Alexandre Só de Castro

Starting in southern Brazil, Alexandre Só de Castro is advancing conservation and effective management of islands, coastal areas, and related marine resources with an approach that combines the knowledge and biodiversity concerns of natural scientists with the experience, concerns, and knowledge of local residents.

Alexandre, an ecologist who grew up near a fishing village, sees that Brazil’s coastal areas and islands face a significant challenge: Industrial fishing and unchecked development are creating environmental, economic, and social hardship for these remote places and people. To ensure that challenges are managed in the best possible way, Alexandre turns to artisan fisher-people, whose participation he sees as being critical to the long-term sustainability of marine resources, fishing livelihoods, and island and coastal development. His Institute of Brazilian Islands (“Instituto Ilhas do Brasil”) gathers the collective knowledge and best practices of local residents and connects these to the larger discussion of marine resources management—a discussion now led by scientists and policymakers, with little input from the communities with generation upon generation of understanding about how to manage the sea and its commercial bounty. Now working in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil, Alexandre plans to connect, in the next five to eight years, coastal and island dwellers along the country’s expansive coastline and, ultimately, to draw them together in a forum that will include representation from the world’s islands.

Coastal areas and islands are among the planet’s most environmentally precarious. Over-fishing and predatory fishing practices deplete natural resources: large fishing boats wreck reef areas, disrupt fragile coastal ecosystems, and haul into their nets commercially undesirable fish that must be later discarded. Industrial fishing harvests 85 million tons of fish each year, of which an estimated 20 million—almost 25 percent—never makes it to market. In Brazil and around the world, other pressures encroach on coastal regions: large-scale development and high-rise resort communities consume whole islands, attracting millions of visitors without properly foreseeing and addressing the damage development brings to marine ecosystems. While environmental destruction and depletion of fishing stock are the best known consequences of industrial fishing, small-scale fisher-people in many parts of the world see that their livelihoods and integrity are at stake as well. The 600,000 artisan fisher-people along Brazil’s coastline are finding that they cannot compete effectively with larger commercial operations. The result is that many fishing communities are drying up, as children and teenagers look to what they see as more attractive income-earning opportunities unrelated to fishing. The geographic isolation of many coastal and island communities in Brazil, and indeed the world, further impedes the response of residents to articulate, as a group, their needs, aims, and challenges in resource management and economic development.
In Brazil, the last five years have seen the introduction of initiatives such as Agência Costal, Instituto Brasil Costa and Pharos Institute, but these efforts tend to promote the role of academic and government institutions in resource management, often overlooking the contribution of the artisan fisher-people who live in the affected areas. Marine scientists lack a means of connecting their research findings and theoretical models to workable solutions and more often than not adopt a hard-line conservationist message that discounts fisher-people’s urgent need to earn a living. Policy-makers, for their part, tend to be overly influenced by the big fish in the industry, in part because they are not supplied with viable solutions that integrate local perspectives, market needs, and conservation-focused mandates.

