National Working Waterfronts gathering: seeking innovation in coastal communities

Feb 212013
 

Across the United States, shorelines are getting squeezed.

Expanding populations, industries, and potential uses for coastal areas add up to increasing conflicts over access to waterfronts. Communities both large and small are seeking creative solutions to address evolving waterfront challenges.

The third National Working Waterfronts and Waterways Symposium — scheduled for March 25-28 in Tacoma, Washington — will address these challenges. The event will provide a forum for diverse users to address common dilemmas, and share solutions.

World population numbers are increasing, as are the challenges in accessing shorelines. This national symposium will provide a forum for diverse users to discuss solutions to some of these issues. |Photo: otEcotrust|

World population numbers are increasing, as are the challenges in accessing shorelines, which impacts the maritime, fishing, and boat building industries, among others. |Photo: Ecotrust|

Washington Sea Grant, in coordination with Oregon Sea Grant, is sponsoring the symposium, where planning professionals, elected officials, and interested citizens can learn first-hand about:

  • Economic and social impacts of and on working waterfronts
  • Successful local, regional, state, and federal strategies to address working waterfront issues
  • The future of working waterfronts, including potential impacts of changing uses and climates
  • Keeping waterfront industries commercially viable

One of the panels, moderated by Ecotrust’s VP for Fisheries Ed Backus, will focus on the way community-based fisheries are inherently intertwined with and dependent on access to working waterfronts and waterways.  Panelists will include members of the Community Fisheries Network, a group of 15 community-based fishing organizations and supporting organizations from around the United States that have joined together to address common challenges faced by small-scale fisheries.  The panel will focus on the critical role working waterfronts play in supporting community-based fisheries and how successful fishing businesses can help communities preserve their working waterfronts. By investing in their infrastructure, their businesses, their communities, their deckhands and crew, and by engaging in creative marketing, small-scale fisheries across the country can help ensure there is enough revenue crossing the wharves they rely on to ensure the long-term sustainability of their communities.

Attendees are expected to include local, regional, tribal, and national decision-makers; members of the commercial fishing, marine, and tourism industries; developers and property owners; business owners; community planners; and waterfront advocates.

Following a 2007 Maine Sea Grant report, Access to the Waterfront: Issues and Solutions Across the Nation, the first national symposium was held in 2007 in Norfolk, Virginia, followed by a second one in Portland, Maine, in 2010.

Working waterfronts provide valuable economic and environmental resources to coastal communities. |Photo: Ecotrust|

Working waterfronts provide valuable economic and environmental resources to coastal communities.
|Photo: Ecotrust|

After the Maine conference, team members secured a grant from the federal government to continue building a network. The U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) funded a year and a half study to identify strategies, practical methods, and finance mechanisms to address current economic challenges of coastal communities. The project was a collaborative effort among the Island Institute; the Maine, Virginia, and Florida Sea Grant College Programs; the National Sea Grant Law Center; the Urban Harbors Institute; and Coastal Enterprises, Inc.

The final results from the study will be presented at this year’s conference, which begins with a full day of field trips around the Tacoma waterfront and region.

For more information, contact Washington Sea Grant Coastal Management Specialist Nicole Faghin, conference coordinator, at wwaters2013@uw.edu or 206.685.8286 (office)

Do you love the ocean? Take the Ecotrust Ocean Day Challenge!

Jun 062012
 

Photo by Sandy Horvath-Dori

Friday June 8th is World Oceans Day, and the salty homes to 90% of the planet’s living biomass are in peril. Destructive coastal development, industrial agricultural practices, and exploitative fishing practices degrade the fisheries that currently feed millions of people globally and that support the livelihoods of 200 million people. Together, they threaten coastal and marine ecosystems that sustain 250,000 known species, sequester one-quarter of the carbon emitted globally, and provide spiritual uplift through scenic vistas, natural beauty, and recreation opportunities. Nutrient and organic pollution alters ecosystem structure, causes dead zones, and presents risks to human health. Climate change poses a range of risks, such as coral reef bleaching, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise, all of which will affect coastal and marine resources and the people and economies that depend on them.

