More broadly, our approach to community-based management goes something like this: Identify a community interested in improving the sustainability of their ocean management. Encourage and support their efforts by providing scientific, legal, and mapping assistance, and by building local capacity for monitoring and enforcement. Know that you have no real control over what happens – you’re not a citizen, you can’t write the laws, you’re an outsider culturally and often racially – but you are deeply invested in the outcome as a humanist, scientist, and over time, more and more as an empath. Explain that you want to see the community continue to make a living from and continue to enjoy their ocean forever. But you are a guest. All you can do is provide information, make recommendations, be respectful, and hope that you will be well received.

We have no control over a community’s answers, over what their priorities and vision are. Clearly, if a community says they want to fish until they catch the last fish and their ocean looks barren like the surface of the moon, or denuded like a clearcut forest we’d say, “You’re on your own. We want to help you achieve a sustainable future.” And if the response is that they want to close their entire ocean to fishing, and base their economy on nature tourism we’d say, “Have you considered the impacts on your economy and culture? Do you have plans for attracting tourism investments and for supporting alternative livelihoods during this transition?” And if people say they want 1,000 jet skis to promote tourism and to bulldoze some mangroves to dock them, we’d say, “That’s not in our budget, and we don’t think destroying the critical nursery habitat for your valuable lobster and fish populations is a good idea.”

However, rarely are things so black and white. There is a huge amount of grey area and cultural specificity to designing a Sustainable Ocean Policy that will actually work in a place.

The health of the ocean and the state of most fisheries is so poor that letting people catch as many fish as they want, wherever they want, however they want, anytime they want is clearly a terrible option. The fishermen I have spoken with feel this most deeply because they see it every day when they have to go further from shore and into deeper waters to make a good catch. It’s higher fuel cost, more dangerous, and less catch. It’s barely profitable. The refrain: “It’s not like it used to be.” So fishermen are the Waitt Institute’s and the ocean’s strongest allies here in Barbuda, and listening to their challenges and stories is invaluable.

Our collaborative effort to create a management system that leads to the more abundant ocean Barbudans want is building inertia at the local level (the head of local government says he foresees no objections to the recommendations) and the national level (last week the Prime Minister formally endorsed the Initiative), but the work is not nearly done yet. Until it is, we’ll keep asking the questions: What do you want your ocean to look like in the future? How can we help you get there? And we’ll keep listening, and brainstorming solutions.

(This post is dedicated to my mother, Louise Maher-Johnson, on her 69th birthday. She reminds me to “Be with the people. And listen.”)