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Fishery Restoration
Your community's sustainable revitalization
program should eventually encompass your
entire region for maximum effectiveness. It
can start with a primary focus on any of the
12 sectors of restorable assets, but if you have a
commercial or recreational fishing economy, fishery
restoration can be a powerful way to bring your
community or region together.
Why? Two reasons: 1) Most
fisheries worldwide are in desperate condition, so citizens
(and politicians) know
something has to be done, and 2) many fisheries have
tremendous bounce-back capacity, so you can sometimes
get dramatic pay-back for your efforts in a relatively
short period of time.
If you've already got a strong
fishery restoration organization, it could be an ideal
sponsor for your community's
Real
Revitalization Program. Is this
organization trusted and effective? Does it wish
to take an even larger, longer-term role in the
community's future? If so, sponsoring the Real
Revitalization Program is also the best
way to help it create (or become) a revitalization
forum.
A revitalization forum is a
permanent public-private organization that supports an
ongoing revitalization program. [Note:
Readers of
reWealth (McGraw-Hill, 2008) will recognize
this type of organization as what that book technically
referred to as a "renewal engine". It was revealed as
the key factor behind the most dramatic urban
regeneration success stories documented in
reWealth.]
Definition &
overview: There's no formal definition of fishery restoration, as it can focus on a number of
restorable functions and assets, such as estuaries,
coastal areas, coral reefs, etc. as well as the economic
viability of the local fishing industry.
Fisheries are,
by far, the most multi-jurisdictional of the
twelve sectors of restorative development. Even restoring
a small fishery, such as a shad run, can involve
multiple states/provinces and dozens--if not
hundreds--of communities. The restoration of
pelagic (open ocean) species--such as cod, swordfish,
sharks, and tuna--would involve dozens of countries.
But fisheries account for over 10% of the global
economy, and up to 80% of some costal economies, so
overcoming such jurisdictional barriers is essential.
The flip side of this challenge is that fishery
restoration has tremendous potential as a tool for
greater international cooperation, which can lead to
cooperation on other critical issues, such as watershed
restoration, war restoration, etc.
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