Helen FieldsScience Writer

Today on Science Careers – a part of the Science magazine website that’s about, you know, careers – I have a profile of Josh Cinner, a guy who studies coral reefs. Only he’s not a marine biologist. Tricky, eh? He’s a social scientist who has spent a lot of time in villages in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, asking people about their relationships with the coral reefs they fish, and he’s also worked in Kenya, Madagascar, the Seychelles, and other such exotic places.

My ploy to get Science to send me to the Seychelles failed, but otherwise I had a good time reporting this story. It was really interesting to talk to someone with such a different perspective on coral reefs. Cinner makes a point that’s obvious when you think about it, but I’d never thought of it before: if you want to manage fish, you actually have to manage people. The fish are going to do their thing. It’s the people you have to worry about.

One of the things Cinner says you have to find out when you’re deciding how to manage reefs is people’s beliefs about what affects the ocean. “Do they understand that human actions are a critical part of shaping the condition of the coral reef or do they think it’s some sort of supernatural power?” he asks. It makes a difference to how you try to manage the reef. If people believe that only the gods control the oceans, then all your talk about overfishing is going to go nowhere. “It’s like telling people in Australia, ‘Go fish the crap out of the reef, bomb it, do whatever you want, just make sure you pray beforehand.’ That’s as much sense as it makes to tell people to preserve reefs if their world view is that the only thing they can do to preserve it is to pray.”

Here’s the profile.

photo: Mila Zinkova