Guest Speaker: Dr. Kevin St. Martin
10/31, 3:30 - 4:30, AUST 434
Title: Revealing Fishing Community Precarity and the Foundations of Environmental Justice
Abstract:
Longstanding calls for environmental justice are only now being enacted within agencies responsible for fisheries management in the United States. This turn in policy foregrounds impacts upon the livelihoods and wellbeing of marginalized populations under conditions of precipitous industrial and climate change. Where the focus of management has long been the maximization of harvest, there is now a mandate to assess uneven and inequitable outcomes as experienced by fishing communities. This turn in fisheries policy implementation resonates with recently established policies and practices globally, such as the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication.
The inclusion of environmental justice within fisheries policy in the U.S., and globally, will, however, require new metrological frameworks designed to make visible a range of “underserved communities” and to trace, over time, the impacts of not only government policy and practice, but also the uneven impacts of environmental change. A research project in the Northeast of the U.S. is building metrics that document and map the precarious conditions and struggles for survival of fishing communities which had been made invisible by hegemonic accountings and metrics. These statistical and spatial measures of community health and decline, interpreted as indicators of community vulnerability and survival, and increasingly integrated into established institutions of fisheries management, document where and at what scale one might address questions of environmental justice.
For more information, contact: Katie Baldi at katie.baldi@uconn.edu