Hope in the Water

(upbeat music) - Don't wanna miss the boat.

(laughing) - This is gonna be a pretty good learning experience.

After today, we hope you're gonna be able to catch it by yourself.

(Baratunde laughs) - [Baratunde] It's early in the morning in Puerto Rico.

- All right, ready!

- [Baratunde] And we're heading out to sea to fish for deep water diamondback squid.

- After about two or three miles, the sea floor starts to get really deep.

800 feet... 900 feet... 1,100 feet... 1,600, 1,700 feet.

That is deep.

And once we're in that deep, Rodolfo is putting bait on these jigs, these specially designed, very aggressive hooks.

- This is a glow in the dark.

So this glow in the dark was bouncing up down the water.

This is the light.

Squids are like, oh!

- Yeah, saying, "Eat me, eat me."

(thunder rumbles) Off in the distance after we've dropped these buoys, you could see dark storm clouds.

They were almost cartoonish in how nearly black they were.

So is it coming toward us or is it going along the island?

- If that starts moving, we might have to go back.

- Oh, okay.

- Because it's big.

And then suddenly, the storm was on us.

(dramatic music) - In those five or six minutes, it had gotten very bad.

The rain and the wind had picked up a lot.

(dramatic music) - And at this point, I'm thinking, this is serious.

Like I'm calling on my physical strength and my own mental fortitude and just trying to stay calm in the face of troubled waters.

We're trying to tell the real story of these people and part of the real story is that it's dangerous, that it is hard.

And all of that is part of the cost of the food we eat.

(gentle music) It's our only home.

And our oceans are its greatest resource.

They cool our warming planet, they help feed our growing population.

But we are asking more of our oceans than ever before.

(upbeat music) Around the world, we're eating twice as much seafood as we did 50 years ago.

Many of our most popular species have been overfished, some to the brink of collapse.

(upbeat music) Feeding more people while also saving our oceans may seem pretty impossible, but there are ways to make fishing more sustainable.

A future in which both the oceans and all of us can thrive.

And there are people around the world who are determined to make that happen.

(gentle music) - I got into scuba diving in the spring of 1974.

Took to it like a duck to water, just absolutely loved it.

It's not only the weightlessness and the silence, it's just this feeling of exploration, different visibility, different creatures, diving around Arran and Lamlash Bay.

It's like walking around in kind of fog and mist and so you don't know what's gonna be around the next corner.

The Isle of Arran is just kinda like a perfect island, isn't it?

It's kind of mountainous on the top and hilly along the bottom.

Our coastline is 60 or 70 miles.

(laughs) It's a very community oriented island and my father always wanted to move here, so.

In the late 1960s, I headed to live here in the Isle of Arran, and I've never lived anywhere else.

(gentle music) - I have such a deep connection with the island.

My family have been here for five or six generations, now have grandchildren here.

The sea is very important and it has been in the past, a source of great wealth to the people of the island.

A lot of big fish, turbot and halibut and pollock or cod, all sorts of stuff was coming in to spawn.

- There was a guy that hired out boats to go fishing.

There was a fishing festival where people would come from all over the country to enter this fishing festival 'cause it was so good.

- It was so abundant in those days.

(upbeat music) - My memory, I think is about 1982 you started, David?

It was about 1982.

- You are the man with the memory.

- Yeah, well some days.

(both laugh) - Oh, the sea doesn't feel very cold, it shouldn't do actually, should it?

- Howard taught me to dive basically.

And from that, we started doing quite a lot of diving together.

(water splashes) - Through the late 1980s, it was quite obvious that these species were getting fewer.

- The legislation that was there to protect the three miles from the coastline outwards was removed.

- That the fishing boats could come in as close to the shores as they wanted.

And all the spawning grounds were hit as well.

- Over a year or two period, they'll get fewer, fewer and then you wouldn't see any, you wouldn't see any at all because of the demise of a lot of the white fish, a lot of the fishermen had changed over to dredging.

The main form of dredging is called scallop dredging.

It has tines or forks, it goes like chops into the seabed.

So the dredge has to actually disturb it out of the sand.

Within six hours, there's nothing much left.