In the face of these threats and challenges, we are encouraged by initiatives like the World Bank’s Global Partnership for the Oceans, and, closer to home, the progress being made to protect ocean ecosystems and the livelihoods that derive from them in places like California and Oregon. Here at Ecotrust, one way we seek to foster the resilience of our oceans is through the development of tools that help people make better decisions about the ocean. Many of these tools are built using open source software, because we believe in sharing ideas and making them easily adaptable and scalable.

So when an upcoming  workshop called for our thoughts on the following questions about new tools for ocean resilience, we thought, let’s ask all of you to chime in with suggestions.

Here, then, is the first-ever Ecotrust Oceans Day Challenge:

  1. What are the three most challenging problems facing the oceans that, if solved, are most likely to improve ocean health and biodiversity?
  2. What are examples of barriers to knowledge and data that exacerbate these problems?
  3. What would a successful tool look like that reduces these barriers?

Please submit your ideas here by 2 p.m. Pacific Time (9 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday, June 12th.

Ecotrust staff will then pick the top three responses, who will receive ocean themed prizes and recognition on our website. We will also take the three winning contributions into upcoming workshops and planning meetings, with full attribution, of course, and the opportunity to partner with us on any projects that result.

How Washington can support fishing communities

May 112012
 

Lately, national fisheries policy makers have left local fishing communities hanging.

At issue is how to ensure responsible community-based fishermen — without huge financial backing — remain fishing, as the nation downsizes the number of boats on the water to protect fishing stocks.

Fishing communities need clear guidance from Washington.

Last November, a bi-partisan, bi-coastal, and bicameral group of eight members of Congress wrote a letter to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), requesting that the agency provide guidance on the implementation of the National Catch Share Policy  to the regional councils that manage our nation’s fisheries. The National Catch Share Policy is guiding how the councils divvy up the allowable catch on fisheries across the country — from cod to halibut to West Coast rockfish — among different fishermen.

 In most cases, those shares go to boats that historically caught particular fish, but they are tradeable and often end up in the hands of the highest bidder.  The members of Congress asked for agency guidance on options to help local fishing communities adapt to catch share programs, including approaches to implement the community provisions in sections of national fisheries law that would enable fishing communities to form Regional or Community Fishing Associations that would help local fishermen retain fishing access and jobs.

 Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA), who represents California’s 1st Congressional District along the state’s northern coast, reiterated some of this letter in a March 2012 article in Pacific Fishing Magazine, calling for agency guidance on the implementation of the same community provisions and for strategies to consider input from fishing communities at the earliest stages of catch share program development.

 NMFS finally issued a response (pdf) to the congressional letter this past March, but unfortunately it is a response with little substance.  NMFS points to other activities (for instance, their work on electronic monitoring) that are not relevant to the request for guidance on national fisheries law’s community provisions.

 They say they have taken “a number of steps,” but do not describe what those are or will be.  They cite work on community efforts for the Pacific Groundfish Trawl catch share program, but the Pacific Council, which manages Oregon,Washington and California waters, abandoned efforts to set criteria for Community Fishing Associations to participate in that program.  They mention the proceedings from a January 2011 Catch Shares & Commercial Fishing Communities Workshop, yet the main outcome there was several clear recommendations to NMFS to provide guidance as to how communities can go about becoming a Regional or Community Fishing Association — guidance that communities are still waiting on.

 In the absence of clear agency leadership on this issue, communities are beginning to define what the community provisions supported by national law mean for them.

 The Community Fisheries Network was launched last month by Ecotrust, the Island Institute of Rockland, Maine and 13 community fishing and development organizations on both the West and East coasts.  Network members have developed standards for the governance of community-based fishing organizations to, in part, enable those communities to qualify to hold catch shares and  maintain community access to fisheries.

