A Nonprofit Leader Navigates Controversy While Preserving a Way of Life

In traditional New England fishing villages, the shanty is more than just a structure in which fishermen store their gear. It is also a gathering place for the men and women who make their living on the sea.

On a cool, rainy Tuesday morning, Paul Parker, executive director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association, an alliance of fishermen, environmentalists, and local residents, sits in the center of a decidedly different kind of shanty. This one occupies a modern office building rather than a rough-hewn shack, and has more computers than buoys, but it is a shanty just the same.

“We wanted to create a space that would be a kind of model community gathering spot,” says Mr. Parker. The previous day, he notes, the shanty played host to a group of fishermen who gathered to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation and to practice donning the inflatable emergency suits.

At 10 a.m. on this day, the shanty is a hive of activity. Six students from a vocational program at Chatham High School are helping with a mailing that announces the charity’s major fund-raising event: the Hooker’s Ball. Meanwhile, a steady stream of fishermen has begun to arrive. They settle into the mismatched chairs and sofas that take up much of the room and talk business: tides, currents, waves, and water temperature.

“There’s just one rule here,” says Mr. Parker. “This is a place where we try to be positive. We used to have a sign outside that said, ‘Leave your negativity at the door.’”

He is only half joking. New England fishermen have had plenty of reasons to feel negative since the mid-1980s, when stocks of North Atlantic groundfish — fish that live near the bottom of the ocean, including the cod for which Massachusetts is famous — began to collapse, resulting in a series of ever-tightening regulations intended to replenish the fish supply.

On May 1, the toughest restrictions to date went into effect, further limiting the days per year fishermen can spend at sea, along with where they can fish, what they can catch, and how much of it they can keep.

“These have been tough times, there’s no doubt about it,” says Mr. Parker, who spends two days a week fishing on a hook-and-line vessel and puts in long hours on the association job when on land. “Protecting the environment is the most important thing we can do. But our approach is unique: We want to protect the environment as a means of protecting small businesses.”

Relying on Hooks

The hook fishermen who have worked out of the ports of Cape Cod for more than 300 years have always been a distinctive breed.

While the vast majority of fishermen in New England fish by dragging trawl nets along the ocean floor (and corporate fishing boats do the same on a vastly larger scale), a far smaller group still relies on the ancient art of laying down hooks and lines to reel in groundfish.

It is a notoriously difficult way to fish, notes Mr. Parker, but it is also regarded as one of the “cleanest” forms of commercial fishing because, compared with nets, hook-and-line fishing generates less of what the industry terms “bycatch” — fish that are accidentally caught along with the intended catch, and may include young and protected species.

“This is a sustainable way to fish,” says Mr. Parker.

In 1991, with the New England fishing industry in a state of free fall, a small group of local residents formed the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association.

At a time when fishermen up and down the New England coast were at war with environmentalists over proposed regulations that they feared would drive them out of business, the new organization took a different tack, advocating the conservation of marine resources as a means of preserving the local fishing industry.

“This was about sustainable fishermen standing up and fighting for the environment,” says Mr. Parker. “Nobody had ever done anything like that before.”

From an ad hoc committee of fishermen who met over beers to discuss the fate and future of their industry, the “Hook,” as its staff and members call it, has evolved in its 13 years into a formalized entity with 2,500 members — 215 of whom are commercial fishermen. Its membership, notes Mr. Parker, also includes business owners, as well as hundreds of local residents who believe that supporting area fishermen goes hand in hand with preserving their coastal community.

While the group initially operated on a shoestring budget — Mr. Parker’s first office was in his grandmother’s basement — it now has an annual budget of $1.7-million.

The funds include $1.2-million in federal money intended to foster a joint research project between fishermen and scientists, along with more than $250,000 in grants from foundations, including the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Surdna Foundation.

Of the 16 fishermen who sit on the board of directors, most have taken courses on fisheries management, says Mr. Parker, while all of the group’s eight staff members, from researchers to a part-time fund raiser, spend time on the water. Mr. Parker says, “You can’t understand what it’s like to make a living this way, unless you’re out there.”

Seeking Out Fishermen

By noon, activity in the shanty has quieted considerably, and Mr. Parker is eager to get on the road. But since his most important constituents spend much of their time at sea, communicating with them — wherever they are — is a priority.

Today’s destination is the Chatham Fish Pier, a small working dock all but surrounded by lavish oceanfront properties. A group of fishermen — and Hook members — have recently returned from a two-day trip to the waters beyond Nantucket and are unloading a cargo of monkfish and skate wings. Mr. Parker relies on fishermen like these to keep him and his staff informed of the day-to-day conditions at sea: the kind of fish they are seeing, where they’re finding the fish, and in what numbers.

The men report that dogfish, a member of the shark family that is the nemesis of groundfishermen, abound these days; cod does not. In turn, Mr. Parker tells them of the latest regulatory changes about to take effect. He chats with them in the language of the modern fisherman: days at sea, total allowable catch, areas closed and open to fishing. It is a grim conversation, but perfectly friendly.

“Everyone is friendly to your face,” says Mr. Parker, driving away from the pier. But he says some fishermen are upset by the organization’s environmental positions. “We’ve been outspoken about the need for habitat protection,” he says. “Not everyone agrees with us on that.” That is something of an understatement. Mr. Parker has received phone calls threatening his life if the group didn’t change its stance. “I was told that the direction of our organization wasn’t a healthy one,” he says.