- And the seabed is incredibly complex and that's what the fish are coming for.

If you start smashing that up, it has consequences.

We'd had numerous conversations over numerous pints of beer about something should be done.

And you can only tell yourself that so long without actually, well, actually something has to be done.

My nephew was a BBC underwater cameraman.

He said, I met this really interesting guy called Bill Ballantine at a conference on orcas, you should really get in touch with him.

- A marine reserve is a place that people have decided they want to be as natural as possible.

- [Announcer] Here around Leigh Marine Laboratory on New Zealand's east coast is a small place where there are no marinas, no sewage outlets to the sea and no fishing of any kind.

It is New Zealand's and the world's first so-called no-take marine reserve.

- Bill Ballantine lives in New Zealand, right next to the no take zone that he set up there.

I get the telephone number, phone it up, and I said, look, I'm interested in setting up a no-take zone, come and see me.

- One day, probably March, be around about 1990, Don walked in and he said, put the kettle on, we've got t0 talk.

It is quite simple, we just persuade people we wanna close off a small area of the bay to recover Lamlash Bay.

We just see if it works, we just let nature go back to itself.

Sounds such a simple idea, that it's all right, okay, let's try and do it.

- We never thought at the start, this is gonna take 13 years.

(gentle music) - We were very naive.

- Initially, it was very, very difficult to persuade anyone.

It was 1995 when we got the first letter back from the minister who stated, I have checked with my officials and there is nothing special there around Arran and the public don't want marine reserves.

- Lord Lindsay.

- Lord Lindsay, yes, yeah.

(laughs) - There's been no management in the Clyde with civil servants in Edinburgh who haven't got a clue about fishing in the marine environment, who are supposed to be making decisions, but unfortunately don't make decisions.

Sit in the seat for three years until they're replaced by someone else and it's someone else's problems and it's time this was addressed.

- We didn't realize how complex the problem was because it was not only environmental, it was social.

- Do you have a final question?

- Do you want me to- - Do you have a final question?

- Was political, was economic and all these consequences all bound into one.

So we had to unpick all that to try and make a difference.

- It took two or three years for us to realize two guys weren't gonna do it themselves.

- That's when we started to pull together a core group of people.

- We started COAST, the community of Arran Seabed Trust and Don came up with that, yeah, Don's good at these things.

- Hi everybody, thank you so much for coming this evening.

I think where this all started was you guys actually going out and enjoying the marine environment and I think if you love it, then you'll want to protect it then as well.

- I mean I've sat here talking to everybody over the last 20 years, but these talks were a mixture of photographs so the community could see that, well yeah, we can see that there's no sea angling life.

Of course they've got quite a record of meeting people in the pub.

Don and myself, we met as many fishermen that would talk to us.

If you meet them one to one, you can find a lot of common ground.

- Hello there, lovely to see you.

I'm no environmentalist, I'm just from the community, right?

We don't want fishermen out of work.

What the no take zone will do is it will increase numbers, but more importantly, it'll increase the resilience.

Glad you got some dinner, thanks for coming along.

So having protected areas, having full no-take zones in the long term is better for fishermen.

(gentle music) Getting a local spot takes a while, it takes quite a few years.

But a really important thing that happened, I think it's 2003, was that a lawyer came to see us called Tom Appleby.

- In terms of Scottish law, the Inshore Fisheries (Scotland) Act 1984, gives the minister the authority to suspend all fishing activities in an area.

- The public right to fish thing was crucial.

Tom would write a big long letter, let's say according to the 1,685 such and such, there's that, there's that, if you read through this, that actually the public have got a right to fish, which means that actually you are managing a public asset.

An asset is something you don't have to use.

Myself, Don and Tom Vella Boyle, our secretary, went and spoke Scottish power and I mean, first time we did it, it was quite a frightening experience.

- Good morning everybody, can I welcome you to the committee's 20th meeting of the year.

The main purpose of today's meeting is to continue taking evidence on the Marine Scotland Bill.

- My best evidence is my experience and my experience of the Clyde is it is in a dire state.

They believed that they had a responsibility to manage the seas on behalf of Scottish fishermen.

