EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the seventh in an ongoing series of features highlighting authors and new books published by Torrey House Press in Utah.
Two outstanding books published by Torrey House Press are strongly recommended for their exceptional strategic and tactical insights for individuals and organizations who wonder if it is still possible to advance projects to restore, preserve and revitalize lands, wildfire and our natural environments, even amidst hostile currents driven by animosity, skepticism and distrust. More often than not, a process of reform and reconciliation starts, as one of the authors expressed, by “introducing ourselves to our neighbors.”
WILD ON PURPOSE: SEAN GERRITY
It was a little more than 20 years ago when the American Prairie nonprofit organization purchased 22,000 acres in Montana, once lands used for ranching, just 100 miles south of the Canadian border. In bringing back bison to prairie lands after an absence of nearly a century and a half, the visionaries steering the privately funded restoration are focused, in the words of Sean Gerrity, on “rebuilding essentially an American Serengeti, complete with pronghorn, prairie dogs, pollinators, grassland, birds, cougars, swift, fox, bison, black, footed, ferrets, and countless other species that have in the recent past been wholly eradicated or reduced to minuscule populations and replaced with agricultural operations.”
Published by Torrey House Press, Gerrity’s book, Wild on Purpose: The American Prairie Story and the Art of Thinking Bigger is more than a chronicle of launching, as the author described it, a “naïve new venture in Bozeman, Montana” in the early 2000s. More importantly, the book (with a foreword by award-winning documentarian Ken Burns) is a hands-on case study about the power of personal agency and the impact of sincere engagement in projects of ecological restoration and preservation. Gerrity’s Wild on Purpose, centered around the abundance of Montana wildlife, goes hand in hand with Sea Change by James Workman and Amanda Leland, about the benefits of catch shares for Galveston. Texas fishermen. To quote Gerrity, it started with “introducing ourselves to our neighbors.”
In an interview with The Utah Review, Gerrity said he started writing the book with the idea that the focus would be on how American Prairie became established with a mission that could be durable and achievable. But the publisher’s editors suggested a shift for Garrity that also could inspire readers who live far from the Montana prairies and envision large-scale endeavors to restore and preserve natural habitats in their own geographic surroundings. Wild on Purpose rejuvenates the possibilities that have often been doused by forces of apathy, malaise and nihilism.
In the book, Gerrity speaks about events and transitions in his life that led him not only to launching American Prairie but also shepherding it through days when resources were at their leanest and ultimately deciding the right time to pass the baton to the next generation of leaders. In the midst of the annoying din of AI and its alleged promises, Wild on Purpose presents a potent case for why human capital still matters the most in ensuring responsible, ethical and impactful human stewardship of our lands, natural resources and wildlife.
Seeing an exit out of the “environmental dark ages,” he wrote, “I consider myself a possibilist versus a blind optimist.” The context refers to the phenomenon of shifting baseline syndrome, which “invariably involves the gradual lowering of expectations about what constitutes healthy, fully functioning and intact natural systems.” Yes, we are struggling with the ethics (or the blatant lack thereof) in the present moment, which confound how to resolve and manage the most urgent environmental crises because of their existential risks. However, Gerrity also sees the value of candid conversations to incorporate the moral imperative of accountability, which demands historical considerations and particularly traditional Indigenous knowledge, into how we become better long-term stewards of our natural environment:
I know when I talk about the possibility of millions more people one day choosing conservation as a path some people will say, ‘Sean, you’re thinking too big again.’ It’s simply impractical in a world where the baselines have shifted to the point where conditions in the natural world are sorely out of balance and our own collective imaginations have diminished so much that somebody has to think big about these things. This is the best time ever to consider starting all manner of things that could one day make the world a better place; one that we will be proud to pass on to future generations.
The theme of purpose reverberates on every page of the book. Gerrity recalls the sorts of circumstances that can lead any of us to contemplate the next path we take in our lives. There is the unnerving close call when his wife, Kayla, went missing during a kayaking trip on the American River, located down the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He explained his epiphany. “I would now risk becoming deeply attached to important things and people, but I also might be very afraid that I wasn’t capable of being good at attachment,” he explained.
