How Consumers can End Unsustainable Fishing Practices


 

Cayman Christ, Nathan Weiss, and I (Blaine Parker) care deeply about the world’s oceans. It is for this reason that we chose to base our project around a pledge to eat only responsibly caught seafood. In designing this pledge, we singled out the most harmful method of fishing which is still allowed in US waters: gill-netting. Almost all states in the US have banned gill nets. The only state which still allows for the use of gill nets is North Carolina.

We framed the issue of gill netting using a collective action frame. This type of framing identifies an issue, identifies the person/people responsible for the issue, and calls for concrete collective action in order to eliminate or alleviate the issue. The issue we identified is the use of gill nets in North Carolina’s coastal waters. The specific environmental damage these nets do includes drowning endangered sea turtles, stranding dolphins, and killing large numbers of fish as bycatch. These nets have been proven to be less deadly to bycatch than other methods of capture, so we believe the use of gill nets should be banned. The perpetrators of environmental damage in this case are commercial fishermen. These fishermen see first-hand the damage that gill nets cause, and they still choose to use gill nets. The collective action we called for in our pledge is to stop buying seafood caught using gill nets. The reasoning behind this is that if everyone stops buying gill netted seafood, the fishermen using gill nets will lose their markets and no longer be able to use gill nets. This would eventually eliminate the use of gill nets in North Carolina, which is our primary goal. 

To spread our pledge on social media, we made an instagram page (@bangillnets) and followed as many people as we could. Many of these people followed our page and signed our pledge. As of now, the instagram page has 176 followers. To engage with our followers, we posted images of gill nets in action and the damage they cause.

The most recent post to this page is a video in which we explain the reasoning behind our pledge. We also posted this video to youtube:


We thought going into the project that we would be able to gain more traction online via instagram and youtube than we were actually able to gain. We initially set our signature goal for our pledge at 1000 signatures. After a month of work, we were sitting at only around 80 signatures. We had to reevaluate our goal to be slightly more reasonable, and we decided that 200 signatures would be an attainable yet ambitious goal. With this new goal in mind, we employed new strategies to engage with more people and hopefully gain more signatures on our pledge. The two new tactics we used which seemed to have very positive results were mass emailing and tabling.

I decided to send an email with a short explanation of our pledge and a link people could click to sign to everyone under the environmental studies major, the marine science major, the biology major, the chemistry major, and the animal studies major. The day after sending these emails, the signatures on our pledge had almost doubled to over 140. This tactic worked because of clicktivism. Clicktivism is the ability for a person to be an activist with just one click on their device. By sending the link to sign our pledge in an email, it took only one click for people to sign the pledge, and I believe this is why our emails had such a large impact on the number of signatures we received. 

The last tactic we employed in an effort to reach our signature goal was to table outside of the Triton Pub on Eckerd’s campus. We printed flyers with our logo and a QR code which took people directly to our pledge. This is another form of clicktivism, as people only needed to scan the QR code to be linked to our pledge. We saw a lot of success by tabling, and managed to gain over 60 signatures in about 2 hours. This pushed us over our signature goal of 200. For this reason, we believe this project has been successful for the scope of time which we were able to work on it. However, we would still like to see our pledge gain more attention and signatures. We still wish to end gill net fishing in North Carolina, and we believe this pledge was a good start toward doing that. 

We may soon gain a lot more support, as we reached out to the North Carolina branch of the Coastal Conservation Association, or CCANC, on instagram. We introduced our project and asked for their support by sharing our page on their story. They replied about a week later and said yes, they would be happy to share our page, but they have yet to do so. Once they do repost us on their story, our pledge will gain a lot of attention, as their page has over 30,000 followers. This is the next step toward ending gill net fishing. 

If you wish to help our cause, please sign and share our pledge! We can bring an end to the unsustainable practice of gill net fishing!

Sign the Pledge!

References:

Cox, R. J., & Pezullo, P. C. (2021). Environmental communication and the Public Sphere (6th ed.). SAGE.

ECFR :: 50 CFR 600.305 -- general. (2021). Retrieved December 8, 2021.

Fisheries, N.O.A.A. (2021, February 22). Fishing Gear: Gillnets. NOAA.

Sea turtles and North Carolina Inshore fisheries. Sea Turtle Conservancy. (2021).



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Noise Pollution

Image
  Noise Pollution  By Christin Toth   This semester I decided to do my environmental communication final project on marine noise pollution. In cities we talk about noise and light pollution, how there is none when you go out into the countryside. However, many of us do not stop and think that noise pollution exists underwater as well. Unfortunately, there is, and it is a big problem.     The expected silent blue abyss is shattered by the loud blasts of compressed air from seismic surveys and the constant shrill of boats. These are the two culprits I focused on. My project goal was to educate people on how these two things are causing harm to marine life. As well as get 50 people to sign petitions against seismic surveying.  I made five flyers all talking about the negative effects noise pollution has on whales, fish, and the fishing industry to accompany that I collected sound samples of different noise polluters and how th...
Read more

Stop Buying Trash!

  https://stopbuyingtrash.wixsite.com/stopbuyingtrash stopbuyingtrash is a web project intended to communicate the need to rethink our habits as the consumers of the world. Changing these habits is a project I’ve believed in for years and a goal I have set for myself in my own life, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to spread the message. I had originally intended to publicly project images and videos drawing attention to the issue with a link to the site on the walls of high-traffic areas around my campus, but found that I lacked the appropriate hardware to do so. Instead I shared the site via a campus-wide email, and it has now been visited several dozen times. I hope those who have visited the site have found it helpful in changing their perspective on consumption, but communication from site viewers to me is rather limited. Web design is not my strong suit, so I was not able to include all the features I wanted at first, such as an anticonsumpt...
Read more

Stop Toxic Waste from Being Injected Into the Earth at Piney Point

Image
  Photo by Tampa Bay Times This is an actual image of the wastewater at Piney Point being released into Tampa Bay in March 2021 . The water is bright green because it contains radioactive elements such as  phosphorous, nitrogen, ammonia, uranium, thorium, radium, and emits radon.  If you think this shouldn't go into the ocean, you are right.  But it already happened, and we have severely paid the price. A harsh wave of Red Tide was induced for nearly nine months, which made the water unsafe to swim in and killed thousands of marine life.  Now, Manatee County and  the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), want to inject that same waste into the ground, and possibly contaminate the drinking water of millions of Floridians.  This is not okay. Nor is it the only option (despite claims from officials). Water treatment processes, such as filtration and reverse osmosis, have been used successfully in the past at Piney Point. These methods sho...
Read more