And so we had to prove that you have to manage it on behalf of the public and more importantly, you have to manage it on behalf of the next generation.

So they were always willing to meet.

It was the lack of action that was the frustrating thing.

I've got reports here that were written in the last three or four years, right?

I've got the Royal Society of Edinburgh inquiry into the future of Scottish fishing industry.

One of the recommendations was marine take protected areas, so that's one report, right?

They're not taking any notice of.

I've got a summary by the Royal Commission of the Environment Pollution, asked for up to 30 percent no-take zone or in 30 percent marine protected areas around Britain.

Still not taking, nobody taking any notice of it at all.

I've got the Prime Minister's strategy unit, right?

The UK government and devolved administration should develop an experimental program of marine protected areas.

Another report that CRAD, SNH are not taking any notice of at all.

- They might have taken the wind out of our sails for an afternoon, but we all reset our sails and reset the compass and here we come.

- How did you keep your energy levels up?

How did you know that you were gonna get there?

- Failure wasn't an option basically, because we felt we were working with the community, that's who we'd be letting down.

Every time they said no, we had to rephrase the question and ask the question again in another way so that they might say yes.

- And so in the end, we wrote officials in the minister a letter saying that if the no-take zone wasn't in place by the 20th of September, 2008, all our documents go to the media, every single thing and we will be appearing in the media.

And so on the Friday the 19th, receiving the phone call from the official and he said, the bill will be passed 11 o'clock tonight on Friday night.

And I said, why 11 o'clock?

He said, because they've all gone home on a Friday night, so it will go through.

So that was a great moment.

(upbeat music) So the no-take zone came in in 2008.

Far as the rest of Scotland's concerned, it's only 2.67 square kilometers, so it's quite small, but it's over some pretty important habitats.

The management of the larger marine protected area came in 2016.

There was a commitment that the Scottish government would monitor it.

(gentle music) The results up to 2019 were scallops were four times more abundant, lobsters were up to four times abundant as well in the no-take zone.

The seabed cover doubled.

Now the really amazing thing is that the marine protected area only came in in 2016.

And in less than four years, the species abundance in that area increased by 102 percent.

(upbeat music) - [Baratunde] Marine protected areas work.

Consider one of the world's largest MPAs.

Papahaumokuea Marine National Monument in Hawaii was designated by President George W. Bush in 2006.

- The largest single conservation area in the history of our country.

- [Baratunde] And President Barack Obama quadrupled its size in 2016 to more than 580,000 square miles.

- If we're gonna leave our children with oceans like the ones that were left to us, then we're gonna have to act and we're gonna have to act boldly.

- The effects are clear.

Hawaiian tuna fishers today are reporting some of the best catches in decades with yellow fin numbers up by more than half.

- This concept of marine protected areas is now mainstream.

Under the conventional biological diversity, the nations agreed to put aside 30 percent of the waters for marine protected areas, and currently we are at about 9 percent, we should have been at 10 percent by 2020, so we are behind in terms of the goals but the current goal is to reach 30 percent by 2030.

(audience applauds) - We hope our success will enthuse other communities to take action.

- Really it has to come from the community, people saying, yes, we want it in our backyard, yes, we want this for future generations.

- That is the real power of course, it's not us, it's you, it's community.

- It's an exemplar that can be duplicated anywhere.

And if we can do it, just a couple of divers, anybody can do it, any community can do it, it's about the future.

(dramatic music) - With climate change moving in and increasing very, very fast, ecosystems that are like Lamlash Bay will be the worst affected.

If there's no fish, no marine environment, what are you leaving for the next generation?

- This is my granddaughter, Ola.

- Papa, I love you.

- Oh, I love you too, I love you too.

(gentle music) - Puerto Rico in my life entered as a lyric, Puerto Rico oh (upbeat music) But this is a different side of Puerto Rico.

It's early in the morning in San Juan Bay and a hunt for deep water diamondback squid is about to begin.

Don't wanna miss the boat.

(laughs) I'm looking for a way that we can live on this planet.

So coming here for me was part of a longer mission to find a way to the future.

- And this is gonna be pretty good learning experience then.