Likewise, the births of their son, Dylan, and daughter, Siri, would direct other transitions. Later, it would be meeting Steve Forrest, a wildlife biologist, and one of two staff members with the World Wildlife Fund’s Northern Great Plains office. This led to the 2001 establishment of a stand-alone 501(c)(3) nonprofit as American Prairie. Gerrity was asked to be one of the three members for its board of directors while he was still planning for his magazine publication.
He wrote, “I was realizing that this was what I wanted in my next vocation— to take a risk on something I really cared about that nonetheless might fail on the other hand. If it succeeded, it might add amazing richness to my life and end up having long lasting value to both wildlife and people.” He drew a parallel to Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, in which the mystic Don Juan said, as Gerrity explained it, “that the trick in life is to practice being awake because opportunities are constantly floating around just outside your peripheral vision, but every so often they float directly across your field of view. If you’re awake, you have a shot at seizing what he called that ‘one cubic centimeter of chance.’”
Gerrity is candid in recalling just how audacious some of his choices were, especially when conditions might have suggested a more cautious, prudent approach. During the dot.com recession in the early 2000s, just as he took the reins of the fledgling American Prairie organization, which had no substantial assets at the time, he realized that no bank would finance a loan without personal collateral that he was willing to put up as a guarantee. It was a throwback to the same situation years earlier when he and his wife, Kayla, started an earlier enterprise. The young couple fortunately had another primary stakeholder in the organization, who agreed to back the company’s line of credit for the first year. “So here I was again starting another company but with much higher personal stakes,” Gerrity recalled.
To make good on crystallizing American Prairie’s legacy potential, Gerrity worked to leverage the “art of momentum.” Rather than operate naïvely that everything would follow consistently in an upward trajectory, Gerrity and his staff broke down the target objective into manageable increments of 18 to 24 months. Three times each year, they organized three-day retreats, as he explained, “to shut the outside world off and thoroughly review the details and understanding of the organization’s purpose, values, vision, current reality and strategies.”
Admittedly, the art of momentum for restoration and preservation in the U.S. is a complicated task currently, especially with the current Federal government’s unmitigated hostility to meaningful efforts for restoration and conservation. Things, however, are popping in Europe. Gerrity highlights The Netherlands’ success in demonstrating how efficient and more productive yields in agriculture can be accomplished on a fraction of available land. Gerrity noted that in accounting for restoration projects in Europe, there were just eight dots 14 years ago but now there are at least 75, representing efforts in countries such as Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Scotland, along with Bulgaria where bison have been reintroduced.
Wild on Purpose’s point is that overcoming animosity is possible, even under pessimistic circumstances. The art of messaging to influence local skeptics was not lost on Gerrity, who knew that American Prairie’s neighbors needed to be assured that the economy for ranchers would not be compromised and that the presence of bison and other wildlife would not inconvenience ranching operations. Realities were not lost on him: “And change was generally not a welcome idea in this region so even if we did everything right it could take a very long time for some of the more reticent folks to conclude that our vision had some merit.”
The book rises on its generous dose of sagacious guidance for other groups pursuing restoration and conservation projects for nature, wildlife and the environment. Gerrity explained that it was important to understand that whatever animosity may have been directed toward American Prairie was borne of people who were frustrated and saddened by the outcomes of unwelcome changes which started long before there was such an organization.
He cited the empirical phenomenon of the 20-60-20 Rule, which some mathematicians have studied to see if this particular ratio implies some sort of balance that leads to an effective environment for efficient management or control. The rule indicates that on either end of the spectrum, there generally will be 20% of people who are ready, willing and able for change, while another 20% will not accept any change, regardless of cost or promised benefit. Meanwhile, 60% in the middle of the bell curve wait to see how circumstances unfold before committing to a change.
Gerrity mentions Clifford Peter Hansen, a Wyoming cattle rancher who served as the state’s governor for one term in the 1960s before being elected to the U.S. Senate. Originally opposed to expanding Grand Teton National Park because he believed it would be a negative for Wyoming ranchers as well as the broader cattle livestock industry, Hansen eventually changed his mind. In a speech, Hansen said, “I want you all to know that I’m glad I lost because I was wrong. Grand Teton National Park is one of the greatest natural heritages of Wyoming and the nation, and one of our greatest assets.”
