by Liz Cunningham with photographs by Jennifer Penner
So many people ask me, “Is there any hope for the seas?” I tell them “Yes” and often I tell a story about a sea nomad named Enci Wahab and how I learned about hope through meeting him.
I met Enci Wahab when I researched my book Ocean Country. For that book I had asked, “Who more than any other cultural group in the world calls the ocean home?” The answer was the Austronesia sea nomads of Southeast Asia. Nowhere on earth are there a people whose lives are more deeply intertwined with the sea. While they now primarily live in stilt villages, they live in the wake of a 10,000-year-old tradition of nomadic life at sea—their ancestors ate, cooked, hunted, slept, and gave birth at sea.
The “ocean home” of the sea nomads is also the marine biodiversity epicenter of the world, the Coral Triangle. Often called the “Amazon of the underwater world,” it includes the waters of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and Timore-Leste. Swimming in these waters, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the astonishing diversity and beauty of sea life.
Hope is no stranger to its opposite. And there was no shortage of that in the Coral Triangle: climate change, coral bleaching, destructive fishing, pollution and coastal development have wrecked such havoc that nearly 90 percent of the reefs are threatened. And the sea nomads themselves have played a role through practices which threaten their very livelihood—cyanide fishing, dynamite fishing, and coral mining.
So, where’s the hope in that?
The answer, I learned, was not “where.” It was “who.”
That’s when I met Enci Wahab. He and his friend Dorman had organized a fisherman’s collectives, in which they all had agreed to forgo destructive fishing and use less-damaging practices such as hook and line and fish traps woven from bamboo. A number of these collectives had formed in this area and similar ones are popping up all over the world. If another fisherman used dynamite, members of the collective would speak with them. They’d make it clear that the community couldn’t tolerate it, that if they continued to fish this way, there would be no fish left for anyone in the “commons” of the sea that they shared: their home.
When Enci Wahab explained why they’d formed the collective, he said: “We do this for our children. We do this, so they will have fish to eat.” His words held such pride and dignity. But it took a while before I understood the depth of that dignity.
A few days later I spoke with another fisherman, but this one said, “I will only speak to you anonymously.” He explained that when you walk away from dynamite fishing, you take a huge pay cut. Dynamite fishing pays between 85-170 dollars a day. Sustainable methods? Five dollars. Forty dollars a day at best. He told me the bombs were terribly dangerous, because the fuses were so short. One friend was killed, another lost an arm, another was blinded in one eye. And the dynamite? A lot of the dynamite was black-market dynamite that came from a “big boss” in Singapore. The dynamite and the fish ran through the same organized crime networks that run narcotics.
Now I understood: Enci Wahab’s dignity was borne from fierce courage.
When the fisherman in the collective made their choice, they not only took a huge pay cut, but many of them had the courage and dignity to walk away from organized crime.
They weren’t waiting for someone else to do something about this crisis. It wasn’t about asking, “Is there hope?” It was about asking, “How can I become it?”
Hope like this isn’t about calculating the odds of success: it’s about doing what’s right. Hope, the philosopher Alan Mittleman writes “is a civic virtue.” It promotes cooperation “on behalf of the common good.” You do things because you must, because it’s the right thing to do.
The fishermen saw results from their actions. Two decades before, they told me, you could hear dynamite “going off everywhere.” Now it was very rare. There were more fish. They could see it with their own eyes. Those who monitored fisheries saw it too: there has been a 75 percent reduction in dynamite fishing in the last two decades.
How the actions of the fisherman’s collectives added up with the efforts of others to make that difference illuminates the path to what we all know is needed: systemic change. This story is replayed all over the world—citizens driving action on climate change, lobbying their elected officials, reducing plastic use, supporting renewable energy initiatives and marine protected areas.
Imagine for a moment that we could zoom forward through time and that we had successfully navigated some of the challenges of planetary degradation, despite horrific destruction, despite the odds of success being razor thin. And from that vantage point we ask, How was this possible?
We all know how, we just need to remind ourselves: it would be because of all the citizens who lived out their own imperatives to do something, to be a part of the change. They did not dwell on that question, Is there hope? They chose to answer another question, How can I become it? They answered it with their actions: they did what they needed to do, despite the fact that the odds stank at times. They became a living, breathing hope that moved the pendulum towards a better future.
I remind myself of this every day now, because I am easily blindsided by the horror of destruction and chilling scientific predictions, by a news feed that screams the world is going to hell no matter what we do. It is hard to stay with the good work of making the world a better place, to heed the inner imperative to do something. Enci Wahab chose his actions with a deliberate regard for the present and for future generations. His steadfast words—“We do this for our children”—stay with me like a ringing bell, challenging me to do the same.
Liz Cunningham is the author of the award-winning Ocean Country: One Woman’s Voyage from Peril to Hope in her Quest to Save the Seas, with a foreword by Carl Safina. She is at work on two forthcoming books, The Passion for Rescue: The Heart of Hope and Our Oceans, Our Breath. Learn about her work at http://www.lizcunningham.net
Jennifer Penner is an underwater photographer who is passionate about the ocean. When not in her ocean office, she along with her husband, own and operate a multimedia company in Northern California. To view more of her work, visit http://www.newmediasoup.com