My Research

Before I head off for 2 months I decided that I will let you in on what I will be doing with my life on the beach. I have written a 25 page research proposal but I doubt anyone is really interested in reading all that so I shall try to recap. I will be working in Tarcoles on the Pacific Coast, my research focuses on a responsible fishing area and how this area is affecting the economic situation of the people who live there. The local cooperatives ( I will be working with 3) of fishermen were the ones who fought to create the area in order to conserve fish and shrimps for the future. Right now there is a regulation that forces the big shrimp trawlers to not shrimp with in 15m depth of the shore, unfortunately the local fishermen cannot shrimp there either, because the big trawlers have no problem moving farther out and the local fishermen do, they are the only ones being screwed over by their own regulation. But, if they dont conserve the shrimp and fish now their way of life will die out due to overfishing.
           My project is going to focus on this interaction and try to show just how much the fishermen have lost out, I also will be conducting interviews with the fishermen to see how they are feeling about it. In addition to this I will be tracking all the fish that come into the cooperative to see how much money is being made overall, I will then compare it to 2009, right before the area was enacted. Also I will be creating projections for what the future looks like for them in a variety of different situations such as the area goes away and the shrimp boats come back and eat up all the progress that has been made etc. Also I will be looking at the environmental impacts of the area to see if the zone is even effective in conserving the populations that it was designed to protect.
              If i ever get all that done, I plan to use the information to give these fishermen a clearer view of their economic situation and help discover the best alternative for moving forward. This is even more important now because the responsible fishing area goes up for government re-evaluation in August, my research could help the cooperative make its argument to the government about the area stronger. Which is exciting because I get to do something that will actually matter outside of academics.
             Unfortunately the paper portion of my project is kind of a mess because I have like 4 projects within my project which do not exactly cover a specific discipline but we will worry about that in May. I will be attempting to post once a week from this point on however I am sharing a dial-up internet connection on a very old computer with an entire cooperative so we will see how that goes. If you are used to communicating with me through skype or facebook, that will be going away.