A scientist driven to understand collective action

As told to Josie Garthwaite

I was born in Mexico City, but we spent weekends and summers at my grandfather’s farm in Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico. He was a naturalist at heart. He would take all the grandkids on walks and hikes and point out the birds and vegetation. I always looked forward to going to the farm, going fishing, climbing trees. I think that was the spark for my decision to study biology and later on marine biology. 

I left home at 18 to study at a university in the Gulf of California. That’s where I still do my work because I fell in love with the ocean – the amount of life in the ocean, the color of the water, the smell of the sea, the amazing sunsets. 

During the last year of my undergrad, I had the good fortune to be selected for an exchange program. I chose the farthest place we could go: Memorial University in Newfoundland. In July, the thing to do was to watch icebergs come by. 

When I arrived, the entire province was in a fishing moratorium because they had overfished their cod. There were debates between local and Indigenous people’s knowledge versus expert scientists’ views. The scientists had said, “There’s lots of cod.” And the locals had been saying, “All the behavior has changed – we don’t see them.” Fisheries biologists redid their models and realized that the locals were right. 

It was very powerful to witness how overfishing could transform a place. The number-one song in St. John’s in Nova Scotia was a song about overfishing by a folk artist. I was taking classes in fisheries and agriculture, and fishers were in class because they said they got tired of spending their unemployment check in the bar, so they went back to school.

When I returned to Mexico, I decided that I wanted to work for biodiversity conservation but also to maintain the livelihoods of fishers. I’m interested in how people can create agreements among themselves that allow them to value the future and the environment more than their own self-interest, their own personal gain. How does that happen? What kind of language, arrangements, negotiations happen? Trust and reciprocity are really important: how people build trust, and rebuild it when trust has been broken. As environmental conditions change, it becomes harder to do that, but I still find case studies where groups and communities are doing it.

It’s not only agreements among people, but also the interaction with the environment that modifies those agreements. We need to understand how their agreements take into account the environment so their agreements can continue to be relevant. If you’re talking about fish, you need to understand how fish grow, where they are, how they move, how they develop this collective understanding of what is fish and where they live, so that they can come up with agreements. 

I’m very interested in questions that are fundamental to how we can live together as a society – particularly, how we can build sustainable or viable societies in rural places in the global south. There are always going to be tensions – it’s about how those tensions get resolved and framed. We need our students to understand that living in a sustainable manner is partly about how to communicate with others, listen, and talk so that we can be heard.

Related: Xavier Basurto, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences