In Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions authors Amanda Leland and James Workman celebrate what’s possible when fishers and conservationists work together to save the world’s oceans.

The book about fishers and conservationists collaborating focuses on the power of catch shares, a management strategy to curb overfishing that allocates a portion of a fishery’s catch to an individual or group.

Rather than pressuring fishers to race into the waters each season, Leland says this system creates more flexibility for them to fish any time of the year. Fishers also see rewards for allowing stocks to replenish. As populations increase, what fishers can catch—and their potential income—grows with it, showing how fishers and conservationists are natural allies in restoring oceans.

Leland, who serves as the Executive Director of the Environmental Defense Fund, calls this a “built in incentive program.” And she tells Food Tank that this solution represents “a fundamental change” for fisheries management due to fishers and conservationists working together.

But Keith “Buddy” Guindon, the book’s protagonist, didn’t begin as an advocate of catch shares. Fisheries were collapsing around him in Texas as support for this new system grew, but he staunchly opposed it, believing restrictions would further threaten coastal communities.

As Sea Change explains, fishers and conservationists were not the greatest allies historically. It was “epically true” that the environmental community blamed them for the overfishing crisis, Leland tells Food Tank. “The argument was ‘this is all collapsing because of you’…when in reality they were stuck in a broken system.”

As researchers worked with the fishers to implement a catch shares program for red snapper, however, Guindon couldn’t deny the benefits that he was seeing. Fish populations were not just stable, but growing; and fishers around him were filling their boats while saving on time, labor, and operating costs. In the past, he had warned his children to avoid the industry. But the success of fishers and conservationists working together gave him certainty that a different, more hopeful future was possible.

Read the full article about fishers and conservationists restoring oceans by Elena Seeley at Food Tank.