A Cheerful Story About Environmental Conservation (Really and Truly)

October is National Seafood Month, and I have a surprise for you. It’s a cheerful story about environmental conservation. I’m serious. Don’t roll your eyes in disbelief and click away to Facebook right now; stay with me.

I know the headlines about the environment have been dire recently, particularly when it comes to seafood. But when I learned the story of West Coast groundfish, a true story about people with diverse perspectives banding together and taking action — and the action worked! — I was floored. And moved, because this could become a model of success for fisheries across the globe.

There’s a catch: It requires just a teeny bit of help from you to become a real-life fairy tale. First, a deep dive Like every good story of triumph, it’s complicated. It all started in the year 2000, when the West Coast groundfish fishery was declared an economic disaster by the federal government.

“What the heck are ‘groundfish’?” you ask. That’s the term for a wide variety of fish that live at or near the bottom of the sea. Some of the most well-known types of groundfish are rockfish, halibut, sole, sablefish, and cod. The West Coast […]

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