The Key to Saving the World
I’ve been reading and rereading this book for over a year. It’s called Adapting to a Changing Climate: Confronting the Consequences of Climate Change by Tim McClanahan and Joshua Cinner. If you’re a social ecology nerd or have ever written a marine ecology paper with citations, you probably know these two authors.
I carry this book with me everywhere, my annotations have gotten so out of hand that I have to slip sheets of paper inside the covers to catch the letters that spill over. It has gotten to the point where I just refer to it as the Bible, and everyone around me knows what I’m talking about.
Anyways, I’m convinced it’s the key to saving the world. McClanahan and Cinner are two of the world’s leading marine scientists/marine social ecologists. In a culmination of their work, they discuss the nuances of climactic events in the Western Indian Ocean as they pertain to small scale fishing communities. That was a one sentence synopsis for a 200 page book, you should read it, it’s a real page turner if you’re into social ecological systems and considering poverty traps. Essentially, this book and the research behind the topics they discuss has deeply informed Sea Collective’s mission.
I’m sharing this with you because this book caused me to rationalize a trip to Mombassa, Kenya, to meet with the famous and important Dr. Tim McClanahan himself. Ok, I know that sounds crazy, but books have made people go on wilder adventures. This was the nerd version of Eat Pray Love. We were already in the area to conduct part of the Sea Collective Megatransect along the coast of northern Kenya, and using Mombasa as our home base was completely reasonable. So, we payed Dr. McClanahan and his colleague, Remy Oddenyo of WCS a visit for an interview for our film, Archipelago. Originally, Archipelago was intended to highlight stories about Kenyan Tengefus (and was called Tengefu Tapestry to start). I explain Tengefus in this post. It is worth noting that Dr. McClanahan started the Tengefu Movement in Kenya, and has been incredibly successful in his work with WCS. He essentially created marine protected areas in a whole country and is one of the most cited tropical marine scientists of all time.
However, when working on our film, we encountered an issue. No one knew what a Tengefu was in the areas we were filming! We were asking about people’s perception of Tengefus in our surveys, and the general response was, “What’s a Tengefu?”. Oops, guess there’s some work to do, and we can’t expect Dr. McClanahan to do all of it. Outreach and education seemed to fall short here to the point that our documentary became an investigative journalism adventure.
This means, we have these incredible interviews with important scientists! It seems like a bit of a shame to only use small portions of it in our film, so I’ll be releasing the full versions here. Don’t mind me being a fangirl for marine ecologists. Now you can absorb some fascinating information about one of the world’s most creative marine protected area creation strategies.
Taylor Bratton