After today, we hope you're gonna be able to catch it by yourself.

(laughs) Well, that's the idea, that's the idea.

Rodolfo wasn't catching squid before, about two years ago we started working with Rodolfo.

- [Baratunde] So he's very new at this?

- It's very new for Puerto Rico.

For me, it's really about supporting small scale fisheries that are responsible.

(gentle music) - [Baratunde] Overfishing of oceans has tripled in the last half century, decimating entire fisheries, the areas of the ocean where certain species would otherwise flourish.

While the problems of large scale industrial fishing grab headlines, a lot of wild fishing happens at the local level.

- Small scale fishing is the food basket of 2 billion people.

There are about 4.6 million fishing boats out there, and 98 percent of those are actual small scale boats.

They catch fish for their daily sustenance, they catch fish as part of their jobs, livelihoods, but also as part of a culture.

- I always wanted to start my own non-profit that worked in civil society.

Studied environmental studies at Pace University in New York and was really into the environment.

I'm the executive director for Conservacin ConCiencia, it's a non-profit organization that works in environmental conservation here in Puerto Rico.

The fishing industry in Puerto Rico really depends on, on several species.

Mainly lobster, queen conch and deep water snappers.

We can't really separate protecting the environment from human society, we're part of it.

And so in order to be effective in protecting nature and having conservation, folks need to be able to make a living off of nature.

But at the same time, some of the resources have historically been overfished and fisheries have declined a bit.

And so that really took us to identifying the need that we need to work with the fishery sector to see how we can continue to diversify their catch so that they can still provide for their families.

(people speaking Spanish) - Success.

(gentle music) - Part of the reason why we can continue to ensure that this is sustainable is because of the scale that we're doing it.

We're not going out there with massive industrial boats fishing everything that we can.

All right, ready.

- Beautiful calm day so far.

- We're going out there in small scale with local artisanal fishers.

We go out through San Juan Bay and after about two or three miles, the sea floor starts to get really deep.

800 feet... 900 feet... 1,100 feet... 1,600, 1,700 feet.

That is deep.

And once we're in that deep, Rodolfo is putting bait on these jigs, these specially designed, very aggressive hooks.

- This is glow in the dark.

So this glow in the dark while it's bouncing up down the water.

This is the light.

- Yeah, eat me, eat me.

- Squids are like oh!

- No lights, no bite.

- No lights, no bites.

- Exactly.

- They drop them into the water on the line and they lower this line.

- So when the line ends, we hook it up to the buoy.

We repeat that process four or five times.

We're gonna drop the next one.

- All right.

Please squid, please.

Is there a special dance we should do for the squid?

- Bachata?

- Yeah, heard squid like bachata.

- Under normal circumstances, what occurs is that squids are very aggressive predators.

So when they see those lights, they'll shoot at it and when they grab it, they'll get hooked on.

And you bring it on board.

And that's a normal day's work.

But when we went out with Baratunde, that's not what happened.

- Off in the distance after we've dropped these buoys, you could see dark storm clouds, they were almost cartoonish in how nearly black they were, but they were way out there.

- We could see on the radar that is still in Luquillo, which is about an hour away from San Juan.

- So is it coming toward us or is it going along the island?

- If that starts moving, we might have to go back.

- Oh, okay.

- Because it's big.

- We started putting the fourth line out, but then we started to see it continue to come closer, and I was like, that does not look an hour away, it looks right on us.

And Rodolfo, he looks at me and he tells me, we're gonna have to pull up.

So once it starts to pull up, takes about five or six minutes of the electric wheel going.

(dramatic music) - And then suddenly, the storm was on us.

(dramatic music) - In those five or six minutes, it had gotten very bad.

The rain and the wind have picked up a lot.

- And at this point, I'm thinking this is serious.

Like I'm calling on my physical strength and my own mental fortitude and just trying to stay calm in the face of troubled waters.

- Thankfully, Rodolfo knows what he is doing.

But it was one of those situations that that's actually, that's part of a very risky livelihood that is fishing.

- Rough day, rough day at the office.

(gentle music) - We're trying to tell the real story of these people and part of the real story is that it's dangerous.

