Word: fishermen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Maria (known to friends as "Neca") and Guy launched the project in 1980, fishermen killed turtles for meat and poached their eggs. The skins became wallets, the shells jewelry. Mother turtles laying eggs on the beach were easy targets, and most of the 2-in.-long hatchlings never made...
Dorry's great gift, though, is for living and working, talking and listening in towns shadowed by the threat of ecological calamity--towns like Gloucester, Mass., the heavily Italian old fishing port where she settled four years ago. At first fishermen losing boats to bankruptcy weren't eager to hear their trouble analyzed by a woman environmentalist, and certainly not by a nonreligious Muslim, born in the U.S. of Iranian parents. But the underlying problem, years of overfishing off New England that had caused fish stocks to crash, wouldn't go away. Neither would Dorry. Quietly she spoke to Gloucester...
What she said was what they knew: if the broken ocean food chain were to mend itself, New England fishermen would have to hammer out fairer catch limits, along with rules for gear type and boat size and number. If they couldn't handle this, Gloucester might be finished, except as a picturesque site for second-home condos...
...finished yet. Dorry's campaign took hold last year when fishermen along the East Coast joined to protest a 369-ft. factory trawler, the Atlantic Star. U.S.-Dutch owned, the Star was being refitted in Norway to catch herring and mackerel. The two species are food for cod, tuna, birds, whales and dolphins, and could be a vital link in rebuilding the Atlantic food chain...
Bottom trawlers drag large, weighted nets over the sea floor to catch shrimp and ground feeders like cod, hake, haddock, halibut and flounder. In the process, the nets haul up everything in their path, contributing heavily to the nearly 30 million tons of damaged or dying "bycatch" that fishermen toss overboard each year. Carl Safina of the National Audubon Society calls it "scorched earth fishing...