If organizations apply the 20-60-20 Rule when it comes to deciding how, for example, a proposed infrastructure project will affect the environment, then it is imperative to include Indigenous peoples in the process. Citing examples from along the central California coastline to the Klamath River to shared bison stewardship in the West and elsewhere, including the Philippines and Australia, Gerrity said progress will continue “if governments reduce or eliminate the many long-standing systemic impediments to tribal leadership and conservation related decision-making and… if indigenous communities continue to proactively, seize emerging leadership opportunities across the growing variety of conservation efforts.”
American Prairie became creative in reaching out to prospective donors, organizing safari-like trips with three days and two nights spent in a remote prairie location. One experience, in particular, validated the approach. Gerrity met a couple at a San Francisco Bay Area event for American Prairie in the middle of one winter. The couple was interested in learning more about the restoration project. Gerrity suggested a trip to the prairie lands might be ideal later that year in the warmer months but he was caught off-guard when the couple said they wanted to go as soon as possible— in early February, when temperatures might be as low as 30 degrees below zero, with near-blizzard conditions. When they made their trip, while it was frigid, the skies were clear and there was less than a foot of snow. Gerrity said it was an eye-opener for the guests, with golden eagles, coyotes, herds of elk and other hardy wildlife. The couple said the experience was just as exhilarating as the African safari they experienced in Tanzania and Kenya a few months earlier.
In a scenario familiar to many nonprofits, American Prairie has had to prove its solvency over and over again. In one period when it could have been make-or-break for the organization, Gerrity took $110,000 from his children’s college fund and loaned it to American Prairie, without any guarantee that it would be repaid. Furthermore, he decided not to tell the board right away. Fortunately, financial circumstances improved within six months, with every employee moved back to full-time status and pay and with monthly payments to Gerrity and his wife, the loan was paid off in one year, including interest. “It had been a wake-up call for me to step up our efforts, even further, to build a more productive fundraising organization,” he recalled. “It remained hard for me to fully grasp how amazingly hard it is to do that, based on advice from others.”
The bottom line is that Wild on Purpose is essential reading for individuals involved in environmental restoration and preservation projects, especially when optimism is in short supply but there is still plenty of hope for possibilities of meaningful changes and impacts.
SEA CHANGE: JAMES WORKMAN AND AMANDA LELAND
“It has always seemed strange to me…The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
In John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row, Doc, the marine biologist, spoke these words as the central witness of the characters and events found on that fabled street in Monterey, California.
In Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions, readers meet a real-life fisherman, Keith ‘Buddy’ Guindon, in Galveston, Texas, not far from the docks on Wharf Road. As authors James Workman and Amanda Leland note, “We’d advise you against trying to match… Buddy… beer for beer in lengthy talks about rebuilding red snapper and grouper populations he’d fish to the brink in the Gulf of Mexico. But the conversation itself might change the way you think about environmentalism in that bar and others like it. Difficult decisions from such brutally honest conversations are exactly what brought this book into existence.”
At one time, in the eyes of Steinbeck’s Doc, Buddy would have been assessed more by the “traits we detest” than “the things we admire in men.” However, Workman and Leland skillfully present Buddy as a skeptic-turned-enlightened archetype in a fascinating narrative that grounds his story in an impressive abundance of empirical evidence collated “from a library of global case studies, science reports, and design manuals.” By the end of the book, which is published by Torrey House Press, the reader can justifiably feel optimistic about how the wisdom of catch shares embodied in more than 200 social contracts are helping troubled fisheries in 40 countries bring back some 500 species of fish.
Exceptional in breadth and depth of intersecting sociological and scientific perspectives, Sea Change literally covers enormous territory in the field of marine ecology and biology. But it is Buddy’s story which effectively makes the science comprehensible to a lay reader who might feel hopeless about the seas recovering from these ecological crises. At the outset, the authors pose the problem succinctly: “No one denies the breadth of overfish, but what can people do at the market, restaurant or ballot box to turn the tide?”