That it is hard and all of that fear and all of that physical stress and all of that anxiety is part of the cost of the food we eat.

And that's not something I'm used to thinking about in the grocery store aisle.

- The reality of it is that when you go out at sea, anything can happen.

You can die in a collision with a big boat, bad weather, the other thing running out of fuel, your gear breaks.

The local fishery is the one that brings you sustainable food to your plate.

And you have to appreciate their effort because every single time they go out at sea, they risk their life.

- Puerto Rico's deep water squid fishery got its start in the aftermath of an epic disaster.

- The situation here in San Juan is dire.

The winds here have been intensifying and the worst is yet to come.

(wind blows) - It was my wife and my, at that time, my 1-year-old kid, and I remember our building was shaking of the strength, of course, no power, no supermarkets were open.

So where I live, where we lose power, we also lose water.

So we didn't have any water either.

- Hurricane Maria really was the perfect recipe for disaster.

Millions of Americans just waiting for somebody to show up.

If nobody is coming, you are the one.

So you gather some friends, find some food, there's always food somewhere around and they start feeding them.

- So it was a time that nobody had anything and so...

Didn't expect this.

- There's a lot of unexpected things from that time, it's all right man.

- And so at that time, Rodolfo was telling me how bad the fishing sector was.

I said, well, I'm pretty good at writing proposals.

- I saw firsthand how these coastal populations, they made their living out of a boat and those boats are all destroyed.

We supported some fishermen that they needed money to buy equipment or to buy the motors or to buy the different tools.

And obviously this is great because it's not throwing money at the problem, but it's really investing into solutions.

- And so I remember helping over 30 fishers submit themselves to World Central Kitchen.

We got Rodolfo gear for the squid, the electric reel, (Rodolfo speaks Spanish) and we got him a new engine as well after Maria, which is one of those things that it's great because it allowed us to continue on to working towards creating that diamondback squid fishery here in Puerto Rico.

There's been a lot of things that the hurricane uncovered.

One of them has been the need to continue promoting resilience.

For an island like Puerto Rico, food security is something that's critically important just because we need to be able to not depend so much on the imports.

- Fishing remains a safety net, even after massive losses of boats and fishing assets and things like that.

It is the one thing as we've observed, that people will go to to get their food in a natural way as a response to major disasters out there.

- That is a serious cooler.

- Raimundo and Rodolfo wanna show me what I missed because of the storm.

All right, it's almost like there's a body in there.

- [Raimundo] There is.

- [Baratunde] A deep water diamondback squid.

That's big.

I have not seen a fully intact squid before.

Gonna pick it up, you see the weight?

- Okay, that's real, yeah, you could train with this.

- One of the good thing for the fishery, almost the entirety of the squid is meat.

- So a lot of the fish, when you clean the fish, a lot of the bones take up a lot of the weight.

So with squid.

- No bones.

(gentle music) - It doesn't really help if fishers go out and catch squid and then we have nowhere to sell it.

So, part of that outreach has really been distributing it to a lot of many different chefs, so folks really have the product.

(upbeat music) - When you're fishing for squid, somebody's gotta eat it and it better taste good, otherwise that's not sustainable either.

- Martin, do you want something to drink?

All right.

This is an alcapurria, so this is a traditional Puerto Rican food.

It's like a turnover that's stuffed with meat.

However, with a play, that instead of with meat, it's with squid.

- There is no meal more satisfying than the one you've worked hard for.

It actually extends for me some of the definition of sustainability and the idea of recognizing value.

- So this is calamari in coconut flour, deep fried.

- Very good, bueno.

- It's like a squid fry.

- This is the first time we make this.

- We gotta come up with a name.

- Well, we gotta know we got, we got squid, Naguabo style.

- Naguabo style, all right.

(gentle music) - When I first started with Conservacin ConCiencia, I remember one of the things that I would say to myself was, I'm doing this for my kids.

But the more that I've been working these past six years, it's been giving hope for myself in my lifetime that things are going to continue getting better.

And I've seen the progress, I've seen the friendships, I've seen barriers broken down.

