Mercedes Lee is assistant director of National Audubon Society’s Living Oceans Program and editor of Seafood Lover’s Almanac.
Monday, 4 Jun 2001
ISLIP, N.Y.
Hi, I’m Mercedes Lee, assistant director of National Audubon Society’s Living Oceans Program. I’ve been with Audubon for more than 17 years (practically my entire adult life) in various policy, programmatic, and editorial capacities. I came to be with the Living Oceans Program when it was first founded by Carl Safina (author of Song for the Blue Ocean) in 1993. It’s been truly a life-changing experience that has influenced who I am in almost every way. I’m able to involve myself creatively and to work on things I care about — wildlife and nature — with people who are intelligent, passionate, and extremely committed.
In my diary entries this week, I hope to give you an idea of the issues our staff and I work on, the strategies we employ, and what tasks these things require. But first a little context.
Since its founding nearly a decade ago, the Living Oceans Program has worked to increase awareness and improve the plight of ocean life. Currently we have a staff of 12 working in Islip, N.Y.; Manhattan; Washington, D.C.; Oregon; and Hawaii. Until recently we focused pretty exclusively on marine fish (analyzing trends in fish populations, advocating policy changes in how fisheries were managed, and increasing public awareness). We recently hired Bill Brown, former science advisor to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, as director of Living Oceans. This marked an expansion and reorganization of our program into four initiatives: sustainable fishing, seafood lovers, ocean parks, and sea ethic — an ecological conscience that embraces the oceans as a profound and nurturing source of wealth now and for all time, for all living things.
As astounding as it may seem, before we started our program, marine fish had gone unremarked upon by the mainstream environmental community, because fish weren’t viewed as wildlife. Marine fish conservation has since burgeoned into a whole and new very active environmental field. Fish and other marine animals are the last wildlife commercially hunted on a large scale. The present global pursuit of ocean creatures for food is unparalleled in the history of our planet. Understandable, considering these finned creatures provide an essential source of food for an increasingly crowded world, and in the process feed billions and billions of dollars into the world economy.
I will save you from the statistical details of how many species are declining, overfished, or facing commercial extinction and what that means in terms of the overall health of our oceans and world food security. Suffice it to say, it was easy to build a certain gestalt around the tragedies facing the blue part of our planet. In unfortunate — but necessary — characteristic fashion with many environmental initiatives that have come before us, the marine fish conservation movement’s modus operandi was to motivate through bad news and outrage. This seems to be a necessary step in drawing attention to a problem.
Well, it’s easy to turn a deaf ear to constant bad news. But I’ve come to understand (perhaps it’s a matter of personal survival) that outrage is not the only way to motivate. Simple necessity and inspiration can be at the heart of change. I took on the challenge to create a campaign that translates confusing and depressing information about the oceans into something that would attract people, resonate with them, draw them into wanting to learn more, and help them take simple actions that make a big difference. I figured that if I wasn’t inspired by the work I was doing, no one else would be either.
Tuesday, 5 Jun 2001
ISLIP, N.Y.
The project that is currently the center of my work at Audubon is the Seafood Lover’s Initiative. In fact, yesterday I finished writing a report about our Seafood Lover’s Initiative for a foundation that supports our program. It’s a fulfilling exercise in that it makes me review what we’ve accomplished over the last year and reflect on what we could have done differently. In creating this program, it was important to me personally to minimize the negativity — change the debate — and take a more positive approach that draws people in. On one hand, we’re facing the fact that marine creatures are being hunted for food to their lowest populations ever. But on the other hand, food brings joy and celebration to people’s lives (and fish and shellfish are important sources of healthy nutrition). My job is to find a way to reconcile these contrasting elements for a public education campaign.
Most consumers assume that all fish and shellfish are equal. In other words, if they’re caught legally and served, they must be readily available, healthy, and abundant. But, all seafood is not equal, and current methods and rates of extracting food from the sea have hidden costs to the ocean environment and to the abundance and diversity of marine life.
