Inspiring Conservation in Baja
Rare President and CEO Brett Jenks talks about a recent board trip to Baja California, Mexico. This is the first of two posts.
We recently returned from a Rare board of directors meeting in Loreto, Baja California, where we visited a new pilot project called Fisheries Fellows. Rare is training and mentoring six Mexican fellows, each of whom will spend two years working with fishing cooperatives in six different towns on the Gulf of California. We designed the program with Packard Foundation with several goals in mind: 1) sustainable benthic fisheries; 2) future fisheries leaders; and 3) a model for ramping up the human resource pool for fisheries in Mexico. Huge challenges of course.
We spent our first day in Baja visiting a sea cucumber fishery with some local cooperative members and a few of the fellows. Great way to get the board more hands-on experience with a fishery and a great way to add context to the many serious concerns that come up when we consider new programs: how to measure success in the short term (sustainability plans are feasible, but we’ll need to monitor the actual fishery for much longer to know that we’ve had an impact), what constitutes success (one out of six, six out of six), potential demand for and scalability of this model if it works out, etc.
The second day we flew over El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve to San Ignacio Lagoon to go whale watching and to meet some past graduates of our nature guide training programs there. At the time we started training bilingual local nature guides, 10 years ago, we struggled with the same questions we are now faced with in the Fisheries Fellows program. We wonder: Would guides get jobs? Would they start careers in ecotourism? Would they be able to compete? If they did, how many people could they employ? Would a burgeoning ecotourism economy create a culture of conservation? Was a $10,000 investment in training one guide justifiable? What would be the conservation ROI?
What we saw in San Ignacio was wholly inspiring. Sixteen of the twenty graduates of Rare’s guide training programs in the biosphere reserve are still guiding. Many are managing their own businesses. Many are involved with international and local conservation NGOs. They are community leaders. They teach environmental education in local schools. One has produced a widely used bird checklist for the reserve. Another is an expert kayak guide leader and NOLS instructor.