Despite his regular presence at the fish piers and on the water, many of the local fishermen still perceive the 33-year-old Mr. Parker as an outsider here. He grew up in Concord, Mass., just a hundred miles northwest, but a world away from the working ports where he now spends much of his time. He fell hard for the town and its surrounding waters during the summers he spent here at the home of his grandmother on Morris Island.

He returned to Chatham in 1997, bringing his newly acquired master’s degree in environmental management from Duke University, in Durham, N.C. A year later, he was hired as executive director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fisherman’s Association.

“I’m not from here,” says Mr. Parker. “There are no illusions about that. Nor do I claim to be an expert fisherman. But I love this place and I love to work really hard, and I think that counts for something.”

While many of his organization’s members are natives of Chatham and surrounding towns, some of the group’s strongest supporters are summer visitors like Mr. Parker himself once was. They donate their time and money for a simple reason, he says: because they believe that the working waterfront is something worth protecting.

“These fishing communities are a big part of what makes New England so special — all the little coves, ports, and harbors up and down the coast,” he says. “People are always ready to retrain fishermen, but that undermines who we are. We would hate to see corporate industrial boats replace these small, family-owned businesses.”

A Bridge of Trust

Back at the shanty that afternoon, staff members are preparing large traps and buoys for a research trip that will set sail sometime between 2 and 5 a.m. the next day, depending on the tide schedule.

Mr. Parker, Tom Rudolph, the association’s program coordinator, and several fishermen will sail 45 miles to the southeast to conduct research on the impact of hook-and-line fishing on young cod. By catching and releasing the fish into large traps at various depths, then retrieving the traps three days later, the group can glean important data on what impact hook-and-line fishing has on fish that are caught and set free.

Studies like this one are at the heart of the organization’s research agenda. And while collaborative efforts between fishermen and scientists aren’t new, what is unusual about these research projects is the extent to which the hook fishermen themselves set the agenda, says Mr. Parker.

Last year, the J.M. Kaplan Fund gave the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association $50,000 to conduct research on haddock stocks in areas that have been closed to fishing on Georges Bank, the southernmost bank of the shoal that runs from southern New England to Newfoundland, and has long served as the mainstay of fishing in the region. But securing money for the program turned out to be the easy part, notes Mr. Parker.

“Fifteen fishermen probably met in this room 20 times to figure out how we were going to generate the data we needed,” he says.

The fishermen, working alongside researchers, spent months collecting data, selling the fish they caught to finance what would ultimately turn out to be a $300,000 endeavor. “It showed people that we can really get something done,” he notes.

Last November the group presented its findings to the New England Fishery Management Council, demonstrating that haddock stocks are booming where tough regulations have been enacted.

As a result, New England fishermen will soon be able to resume fishing for haddock three months per year in areas that were formerly closed. Mr. Parker says that the additional activity will generate between $2-million and $4-million per haddock season for the local economies where the fishermen live.

The research projects have provided an economic lifeline for many of the group’s fishermen members, Mr. Parker says. Federal money is used to pay them to collect data and conduct tagging research at a time when tight regulations have drastically cut back the days they can spend fishing. But he maintains that it serves a larger purpose too: building a bridge of trust between scientists and New England fishermen.

“Fishermen often feel like scientists don’t listen to them, that they don’t respect just how much they know about the ocean,” Mr. Parker says. “Fishermen also associate scientists with quotas. They’re the ones who tell them how much fish they can catch.”

The poor relationship between fishermen and scientists has been one of the most important stumbling blocks to building wise fish-management plans, he says.

“Cooperative research is one way to erode those barriers and build trust and mutual understanding instead,” says Mr. Parker.

In the bright, busy atmosphere of the shanty, it is easy to forget for a moment about the dismal state of the New England fisheries.

Mr. Parker and his staff are relentlessly focused on the future. They are filled with plans for the coming weeks: research projects, political campaigns, and educational events. For example, 75 Vermont teenagers representing another embattled industry — small family farms — have been invited to Chatham to meet their seafaring counterparts. But far grander plans are also on the agenda.

In a rare moment of quiet, Mr. Parker and Melissa Roberts Weidman, the group’s communications director, talk about their vision: a collaborative scientific research institute called Chatham Ocean Discovery, or COD, to be housed in a former military barracks known as the Marconi Hotel. The site, occupied by Morse code communicators during World War II, has been abandoned for more than 40 years, and Mr. Parker’s organization is now in discussions with the town of Chatham over leasing and renovating the structure. The institute, notes Mr. Parker, would provide a place for fishermen and scientists to work together.

“The scientists are very excited about the possibility that this could happen,” he says.

But despite his anticipation of a brighter future, these are dark days for New England fishermen. When a fisherman stops by the shanty to speak with Mr. Parker late in the afternoon, he seems to embody the precarious state of the industry.

Hammered by declining fish stocks (there are simply fewer fish to catch in a depleted fishery) and by ever-tightening government regulations, the fisherman has sold his permit, meaning that he can no longer fish commercially at all. He is visibly in despair — one way of life now over, the future at best uncertain.

Mr. Parker tries to remain upbeat; he reminds the fisherman of the soon-to-be-reopened haddock fishery, and even offers to sit down with him and his wife to talk about their situation. “Change is coming, no one has any doubt about that,” Mr. Parker says after the man has left. “The fishermen are just looking for some reassurance that they can get through this.”