Our challenge was to somehow translate complex, depressing information into a simple, understandable form that is sound, credible, and inspires action. Our Fish Scale first appeared in the May/June 1998 issue of Audubon magazine as the “Audubon Guide to Seafood.”
The Audubon Fish Scale is a visual tool. It’s a color bar ranging from green (doing well, okay to eat) to yellow (some problems exist, use your conscience) to red (serious problems exist, avoid). The Fish Scale is the first of its kind — ranking seafood and providing advice — created by applying a quantitative assessment of values across a spectrum of qualitative criteria, including species life-history characteristics, abundance in the wild, habitat health, secondary catch (called bycatch), and how well the fisheries are managed. People can see at a glance how their favorite seafood is doing and decide whether or not to buy it. It’s truly amazing how responsive people have been to this approach.
We’ve since developed several spinoffs, including our Seafood Wallet Cards and the Seafood Lover’s Almanac. The Almanac is not your standard environmental handbook. Featuring whimsical paintings by Robert Shetterly, exquisite watercolor illustrations by Charlotte Knox, and computer-generated fish art by Richard Upper, Seafood Lover’s Almanac combines beautiful art and graphics with information about seafood in a way that has never been done before. It’s one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve worked on. The Almanac has proved extraordinarily popular, and we get orders and inquiries daily (we’ve sold and distributed more than 6,000 copies). We handle fulfillment from our offices to major book distributors, retail outlets, amazon.com, and institutions that want the books in bulk. We try to direct individual orders to bookstores and online retailers like amazon.com.
The last few weeks, our seafood policy associate, Carrie Brownstein, and I have been working on developing and producing Seafood Wallet Cards in partnership with the John G. Shed
d Aquarium in Chicago and the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. They picked the species they want on their respective cards (based on an informal survey of culinary preferences in their region), and we produce them. The cards are hot off the presses and I’m anxious to see them. We’re shipping a few hundred of these cards and other seafood materials to the Marine Fish Conservation Network for their Fish Fest happening later this week in Washington, D.C. We’re also in the midst of producing our own Seafood Wallet Cards, which we hope to have in a couple of weeks for mailing to our members and others.
Wednesday, 6 Jun 2001
ISLIP, N.Y.
Okay. I must confess. How do I say it? I made an error. A few weeks ago I produced these colorful postcards to get the word out and advertise the Seafood Lover’s Almanac. A few thousand for the retail establishment (bookstores, libraries, etc.) and even more for broader public distribution. We mailed out a few thousand of these postcards to the American Booksellers Association mailing list. I was so happy to get them out and to know that we were ratcheting up our marketing to the book-buying world. The more the bookstores carry it, the more likely it will be on store shelves for sale. Well, back to the mistake. The card has a typo. There’s an identifying number, called an ISBN that all books have. It’s like a social security number for books that is very important in the retail and wholesale business. There is one digit missing in this string of numbers on the card. I can’t tell you how many times I reviewed that card, had others proofread it, and specifically checked that number.
Yesterday I got a voicemail message from a bookstore buyer who wanted to purchase the book, but couldn’t find it in the distributor’s database because there were too few numbers in the ISBN. What was my reaction? At first, I was stunned. Then my mind reeled at the impossibility of this — how many times had I checked that card before getting it printed? And then my brain went into a rapid state of processing, trying to assess the implications of this (that after all this effort no one would be able to find the book!). And then I laughed. This is not an atypical reaction for me, laughing in a moment when others faced with similar circumstances might curse and get angry. I try to keep things in perspective because I know I’m one of the lucky ones. There’s no benefit to getting angry and upset at an error like this because this moment, this problem, is a very small challenge when compared to the challenges and misfortunes that others in the world face.
When I returned the buyer’s call, he said not to worry, he found the book by searching the distributor database by title. I mentioned I thought we’d better produce and send out another card noting the correction. He said we shouldn’t bother, that anyone who cares would find it and buy it. Redoing the card would be an unplanned expense (having to repurchase the booksellers mailing list; paying the graphic designer again; printing it; and covering postage — not to mention staff time). I’ll decide later whether or not to redo the card.