Workman and Leland epitomize the ideal collaboration of entrepreneur and scientist. Workman drew on fieldwork with Indigenous Kalahari people and founded AquaShares, a firm pioneering water credit trading. Leland, a kayaker and scuba diver who learned to fish from her grandfather, is executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund. One of the projects she worked on involved 14 countries and was focused on reversing overfishing while supporting those whose livelihoods rely on fish. A heartening parallel is found in Buddy and his fishing colleagues who initially distrusted the idea of scientists getting involved in their business. They learned that their participation in research studies can produce tangible benefits for their livelihood in the fishing industry.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Workman said it would have been “easy to wonk out” in the book on the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), which became 50 years ago the comprehensive law governing marine fisheries in U.S. federal waters. He added that a character-driven narrative for the size of this large story made sense.
Buddy’s presence in the story welcomed discussions about how certain species became popular at restaurants or how the emergence of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish levied a huge impact on the fishing industry. There is an excellent summary about the history of American fisheries and how several of the Founding Fathers advocated for a governmental stimulus to aid the cod fishing industry. Fitting in with the narrative, Buddy articulates the valid reasons for his concerns and fears about whether or not environmental reforms could be carried out, without jeopardizing his livelihood as a fisherman.
What is notable about Sea Change is that Torrey House Press, an InterMountain West publisher, likely would not have considered acquiring a manuscript which dealt with sea fishing hundreds of miles away from the landscapes that typically are covered in the THP catalog. But the lessons of Buddy’s evolution in his thinking, just as Sean Gerrity persuaded Montana ranchers to consider the value of restoring the American prairies and wild bison, will resonate with readers who are concerned about the universal implications of water rights and public lands conservation.
“There are huge parallels,” Workman said, between catch shares and groundwater, which also is typically seen as an invisible resource whose value becomes evident once it is brought to the surface. The implications of conservancy certainly matter for evaluating the rights of dominion for farmers who rely on irrigation along with the potential contentious litigation about those water rights. Likewise, the conceptual template underlying catch shares would be just as relevant in resolving disputes and concerns among ranchers who worry about predatory threats to their livestock by wolves and grizzly bears as well as herds of bison grazing on pastures they have relied on for the benefit of their animals.
In Sea Change, to the surprise of Buddy and fellow fishermen, catch shares actually showed them how they could realize real economic benefits by fishing on fewer numbers of days and saving on energy costs as well as during their fishing operations.
Just as Gerrity’s Wild on Purpose chronicled the slow, often messy process of building alliances for the prairie reserve, Sea Change amplifies the point about sustaining hope while sincerely committing to building trust so that meaningful alliances can be formed. To wit, an anecdote from the book tour: “It was an exciting moment when Amanda [Leland] and Buddy hugged each other. Once they mistrusted each other and now we’re all best buddies.” Sea Change shows the possibilities of turning once unlikely allies into ambassadors who see the value of “kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling,” as Doc in the Steinbeck novel mused.
Described by the authors as “one of the most brutally successful and contentious figures,” Buddy, who grew up in a time when the fish seemed endless, “consistently outhustled and outfoxed every other fisherman in the western Gulf and through the first decade of the 21st-century he and others had nearly emptied the sea.” But as a highliner, Buddy acutely knew that it was not just the prospects of irreversible economic losses but how even in the relentless game of catching the most fish, his outside life was suffering and he was missing out on events important to his family:
Yet there was no equivalent at sea to a fish harvesting speed limit. To the contrary, as regulatory mandates forced fishermen into rushed and reckless behavior, safety gains from tactical approaches were often overwhelmed by the race for fish. The derby encouraged Buddy to cut corners, defer maintenance work in the fog of exhaustion and go out even in gathering Gulf storms, as rivalries intensified over a finite resource. The primary focus on the scarcity of time and fish reduced decision-making capacities and left less room for seemingly secondary concerns like safety.
To situate Buddy’s place in the larger stakes of the narrative and the rationale behind the social contract remedy of catch shares which he rejected at first and then finally embraced, Workman and Leland turned to seminal figures such as the late H. Scott Gordon, a Canadian economist. Gordon contended that marine biologists had to reconsider the idea that the fisherman was an exogenous element whose behavior had no place in their models. As noted in the book, “if wild fish were renewable and theoretically inexhaustible, and so valuable to coastal economies, why were fishermen so poor?” Introducing the concept of catch shares in 1954, Gordon explained that among “traditional and indigenous fishing communities, stable primitive cultures appear to have discovered the danger of common property tenure and to have developed measures to protect our resources.” It would be nearly a decade and a half later, when catch shares first became codified under modern formal statutes.
