Environmental Leadership Program: ELP News: Winter/Spring 2003: Voices of ELP Overseas

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newsletter Winter/Spring 2003

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ELP News:

Voices of ELP Overseas

Economic globalization, heightened national security concerns, and large-scale problems like climate change are helping to make environmental problems increasingly international. American environmentalists have a critical role to play advancing environmental progress worldwide and collaborating with other countries to seek common goals. Many ELP fellows approach environmental issues from a global perspective and work internationally.

In the following interviews, four ELP fellows discuss the challenges they face in their work abroad, and the importance of addressing global environmental problems as U.S.-based professionals. These fellows work, or have worked, in locations ranging from Europe, Mexico, and South America to Asia and the South Pacific.

RICHARD CUDNEY-BUENO is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Renewable Natural Resources at the University of Arizona, where he studies the role of marine protected areas and community-based efforts in the management of small-scale fisheries in Mexico. He has participated in various initiatives concerning management and conservation of marine resources in the Gulf of California, Mexico, and across the U.S. border in the Colorado River Delta.

What are the most urgent global environmental issues in your work? What approaches/tools do you use to resolve those issues?

I work on marine conservation and sustainable fisheries management. Without a doubt, the decline of fisheries and its effects on ecosystem health and on the cultures that have depended on fishery resources for generations is one of the most pressing global environmental issues today. Most fisheries worldwide are either in a state of crisis or are already exploited to their full capacity. For this reason, one of the few agreements to come out of the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development was to stop the overexploitation of fisheries worldwide.

I believe that the world needs positive models of fishery management and marine conservation. Regardless of their scale, good examples can encourage larger global efforts. My main approach to marine conservation issues, therefore, has been to strengthen promising models and/or facilitate their evolution. I aim to understand the political ecology surrounding fishery issues in a particular region and to identify existing management practices that operate in that setting. I can then build on those formal or informal practices, rather than institutionalizing new management systems that might be ineffective and cause undesirable ecological and social outcomes.

In addition, I try to empower stakeholders to conduct their own monitoring processes grounded on science and local ecological knowledge. Part of the problem with any natural resource management issue is that local stakeholders seldom have proof that their management efforts are, in fact, working from both ecological and social angles. Conducting monitoring processes to measure impact can bring greater credibility to any local management effort. At the same time, I facilitate communication between the fishing sector and various governmental and non-governmental agencies to define and formalize management guidelines in tune with local realities.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Tackling these problems is an endless learning process.

Sustainable fisheries management benefits local communities and is an important measure for conserving marine resources around the world.
Photo: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Central Library

What are the main challenges you've experienced in working abroad?

Possibly the biggest challenge working in Latin America has been to reconcile the need for conservation measures with pressing food and health security issues. Although certainly not unique to this region of the world, facilitating communication between local stakeholders, the government, and NGOs has also been a constant challenge. Community timeframes operate at very different scales than those of the government. The result is that time delays between petitions to formalize community-based management and their institutionalization by the government often undermine conservation efforts. Finally, it is very difficult, if not practically impossible, to shelter community-based efforts from global market processes.

What is the single most important message to get across to people in the U.S. in regard to international environmental issues?

I would say that many of the environmental paradigms and strategies used to cope with environmental problems in the United States often do not apply to the realities of other countries and regions of the world. People in Latin America, for instance, often cannot afford to think about "sustainable" management and conservation practices, because the health and food security of their families is more immediately at stake. Unfortunately, most environmental agencies worldwide, whether non-governmental or governmental, operate under largely "westernized" views.

It is important to dig deeper and try to understand the historical underpinnings of any environmental issue in a foreign country. Often, the roots of these problems are generations of colonialism, historical national and international resource extraction policies, and global processes. For example, how can U.S. environmentalists demand that fishermen in the Upper Gulf of California, Mexico, fish more sustainably when what is caught there is mostly sold in the U.S. and fishermen believe that their fishery resources have declined primarily because the Colorado River no longer flows that far into Mexico? There is always much more than meets the eye.

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