While I prefer more creative pursuits, much of my days are spent on these kinds of administrative details. I periodically review our program budget of more than a million dollars, making sure that we’re not spending more than we bring in. I help identify potential new funding sources that our development director later researches, and I assist in figuring out what we should specifically appeal to them for. (The competition for funding is quite fierce, not only between nonprofit organizations, but also within Audubon.) While on Monday I got our Seafood Lover’s Initiative narrative report done for a foundation, today I worked on assembling our financial report for the whole program. It should be an easy thing, but it’s taking me longer than normal to get done. The categories we use to internally track our budget are different than how most foundations want us to report our expenditures. And I’m required to project what our expenditures will be to the end of the fiscal year, since our report is due before these final numbers are available.
Such is the romance of nonprofit work. We do what we need to. Sometimes my world is small; sometimes it is big. And it’s always both at the same time, whether I realize it or not.
Thursday, 7 Jun 2001
ISLIP, N.Y.
Last night, we had a staff potluck dinner, which we recently decided to hold once a month. Yesterday’s theme was Middle Eastern food. We all contributed different dishes and set up outside on our back patio, which is framed with huge European copper beach trees, fragrant wisteria, and blankets of vines on our courtyard walls. Perhaps I should give you a little bit of context for the physical setting of our Living Oceans Program.
I live and work at the Scully Science Center. The property encompasses about 65 acres of brackish marsh and forested freshwater wetland on the edge of a suburban town on the south shore of Long Island, N.Y. It has two ponds and several creeks, or channels, in which yellow irises are now in full bloom. Poison ivy and ticks also abound. Our offices are in several of the 28 rooms in an estate home built in 1917 and donated to Audubon decades ago. Some people say Scully — which we affectionately call the place — is haunted. (I’ll just leave it at that.) Located on a dead-end street that leads to the Great South Bay, we can see Fire Island from the shore. It’s great for daily mile walks to the beach to get a break from the intensity with which I work and to keep me in touch with the real world and the rhythms of the seasons.
The red-winged blackbirds have fledged their young, and the swallows seemed to arrive early this year; however, there didn’t seem to be as many as last year. They nest in swallow boxes on our marsh that were recently reconditioned by a local Boy Scout troop. Warblers abound, especially in the spring migration. Geese can frequently be heard adjusting themselves on the pond, and the place is a haven for spring peepers, small frogs about the size of the top of my thumb. It’s not infrequent that I see or hear ospreys overhead. One memorable day I took my kayak out on Champlain’s Creek (about a mile away) and in one field saw 11 ospreys. They were everywhere, flying and perching on branches and artificial nesting platforms. They’ve made a great comeback on Long Island from near extirpation in the 1970s. Right as our potluck was getting going, we found a baby bunny in the middle of the driveway in its “I’m not here” mode, paralyzed with fear and in a profound stillness, indicating it might still be under parental care. I got a towel to keep my scent off it and moved it from harm’s way. I trust the forces of nature will be on its side.
In addition to the program work I do, I’m responsible for making sure that various repairs are done to the buildings and grounds here at Scully. Right now our gravel driveway is in dire need of mending (should I say cavernous in spots?), and we’d been having difficulty getting a contractor to do the job at a cost we can afford. It looks like, with a bit of compromise on our part, we finally have someone to come in and restore the worst sections. If all goes well, the repairs will start this weekend. We also have a couple of areas along our fence line that we’re working on getting repaired. Myra, our office manager, is soliciting estimates for that. And we have a carpenter/roofer coming in a few days as well to do some repairs to our slate roof and copper gutters. Maybe all this falls under the category of “spring cleaning.”
I’ve lived and worked here at Scully since 1989, and I feel it now to be an extension of
myself, giving me a true sense of place (a remarkable feeling for someone who grew up never staying in one place longer than two years). And this inspirational context — Scully — clearly provided and continues to provide all our staff with an incubator-like setting, enabling our program to thrive.
