk about these issues, to settle confusion and exchange ideas, fears, hopes, and offer the opportunity that doesn’t otherwise exist for those on different sides of the fence to rub shoulders. So while my plan for the timing of all this has changed and in some ways my goals for the summer have been delayed, I think (I hope) it’s been in response to real needs and on-the-ground changes.

More later,

Katie Okamoto

New England Fish Forum updates

I wanted to do a quick check-in post making public the New England Fish Forum web presence(s)! The main site is here for the New England Fish Forum, and the sister project, the interactive Knowledge Database, is here. 

I’ve been in touch with a lot of people over the last week, and things look promising for the first Conversation to take place in June in Rhode Island (a southern Massachusetts one will also be coming up). While fisheries management is endlessly frustrating, it seems, I am continually heartened at how eager and willing fishermen, scientists and managers are to talk to me when I introduce the Fish Forum as an idea. In the meantime…

1. Our Fish Interactive Knowledge Database

I am meeting with the heads of fishing industry orgs, scientists, managers and people at collaborative research initiatives to get this really useful–not to mention used! 

2. Conversations

I would like to hold at least three, but hopefully more, Conversations this summer. These will be informal meetings between industry members, scientists and managers, sort of in the vein of the last workshop but without a research intent. I may prompt and moderate but in general I envision these as alternative salons for shoulder-rubbing and hopefully communication to happen in a way that is positive and more productive than within the Council structure, at least as it is perceived. I am trying to book the Commercial Fisheries Center at URI East Farm for the first one, and I wanted to coordinate with the Women & Fisheries project as well (they envisioned an all-women workshop for the month of June). I still believe that the Fish Forum must include men in the discussion, but I agree that having some of the Conversations be all-women will be beneficial for a number of reasons that I’ll write about in greater detail another time.

3. Fish Party ’09

I met with a wonderful marine anthropologist at SMAST last week. She is young and enthusiastic and has done her own share of work not just on fishing boats (for her education) but with women in fishing. She feels like a lot of the best breaking down of barriers happens at parties and we may be planning a party with no meeting agenda, nothing on the table to discuss, just invite everyone remotely related to fishing in New England, in the spirit of being in the same boat. Must consider food, beverage and location and timing questions of course. I’m thinking July, week before the Point Judith Blessing of the Fleet, or mid-August, before the Cape Cod Hook Association’s Hookers’ Ball. Yes, that is a thing.

4. 1-800-Our-Fish

This will be in the back of my mind for the fall… setting up a 24-hour 1-800 number that is staffed that fishermen can call to ask any questions about the latest regulations, since so many of them don’t seem to now who to call, and end up frustrated at the lack of communication from management. It would need separate funding. 

I learn and relearn just how interesting fisheries issues are in New England. The networks and avenues through which the commercial fishing industry operates as a community are complex, organic and difficult to map. Meanwhile, the council structure is accustomed to organizing, boxing and bagging its own fisheries categories that usually do not correspond with how the commercial industry community (to whatever extent it is a ‘community’) goes about getting things accomplished. This is a fascinating human problem with ecological as well as social consequences. Perhaps the New England Fish Forum will be one way acknowledge and strengthen the less structured but nonetheless important relationships in fisheries.

Net casting

By Katie Okamoto

This post marks the first week of the Summer ’09 phase of the New England Fish Forum (NEFF). Already I have had to reevaluate the ways in which I will accomplish NEFF goals. The ultimate goal is to contribute to a socially and ecologically sustainable local fishery; the Fish Forum seeks to achieve this ultimate goal with the intermediary goal of promoting a culture of improved communication and conceptual plurality in regional fisheries management under the New England Fisheries Management Council’s (NEFMC) jurisdiction.

My original vision for accomplishing these goals was through a web-based platform supplemented by face-to-face conversations and workshops between interested individuals. The Fish Forum would be a sort of Fishbook, an interactive website where conversations between fishing industry members, scientists, managers and professional environmentalists would engage in conversations across the NEFMC governing region. Part of Fishbook would include the Knowledge Database for scientific and experiential fisheries information to coexist for the first time.

