To Save Fish, Conservation Loops in the Locals

Among the things Moses "Mo" Tuivuna remembers about his childhood in Fiji is catching fish so big there was never any worry about having enough to eat.

When Tuivuna's father died recently, he went back to visit his childhood home -- a village called Solevu on the Fijian island of Malolo. Instead of grabbing fish out of the sea at will, he noticed, villagers now have to walk a mile or two to find fish worth catching.

View a slide show about efforts to save coral reefs in Fiji here.

"We're changing," said Tuivuna, 35, a large, gentle man, who is employed as a divemaster on a local boat. "When I was a kid, more people were fishing and less were working. Now, more are working."

It's a trend echoed globally: As natural resources decline, local people seek employment in cities and at resorts. In the process, native cultures disappear, as does biodiversity.

But it doesn't have to be that way, experts say. At hundreds of sites around the world, conservation groups are attempting to protect ecosystems and cultures at the same time. It's conservation with a local twist, but compromises are essential.

"You can't just ignore the demand for resources while you conserve those resources if you don't find alternative resources and if you don't account for local livelihoods," said Adina Merelender, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. That's true, she added, "whether you're working in the range-lands of the American West or with very, very poor people in Kalimantan."

Or in the islands of the South Pacific.

Not far from one of Tuivuna's favorite dive sites in Fiji, a group of remote villages is working hard to have it all -- tourism, biodiversity and cultural resiliency. About 1,000 people live in the Kubalau district on the island of Venua Levu. Among the members of one local village, Kiobo, 34 have completed ecotourism courses and are eager to host guests.

WATCH VIDEO: Learn about the four kinds of coral reef.

Related Links:

• Africa Dust Harming Corals?
• Coral Bank Created to Save Threatened Reefs
• HowStuffWorks.com: Why would there be no more fish in 40 years?
• Sponges Feel the Heat From Climate Change

Scuba divers already have to pay $25 Fijian ($13 U.S.) to dive in the nearby Namena Marine Reserve, which is located inside the Kubalau's traditional fishing grounds, called Quoliquoli. The money goes toward conservation and scholarships.

Through divers and other tourists, the people of the Kubalau hope to bring in even more money that could buy the village some of the things they don't have, including electricity and running water.

"There is a really strong desire through a lot of communities to really come together," said Stacy Jupiter, Fiji's program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society. "It can work."

In the 1980s, ecotourism sprang up as a simple attempt to make money out of nature and people's desire to see it.

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, leaders from more than 150 nations (not including the United States) agreed for the first time that protecting biological diversity needed to be an essential consideration during the process of development. As a result, USAID, the World Bank and other agencies began funding so-called Integrated Conservation and Development Projects. From Mexico to Guyana, hundreds of ICDPs attempted to address the needs of local people and involve local participation.

As much as those projects made sense in theory, results were mixed and backlash followed, Merelender said. Indigenous groups were angry about new limitations on their ability to hunt, fish and cut down trees. Outspoken critics argued that biodiversity conservation could never coexist with economic development.

Moving forward, Merelender said, conservationists are focusing more on the trade-offs involved in trying to protect parts of the Earth where people have lived for many generations. They are admitting that compensation is sometimes necessary, and that people have always impacted the planet -- and always will.

The new model is called community-based natural resource management.

But figuring out what success means is still a work in progress.

"Both man and nature are so complicated, no simple picture is going to allow you to predict what will happen if you change what you are doing," said Les Kaufman, a marine ecologist and conservation biologist. "It's an adaptive dance. We make a move, and we see what nature does."