Paolo Fanciulli was a fisherman with a chip on his shoulder. Like many artisanal fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere, the fish stocks that he relied on for a living off the Tuscan coast of Italy had been depleted by illegal trawler ships that came in close to the coast.
Small-time fishers like Fanciulli couldn’t compete with these ships, which gathered everything in the area and then left it barren for years. “I understood that the success of my fishing activity was intrinsically linked to the good state of the environment,” says Fanciulli, who spoke to us with the aid of a translator.
Trawling is a fishing method that involves dragging a weighted net along the seafloor behind the boat. It’s an indiscriminate catch-all method that can be very profitable. “At the beginning when you start fishing with trawl nets, you get a lot of benefits,” says Ricardo Aguila, senior adviser and expedition leader at the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana.