A high school volunteer, Skylar, came in yesterday and worked on entering names into our membership database. Next week, we’ll have three or four high school volunteers come in to do a 5,000-piece mailing to our membership list. Stephanie, our executive assistant and cherished “mother hen” for our program, took it upon herself to bring in and train these volunteers. It’s been a terrific asset for us in that it enables us to keep up with the traffic flow of inquiries and outgoing materials. For this mailing, we’ll be sending out our postcard advertising the availability of our Seafood Lover’s Almanac.
Skylar also assembled information packets for our Seafood Lovers Initiative. This in preparation for a seafood publicity event I’m going to later today in New York City. That reminds me … I should take a few moments to prepare my comments, as I’m expected to say a few words. More about that event tomorrow.
Friday, 8 Jun 2001
ISLIP, N.Y.
Today is Oceans Day! It may seem odd that we’re not doing anything special for it at Audubon’s Living Oceans Campaign. But every day is Oceans Day for us.
I find it ironic that I’m working in the field of marine fish conservation. Until very recently, I never ate seafood. I always equated eating fish with death. My mother used to serve frozen fish sticks (which I now know are pollock) to my brother and me when we were young. Right as she would put the plates on the table, she’d say — and I mean every time — “Watch out for the bones! You could choke on them!” I’ve since learned that fish have more to fear from us than we of them.
Last night’s launch of the Seafood Choices Alliance was held at Fairway, an exquisite fresh food market in New York City. The Alliance is the brainchild of SeaWeb, an ocean conservation communications organization. The Alliance is a (free) online subscriber service for seafood professionals (chefs, fishmongers, distributors, etc.) and others who want to know more about environmental issues impacting the seafood industry. Audubon’s Living Oceans is a “founding voice” of Seafood Choices Alliance. The event last night was very encouraging; there were several people from the food and fishing worlds who provided testimonials about the importance of choosing our seafood wisely to help bring our oceans out of trouble. It’s good to know that these concerns are moving into the mainstream. That is exactly what we want to happen.
And speaking of mainstream, speaker Henry Lovejoy, founder of Ecofish, announced that this year his business will reach $2.5 million in sales, and they project achieving $10 million in five years. That’s astounding, especially to think that they just started their business two years ago. It goes to show that one can create a successful business with a conscience.
I think I mentioned earlier that I received from the printer a few samples of the Seafood Wallet cards that we did with the Shedd Aquarium and Aquarium of the Pacific. They are quite handsome. The Aquarium wanted their supply of cards in time for an event they’re holding today and tomorrow in honor of Oceans Day, but they apparently haven’t received them yet. I checked with the printer to see where the glitch might be. They’re apparently somewhere in the bowels of the Aquarium, waiting to be discovered.
I finished writing the brochure profiling our Seafood Lover’s Initiative, and I’m working with our graphic designer to produce that, as well as our new program brochure. Next on the short horizon is to work on redesigning our website.
Later today, I’m meeting with Peter Handel, an independent publicist that we contracted with earlier this spring to organize my book tour on the West Coast to get the word out about our Seafood Lover’s Almanac. I’ll pick him up at the airport in just a little while. We’re going to discuss other publicity and outreach work he might do for us, as we expand our Seafood Lover’s Initiative to the grassroots level, into the grocery world, and internationally.
The public’s enthusiasm toward our seafood consumer information is unlike anything we’ve experienced in our marine conservation work. The movement toward more sustainable seafood consumption is evolving, and the public is unequivocally hungry for information and guidance. In truth, seafood consumption is humanity’s strongest connection to the sea. And we’re working to make that a very conscious connection.
There are many things to accomplish in the next three weeks to enable the office and the seafood project to continue in my absence. In July, I will begin a three-month sabbatical to pursue an independent project. I’m working on producing an audio documentary series about the human impact of early-age stroke on victims and family members. It’s a very personal story, so I know it will be quite a journey.