- Raimundo is a great representation of meeting people where they are.

You can't just show up asking people for something, demanding that they change without offering them something too.

- We need many of Raimundo Espinozas not only Puerto Rico but around the world.

It's a very simple message, I want you to fish, but I want you to fish smart.

I want you to enjoy what the ocean can give to you and your family, but in order for you to keep enjoying the riches of the ocean, you're gonna have to also be a friend of the ocean.

- No, that's good.

Oh, I think a lot of us interpret sustainability as don't touch, right?

Hands off, sustainability is to sustain, to extend life and not just of the fish or the quote unquote natural resource, but of us.

(Baratunde speaks Spanish) And that's some of what I got a glimpse of here in Puerto Rico.

It's not about one person who has the one answer to all these challenges, it's about a communal approach.

(Rodolfo speaks Spanish) - Says you have to come back so you can go dive fishing with him because- - Oh man, Rodolfo is trying to murder me, does it with a smile though.

(laughs) (chicken clucks) - I've had chickens for a long time.

I haven't had to buy eggs for 15 years, it's pretty awesome.

Six generations of my family have fished in the waters of Ke'ohe Bay.

It's part of our identity, you know.

Everything was about the ocean.

Hawaii, as a state, is the largest consumer of seafood per capita in the nation.

Yet, of the seafood that we consume here, the vast majority of it is imported.

So like, we're completely surrounded by ocean and the seafood we're eating isn't from here.

That is a very bleak picture.

And I think that that's why I do what I do.

Everybody in the community knows Hi'ilei Kawelo is the girl that takes care of the fish pond.

I'm the executive director of Paepae o Heeia.

Our non-profit cares for He'eia Fishpond, which is an 88 acre, 800-year-old place of traditional Hawaiian aquaculture.

I wanna restore this pond.

It's a chance for us to grow fish in a traditional fashion and keep 100 percent of those resources local.

(upbeat music) - Fish ponds in Hawaii were part of a supply chain of food, part of a seafood set of economies that really provided most of the protein source for Hawaiians back then.

And actually some recent estimates indicate that our population actually wasn't that different.

That there may be about a million people back then, but living completely within our means, not looking outside and importing 90 percent of our food.

- Our fish pond wall is 1.3 miles in a full circle.

And then we have seven of these gates, which we call m This is like where all the magic happens.

The vertical uprights allows for small fish to enter.

At the same time you're preventing big fish that have been in here for years from exiting.

So it always is allowing for stocking of the pond naturally.

For traditional aquaculture, we're not feeding fish.

The phytoplankton is the food for the fish that you wanna have growing in your pond.

Small fish come in, they stay in, there's plenty of food and then you're able to harvest in the case of a mullet four years later.

There were in excess of 400 fish ponds throughout the pae ;na, throughout Hawaii.

Some of them date back to 1,200 years ago.

And then the market economy gets introduced to Hawaii.

We start to value money and cash as a commodity rather than food.

And then in the 1940s, wanting to build airstrips for military.

- [Announcer] Our air superiority in the southwest Pacific has been definitely established.

- They have a surplus of dredge material that go to fill in fish ponds to make way for housing.

- [Announcer] The fun-loving ways of the Hawaiians are contagious and pretty soon, we tourists are trying everything.

- We lost touch, we lost value in these spaces whose sole purpose was to grow food.

I've invested 20 plus years of my life into this place and the estimate is that it took about 2,000 people to build this fish pond in two years.

- Aloha and good morning, welcome to He'eia Fishpond.

Oh, we always start with pule, so we're gonna do a pule real quick.

(speaking Hawaiian) - We do our community work days every second and fourth Saturday of every month.

And this is how we get a large number of volunteers out on site and we get a lot of work done.

For 20 years of our organization, it's been restoration and still restoration, but restoration eventually transitions to maintenance.

We have a big invasive algae problem.

Every little fragment can grow into a whole other plant.

These are invasive mangrove propagules elsewhere in the world where mangrove is native, entire ecosystems have evolved along with that species.

So we rather get them when they're little so that they don't grow into big 80-foot tall trees.

Pulling seedlings is never-ending.