 The network is also set up to share information among fishermen, fishing communities, scientists and others, in order to improve the stewardship of marine ecosystems, to build up local and regional fishing economies, and to bring renewed energy and vitality to waterfront communities.

 Individually, members have taken progressive steps along these lines, whether it’s establishing their own seafood brands, pushing for marine protected areas in local waters or successfully lobbying for small boats and artisanal fishermen in fisheries policy. As these efforts multiply across the nation, community-based fishermen will ensure that catch shares held by communities are a sound, lasting investment in the country’s working waterfronts.

 Now it is up to national policy makers to support these communities.

Salmon and resilience: Beyond simple fixes

Apr 272012
 

By Joseph Cone

Excerpted from the preface to Pathways to Resilience: Sustaining Salmon Ecosystems in a Changing World (Oregon Sea Grant, 2012).

What is the path we’re on if it’s not a path to resilience? The path of the status quo tries to get the most out of — “optimize” — some element of a system. The essays in Pathways to Resilience, a new volume about salmon challenges from Oregon Sea Grant, present views of a profoundly different paradigm — that of resilient whole systems.

steelhead at Salmonberry Falls, OR

Steelhead leaping at Salmonberry Falls, Oregon (Photo by Melissa Tatge)

Although the essays are devoted to salmon and, importantly, represent key insights by the first generation of scientific experts who have thought deeply about salmon and resilience, the reader of today — and also of the future — is encouraged to see this work in its broader significance. A time capsule from today would reveal a world fitfully struggling to come to terms with ecological and social systems that are dangerously vulnerable to major shocks: global climate change, international terrorism, polarized and fractious publics in nation-states, an interconnected global economy that rewards the few but effectively punishes the many.

Where is the wisdom of resilience, of attending to the dynamic whole that would sustain these linked systems? If such wisdom were acquired easily, presumably it would have been broadly achieved by now. But it has not been, which is one reason why the example of the essays are valuable to anyone concerned about a sustainable future.

Those who take the challenge of trying to understand our human relationship with Earth as a totality describe that totality in terms of a complex, interrelated system. This so-called human-nature (or social-ecological) system is ever-changing and multidimensional, but the problem today with this human-nature system is that we have been the perennial receivers in the relationship and nature the giver, and while our demands for what economists call nature’s “goods and services” continue to increase with burgeoning population and hu­man aspirations, nature is broadly being depleted.

Many in the United States have been concerned with this depletion over many years, and concepts of conservation, stewardship, and, more recently, “sustainability,” have enjoyed many adherents. These are good and valuable concepts, but these ideas have not shown themselves sufficient to shift our understanding, much less our collective behavior.

We tinker with pieces of the whole, trying to be more focused or more efficient, to gain from this or that component of the system some particular advantages in this or that place: more salmon for fisheries through hatchery production; better fishery management through maximum sustained yield calculations; greater timber production and profit through clearcutting and replanting monocultures… such approaches in the Pacific Northwest have had undesired consequences to the broader social-ecological system of which they are parts.

Taken as a whole, the essayists in Pathways to Resilience believe in a holistic view that embraces complex social-ecological systems and a perspective that helps those systems anticipate and avoid major shocks, and where the shocks are unavoidable, be able to respond and adapt to them. In short, the resilience of the system needs to be in view.

“Resilience holds the key to our future. It is a deceptively simple idea, but its application has proven elusive,” wrote Jane Lubchenco, the Oregon State University marine biologist who became the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under President Obama. Truly, the goal of resilient coastal social and ecological communities will not be easy to achieve. The concept is still emergent and is not well understood, appreciated, nor in the cultural mainstream. But we in Oregon Sea Grant believe resilience thinking is a good compass to guide us into the future and help us be of public service.

