Conservationist Crispen Wilson, a Missouri native with a goatee and a penchant for T-shirts that say things like “Nigeria’s Endangered Primates” or “Conserve Madagascar’s Biodiversity.” He has worked with many of the world’s governments and largest green organizations to save endangered species and sensitive ecosystems. In Lampulo, Wilson walks among the fishermen as a colleague. They know him because he spends his days working for the traditional local fisheries association, known as the Panglima Laut.
After Asian tsunami Wilson’s helped the Panglima build new digital navigation maps and databases of local fish with the idea of opening up export markets. It is said that his efforts are the next stage of rebuilding – replenishing the collective knowledge of things like fish seasons and shoals once handed down by word of mouth and then erased when tens of thousands of fishermen and traders perished among the nearly 170,000 Acehnese dead in the tsunami.
According to Wilson his plucky grass-roots efforts is expected to win the affections of fishermen so that one day he can ask leaders to aggressively manage their fishery and save this piece of the eastern Indian Ocean from the steep decline so common elsewhere in the world.
Frazer McGilvray, with Conservation International in Washington, D.C., praises Wilson’s unusually deep dive from lofty global conventions into the hardscrabble, poverty-stricken world of Indonesian fishing, rife with illegal boats and heavy shark hunting that’s depleting the important predators.
