On January 17th my group and I interviewed Eddie Stern. He is on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund which is a large organization that uses politics and business to solve environmental problems. If found this very interesting because before I had thought that the best way to help was to go and volunteer and clean the water, but part of preventing water pollution is giving people an incentive. Money and business is a very good incentive, and is what the EDF uses to convince people. He told us about overfishing of the coast of Maine, and fishermen would catch as much as they could because they would make the most money that year, and they did not think about the next year. The EDF installed a solution called catch shares. These shares where pretty much fishing spots in the ocean that fishermen could obtain of buy from one another. They pretty much were buying land to fish on. Because the fishermen now owned the place they were fishing, they realized that if they wanted to be able to fish next year, they would need to keep their fish stock in good shape. Because the fishermen knew they would need to fish next year, they had an incentive to think about what they were taking out of the water. Because these shares are like investments, the way to get the most out of the investment was to be able to fish it for a long time, so that meant limiting themselves each year. While the fishermen had the freedom to take every single fish out of their area, they knew that next year they would have no source of fish and therefore money. This is a great example of how the EDF’s work really works and is good. This will be a great thing to teach at the teach-in because it shows that there are many way to approach the problem of water pollution. I think that my group was impacted in a very positive way at the end of our interview because we had learned that there are so many different ways to approach the problem and that everyone can find one that suits them best.