Alexandre recognizes that the ability of citizens living in coastal and island communities to contribute effectively to the maintenance of their livelihoods and the conservation of marine resources depends on their ability to connect, self-organize, and ultimately, link with other similar communities hundreds of miles away. His Institute of Brazilian Islands (“Instituto Ilhas do Brasil”), a formal organization since 2003, facilitates citizen participation by pulling together fishing families, many of them living on insular islands or in remote coastal regions, into an effective network. To do this, Alexandre strengthens informal networks that may have existed for a hundred years or more. He helps these networks broaden their governance base so that they are not dependent on the strong initiative and direction of a few leaders but are instead supported by a broad and active membership from the typically several hundred fishing families in a community. The strengthened networks—such as the Pântano do Sul Fishermen Association in the coastal city of Florianópolis, now an active group of 200—are the unit for effective decision-making and policy-setting.
Reaching school children who live in coastal areas is an important step in sparking dialogue about the future of fishing communities and engaging children and parents in stewarding a future for small-scale fisher-people. Volunteers throughout the state hold school programs each fortnight, helping young students see the important role their communities play in maintaining fish populations while providing fish for consumption. This structured volunteering effort fosters community and supports education, but it also accomplishes an equally critical aim: helping families reconnect to the ethic and age-old methods of fishing and helping them recognize how important these are for the future of the small-scale fishing industry.
To support this and other education-focused initiatives, Alexandre and his team have developed informative printed materials, the content for which draws on local knowledge and the social history of the island and coastal dwellers.
To enable strengthened communities to contribute to larger issues of conservation and resource management, Alexandre has formed the Open Community University (“Universidade Livre e Comunitária”), which gathers local knowledge from small-scale farmers, fisher-people, weavers, artisans, story-tellers, musicians, and others and makes it available to scientists and other groups through seminars that integrate local people with academic groups. Participating professors or policymakers pay a fee, which funds the participation of local people. Alexandre believes that the university will establish partnerships with public programs for professional training. He also plans to create a library that will house reference material for use by the coastal communities on such topics as technical studies, sustainable tourism, management of tourist initiatives, local cuisine, artisan fishing, fishing arts, island conservation, and environmental legislation.
Alexandre sees that volunteers offer a key resource in advancing the work of island stations to coastal regions throughout Brazil. He has structured his effort to attract and use volunteers from across the country—750 so far. Volunteers contribute by speaking at seminars in public schools, participating in cleaning campaigns that engage communities in keeping coastlines clean and litter-free, and promoting responsible buying to consumers of marine products along the shores and further inland. In 2004, 20 core (and paying) “eco-volunteers” from eight Brazilian states designed and held six courses on topics ranging from conservation to organizational management. These courses attracted over 100 participants and sparked an interest in working professionally with conservation.
In the medium term, Alexandre plans to create an island network that will join the communities along the whole of Brazil’s coastline and enable sharing of best practices in conservation, environmental management, and governance. Beyond this, he sees great value in reaching across national borders, especially as fishing communities around the globe share concerns and could benefit from the best ideas and the solidarity of neighboring islands or islands thousands of miles away. The national and global networks he envisions will help islanders and coastal people meet scientists and policymakers with an outline and reference for meeting conservation and productivity targets, and list of proven “how tos.” To spread his ideas, he works with the Ministry of Environment, National System of Environment, National Program of Coastal Management, Federal Plan of Action for Coastal Zones, and others.

Alexandre was born and raised in Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, along Brazil’s southern coastline. From an early age, he showed a strong interest in the natural world, and at age 18 was invited to join a Brazilian research team bound for the Antarctic. With the team and on three separate missions, he observed and catalogued the impact of humans on marine animals in the polar region.
After studying biology at the university, Alexandre started off his career teaching environmental education at Lutheran University of Brazil. The innovative approaches he used in the classroom drew the attention of other universities in Rio Grande do Sul, which extended invitations to teach in their programs. In 1996, he finished a master’s degree in ecology and began to focus on the role science and public policy might play in shaping the popular understanding of environmental hazards. Between 1995 and 1999, he founded and directed Ecocyclo Environmental Consultancy, a company that coordinated environmental management projects initiated by the Ministry of the Environment.
In the mid-1990s, he began volunteering for Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international citizen organization, and in 1999 accepted a staff position with the organization on the condition that he be allowed to create a more independent institute in Brazil that would mold and apply principles of the organization to the needs and opportunities of Brazil’s coastal areas. The institute he created is the only independent model of Sea Shepherd in the world.
Through his work and continuing research at the university, Alexandre observed great irregularity in the certification of marine products. Through the Sea Shepherd Institute, he created an environment-friendly “seal” and marshaled support for it from the Ministry of Justice. This was the first such effort in Brazil to engender in consumers a commitment to the harvesting methods of marine products. The seal continues as part of Alexandre’s effort today.
Alexandre created Island Stations as an initiative of Sea Shepherd aimed at strengthening the commercial viability of insular and remote island communities, many of which subsist on fishing. Over time, though, he saw that his effort was moving in a direction that necessitated its separation from the parent institution: namely, its focus on people and on their role in decision-making represented a shift from what he saw as the more activist approach of Sea Shepherd. Alexandre felt that he needed more autonomy to shape the mission and operations of his initiative, and in 2003, formed a formal organization, now the main vehicle for advancing his idea. He is committed to the idea full-time.