Joseph Cone is the assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant; this piece was edited by Rick Cooper, managing editor of Oregon Sea Grant.

Future We Want: Community-driven fisheries

Apr 192012
 

In 2005, an outspoken, gregarious San Francisco crab fisherman named Larry Collins wrote down his vision for a more prosperous future. It ran to 20 pages of handwritten scrawl but it boiled down to one idea: small-scale Bay Area fishermen boosting their income by selling directly into markets in the region. Eventually he connected with Ecotrust, which, among its many creative uses of capital over the years, has helped other community-based fishermen and local associations secure loans and grants that help with equipment costs, fish catch quota purchase and marketing ventures.

Crab boats in San Francisco are joining a national community fisheries movement Courtesy of SFCFA

Global research published last year has shown that, in both the developed and developing world, viable community-based fishermen who have a meaningful stake in management of their local marine resources create more resilient fish stocks and fishing communities. The strongest example is in Chile, where the fishery surrounding a type of snail called  the “loco,” or Chilean abalone involves 700 areas co-managed with 20,000 artisanal fishermen along 2,500 miles of coastline.

Building on work with community fishing organizations in Alaska and Oregon, Vice President Astrid Scholz initiated Ecotrust’s work with Collins and the fishermen on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

The group of eleven fishermen, running small crab and salmon boats out the Golden Gate, have scraped by for years selling to commodity fish buyers, while watching bigger boats voraciously fish out crab stocks off Northern California. They successfully fought for state limits on the number of crab pots in their region, establishing an ethic to protect long-term viability of the stocks. And then they built a business plan with Ecotrust to ensure increased economic returns on their catch.

This year, the group used a $250,000 grant Ecotrust received from the California Ocean Protection Council to secure a warehouse lease on Pier 45 at Fisherman’s Wharf and  access to a hoist and an ice machine, two simple tools that allow the fishermen new control on where and how they sell fish. It’s no secret that a handful of processors dictate the flow of seafood and the price levels up and down the West Coast; in the crab business, processors exert considerable pressure by commanding  the hoists that offload boats and the manufacture and sale of ice, both of which fishermen depend on to get crab to market.

At Pier 45 in San Francisco, the fishermen’s association unloaded 350,000 pounds of crab themselves in December 2011, and put the crab out on the live market.  By distributing it themselves, they saw a 10% higher return for their crab and their late fall salmon. The organization also sold bait at reduced cost to its members and peddled ice to other processors on Pier 45, bringing additional revenue. And it earned hoist fees for offloading other fish from members and non-members alike.  After paying out expenses at the end of the 2011-12 season, the group cleared a profit.

Last week, the association joined with a dozen other like-minded organizations to start the national Community Fisheries Network. Membership groups agree to responsibly manage fish catches around their home ports and work to ensure fishing communities and members earn a fair benefit from fishing harvests. Like the San Francisco cooperative, these organizations will also be offering fee-based services to members and other colleagues, buying product and re-selling it on the wholesale market, and building brand awareness in local and regional markets for community-caught fish.

Ecotrust will bring its experience building new social ventures over the last 20 years to support the branding and marketing of community-caught fish —  the brand that San Francisco fishermen have begun building with their recent declaration of independence. The eventual vision for Larry Collins and his colleagues is a full-service retail market on the Wharf. It will be a 21st century take on the thriving waterfront markets of old. The group is also exploring purchase and leasing of permits and fish catch quotas for groundfish on the West Coast.  And we believe that driving this sort of place-based innovation, at the nexus of social, environmental and economic wellbeing, is the best way to transform society.

How will we build the future we want? What are your ideas for radical institutional change? These are the questions the UN is asking in preparation for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in late June. In response to their Future We Want campaign, we’re curating transformative ideas for building a more resilient world. We’ll share some of the ideas we’re cooking up here at Ecotrust, but most of all, we want to hear from you. Email obrooks (at) ecotrust (dot) org.

 

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