I am increasingly convinced that a more achievable and effective focus for these summer months will be to facilitate in-person conversational workshops. Given the disparate and diverse community of people involved somehow or other with the fishing industry in New England, an online Fishbook may only be effective with positive experiences with in-person interactions among stakeholders. In the meantime, the web platform will house the Knowledge Database in its formative stages.

This month, I will re-introduce NEFF to community members and work with them to get more people excited about participating in the new conversation. This networking will be geared toward the first conversational workshop at the end of June. Additionally, tomorrow I will launch the Knowledge Database networking campaign (I’ll be meeting with a couple of scientists at SMAST to discuss the Knowledge Database design).

The Knowledge Database design campaign will engage scientists, managers and members of industry to plan the online Knowledge Database, where different kinds of fisheries information and expertise can coexist and inform management in a three-tiered approach. NEFF’s three-tiered method of influencing the current NEFMC knowledge culture will be indirect, but it will contribute to a more inclusive and conceptually pluralistic approach to fisheries management decision-making. Currently, the NEFMC is required by federal law to consider the “best available science,” but the NEFF approach is based on the idea that diverse kinds/sources of knowledge can and should inform how we understand the ecological resource. The NEFF Knowledge Database (tier 1) will inform what research and research grants are sponsored by some of the key collaborative research initiatives in New England (tier 2). Initial Knowledge Database design, therefore, must involve people from the collaborative research initiatives in order to be effective. Research from these initiatives in turn contributes to the body of knowledge off which NEFMC decisions are made (tier 3).

I am excited about the work ahead and I can’t wait to get back to the water!

New England Fish Forum – Elevator Pitch

New England Fish Forum: Sea Change

by Katie Okamoto

In southern New England’s fishing towns, where I have spent most of my time, big draggers and small lobster boats alike sit idle through their usual seasons. Here, people talk about a sea change. Nobody is exactly sure how things will change, but there is a definite sense of now-or-never. Managers talk about a “transition” and a “new path.” Scientists talk about partnerships with fishermen. Fishermen talk about being on the brink of local extinction or stronger survival—the question is which way the ball will roll.

This summer, while searching for interviewees for my thesis in Environmental Studies, I met many inspirational people on all sides of the fisheries management table, people who were moved to tears talking about the “fishing way of life,” people who despite a climate of cynicism and distrust believe in the collective power of individuals to come together around a social and ecological legacy. The founder of a New Bedford fishermen’s advocacy group put it this way: “Right now collaboration is the only thing to free us.”

Local food systems like New England’s fishing industry are essential to sustaining the resource. Yes, fishermen kill fish, but they also need healthy fisheries. It will always be impossible to please everyone in fisheries management. The problem is that the current structure places the human community at a less important level than the ecological one, fatally ignoring their interconnectedness. True collaboration is hindered by miscommunication, resentment and insufficient knowledge-sharing, and the interactions to improve those relations are rare in the existing hierarchical management structure.

I have been interested in how environmental issues are communicated between ‘experts’ and the public; my experiences in fisheries turned that academic interest into an obsession of urgency. Collaboration really is the only thing to free us—not fishermen, not scientists, not managers, but us, all collective problem-solvers and users of the ocean. While managers, scientists and fishermen can vehemently disagree, there is consensus around these words: trust, respect, knowledge-sharing. The change that’s in the air will not be positive without different, better interaction. Sadly, like the fish, patience, hope and enthusiasm are not everlasting, especially if relations between fishermen, scientists and managers undergo further strain in the economic downturn. Fishermen seem to be on their last string.

I have described the New England Fish Forum as a labor of love and frustration. Though what I hear in management meetings can be discouraging, the people in those meetings inspire this project. With the help of the Fish Forum, I hope they will inspire each other. It will be a definite challenge, but in many ways it is now or never.