Jellyfish, they sting and kill other things so you gotta stay on top of it.

It's not really glamorous work, it's muddy, stinky, hot, icky.

But we try to make sure people feel stoked on it so that everybody leaves at the end of the day, they're nurtured spiritually, intellectually, physically sustained from that space.

And they feel good about it.

We live in Hawaii where yeah, local people get iced out.

We can't afford to live here.

The cost of living here is just icing us out.

It's important to feed ourselves, right?

We'll be lucky if we get a fish on camera.

Everybody wants to know when we're gonna have fish available.

It's just like this pressure, pressure to produce.

Oh man, thought those guys are gonna bite.

To grow food in the ocean without feeding fish, it's slow, it's super slow.

- Yeah, that's grandpa's old pole.

- Is it still good?

- Yeah, still good.

- Aloha everybody, good morning.

Welcome to He'eia Fishpond.

By show of hands, how many of you, is this your first time here?

First timers.

It's fishing day and usually a bunch of families come out.

We do these a few times a year and it's a good day, for fishers that don't otherwise get a chance to come to the fish pond.

They're here to help us reduce the number of predators in the pond.

- I have seen that one.

- You've seen this one?

Yeah, so any of those you can catch.

Can you point to the barracuda on the poster?

- I have not seen one, but I know what it looks like.

- Yeah.

(gentle music) You're guaranteed to catch fish right, when you come to fish at a fish pond?

Wrong.

- One, two, three.

- Oh, holy moly.

I just wanted my son to grow up learning how to fish and I felt like this was a great opportunity to come to a fish pond that we both have worked on as volunteers.

I saw a group of fish over there.

- Pull them all the way up, all the way up on shore.

All right.

- Okay, let's take a picture, look at Auntie Hi'ilei, come here.

- Okay, over here, London.

Look, one, two, three.

- What I'd love my son to get out of this is to appreciate this ancient technology that offers so much for food security.

- And that he remembers the fun we had together.

And that mom caught the biggest fish.

- Yeah.

What?

You're gonna eat it, right?

- No.

- What?

- It's kind of a management strategy for us.

It might not be in the same way that we fed community 200 years ago, but nonetheless, we're feeding community.

- Can you tell me how big the fish was that I caught?

How big was it?

Thanks a lot.

- Fish ponds may also play a role in community safety.

The 2023 Maui wildfire claimed the lives of a hundred and one people.

The disappearance of local fish ponds in their surrounding wetlands has been cited as a key reason the fire spread so fast and so far.

- Now you can't build a Hawaiian fish pond in any location, right?

The environment's different.

But you can think about the ingenuity and the method.

Why wouldn't a thousand year old fish pond stocked with ancient wisdom combined with new and exciting tech, why can't that be the transformative solution for food security globally?

I think it can.

- We wanna feed community seafood and keep some of that, keep all of that seafood that's grown here locally.

- Here, kids.

- Right here on the table.

- Come.

- What would you like?

- You want a whole piece of fish?

You can eat the whole thing.

If there's 50 fish ponds remaining in Hawaii that have potential to grow seafood, why not try?

- [Director] Alpha, take one, mark.

- The world is eating more seafood than ever before and that's simply not gonna stop.

One way to prevent overfishing is to pivot to more sustainable fisheries.

- One of the biggest threats to conservation is poverty.

So if we help create livelihoods, we help support and create incomes for people that can work with the environment.

We're gonna help create stewards of the environment.

Another way to restore abundance in the ocean, leave some of it alone.

- The evidence is if we manage our fisheries much, much more efficiently, they'll produce three times more food.

Long term, humans have no option.

If we are to survive on this planet and feed ourselves, we have to look after nature.

We have to start getting that balance back.

- We can also embrace what worked in the past.

- And I think that 10 to 20 years from now, the fish pond is feeding community, fish, crab, seaweed.

But is not just about our fish pond.

Other fish ponds are also doing that.

There's so many other places like this that are just really waiting, they're waiting for us to like wake them up.

- Can we save our oceans and feed our growing population?

Is it possible to do both?

Yeah, it's possible, and it starts with us.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (gentle music)