Buddy was the ideal avatar for Sea Change. The authors traced his change of heart from outright opposition to catch shares for red snapper to recognizing them as beneficial to him as well as his fishing colleagues. It wasn’t a straight line to change his mind. “He may have had the most in terms of money and self-worth to gain if a new catch shares system could rebuild red snapper populations,” the authors wrote. “But he also had the biggest investments to lose if it couldn’t.”
When he and the other fishermen were invited to vote in 2006 on a referendum of principle regarding catch shares, Buddy voted against it even as 80% said yes. His mind was finally changed after catch shares were implemented in 2007, especially as the market for the first time favored the harvesters over the buyers. Buddy realized the wisdom of spreading out the timeline “rather than catching the entire quota in the first few trips,” the authors explained. “The fisherman could also earn more while letting the fish recover back toward historic levels.” Buddy put it simply, “It sounded crazy, I know, but we could all catch less fish and yet make more money.”
Not only was the ecosystem given breathing room to recover and adapt but also Buddy and every other commercial fishing boat in the gulf were burning 80% less fuel. Workman and Leland summarized the achievement perfectly, “Put this another way, thanks to catch shares, Wharf Road has gone far beyond the cuts agreed to by signatories to the Paris Accord, overnight and voluntarily.”
Sea Change does not lightly treat the complexities involved. “Marine research isn’t rocket science, brain surgery or quantum physics,” wrote John McQuaid in his Pulitzer Prize winning series for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “It’s harder. We know less about the ocean than we do about outer space yet the social cost of miscalculations are enormous. Scientists and managers operate on a razor’s edge. They must allow as much fishing as possible without allowing the fish population to collapse and are under pressure to move in a more dangerous direction.”
At first, Buddy only welcomed researchers on his boats when it was absolutely necessary. “He felt like they regarded his livelihood as, at best, a necessary evil and encroachment under an otherwise pure or natural ocean ecosystem,” the authors explained. “Just imagine doing your taxes, equipped, one of his Wharf Road deck hands with an IRS agent, looking over your shoulder and taking notes.”
The most galling thing for Buddy— as well as for practically every other fisherman in the U.S.—was that whatever research was gathered on the boat could be used to argue for reducing the amount of fish they were allowed to catch. “They felt treated like second-class stakeholders, demoted in stature, discounted in weight,” the authors noted.
Two years after catch shares were initiated, Buddy’s change of heart occurred when a federal fisheries scientist hired him and his boat. “It was hard to say no to extra income for fishing. The government would pay for his time, bait, ice, and fuel and let him keep and sell his catch,” the authors wrote. “The only drawback was that he’d have to fish it on federal terms and timetables. He agreed and not just for the money now vested in the long-term outcome, but he was eager to discover what they might find.”
That came in the form of a hook timer, which elicited Buddy’s approval. Buddy and the scientists realized it was possible to realign interests mutually to engender trust and respect, something which the fictional Doc could only have dreamed about for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The authors summarize this challenge beautifully: “Data-rich transparency is at the heart of America’s central challenge of natural resource policy, how to hold private enterprises accountable for harvesting federal resources governed under the public trust. In other words, we should harvest data at the same rate that we harvest fish.”
Going further, catch shares have shown it is possible to rescue food waste. “Thankfully, ocean protection need not be a zero-sum game,” Workman and Leland affirm. In a separate example regarding catch shares implemented in 2011, “discarding has dropped 80% and several species along with several other once depleted species have been declared rebuilt,” the authors cited.
Buddy’s evolution in his thinking about catch shares has also made the ideals of becoming a commercial fisher more appealing to an up-and-coming generation which is unprecedentedly sensitized to the efforts to restore, replenish and preserve the marine ecosystems on mutually beneficial and acceptable terms. In the words of Chris Brown, a commercial fisherman and president of the Seafood Harvesters of America: “It offered kids nothing but a lot of hard work for low pay and no security but now you see them hanging around the docks, asking questions showing interest to me. That’s a good sign. It means we have a future.”