Net Values
Net Values
Environmental, Economic, and Social Entanglements in the Gulf of California
In Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, artisanal fishing families and staff of Loreto Bay National Park face an array of choices as tourism, environmental concerns, and economic precarity challenge livelihoods and natural resource availability. In Net Values, Nicole D. Peterson offers a critical examination of how the idea of “choice” is understood, and what it means for policies, planning, and programs to ignore the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts surrounding these choices.
Anchored by more than twenty years of research, Peterson provides insight into the fishing community of Loreto and reveals an important role in decision-making that diverges from previous studies. She argues that decisions about fishing, natural resource management, and other aspects of life are influenced by context, values, and expectations in ways that go beyond the typical psychological or cognitive theories of choice. Instead, Net Values highlights the ways that choices are constrained and enabled by values and expectations of cultures, histories, relationships, and experiences, both personal and shared. Peterson answers questions such as “why do the fishermen fish?” or “what is the marine park staff doing?” These decisions and choices are related to the larger implication addressed by this book: that in order to make effective policies around natural resource management and other issues, we must understand how those potential policies interact with the decision processes already underway.
Divided into five chapters, Net Values is rich in ethnographic detail, drawing from real people to inform the narratives, chapters, and theoretical elaboration. Peterson’s interactions with fishers such as Don Javier and his family and friends support the ideas offered around choice, values, and strategies, connecting ideas to real experiences.
Net Values offers an important and timely account of competing values around fishing and conservation. In contrast to many studies of conservation, the book is able to move easily between the perspectives of the Mexican fishing community, environmentalists, government officials, and other stakeholders. In the end, we come to understand the complexities of these issues. But perhaps more importantly, as the author focuses on values and decision making by all parties, we see what works, what doesn’t, and why. The book is hopeful in this regard as it does suggest ways beyond the current competing interests towards more equitable and sustainable practices, even if they are not yet realized in the case of the Lorento Bay National Park.'—Jamon A. Halvaksz, author of Gardens of Gold: Place-Making in Papua New Guinea
'Drawing on two decades of interactions with a small Mexican fishing village, Peterson details the multiple challenges facing today’s artisanal fishing families as tourist development, environmental concerns, and the economic precarity of changing and declining fisheries resources shake up their families, households, and livelihoods. Her narrative demonstrates the complex social and cultural contexts in which commercial fishing families maneuver around fisheries policy and engage alternative opportunity to create and sustain value.'—David Griffith, author of The Cultural Value of Work: Livelihoods and Migration in the World’s Economies
