All posts by: Magazine Editor

When Mary Wyatt ’74, American studies, was a little girl, she loved to retreat to a secret space in her backyard. There, in a patch of grass surrounded by a grove of apple trees, she spent lazy summer days lying on her back and gazing up at the passing clouds. Flash forward to the present day, where the concept behind Wyatt’s favorite childhood ritual – connecting to nature in a ‘sacred’ space – plays a central role in the organization for which she serves as executive director.

While the parallels between Wyatt’s favorite childhood indulgence and her current job may be pure coincidence, she insists that the ties between her education at UMBC and her professional life are not. As an American studies major, Wyatt indulged in an array of interests – literature, history, music, sociology, art, pop culture – all related to the experience of being an American.

“It infected me with a desire to do something with my life that would really make a difference – in a place where I could actually make a ripple, here in America,” she says.
Although it would be almost two decades and a number of jobs (including positions in property management in Annapolis and in finance with the Rouse Company), Wyatt never lost sight of her aspiration.

In 1992, after a hiatus from the workplace to take care of her children, Wyatt decided she was ready to return to the workforce full-time. A quirky job advertisement in a local newspaper caught her eye. It began: “Renaissance man seeking assistant with good communication skills…”

Wyatt found herself employed by Tom and Kitty Stoner, husband and wife entrepreneurs interested in launching a private foundation whose focus, when Wyatt met them, wasn’t entirely clear. “They knew they wanted to do something that had to do with the environment, and the healing power of nature,” she says.

For the next few years, Wyatt and her new employers researched established foundations whose goals and objectives they respected. Then, they went on a weekend-long retreat in Vermont. In a whirlwind brainstorming session, the three of them drafted a mission statement, a vision statement, and a business plan for what would become the TKF Foundation.

The TKF Foundation, a private grant-making foundation, formed in 1996 on the premise of inspiring and creating “open spaces, sacred places” – open, that is, to people from every culture, religion, and economic background, explains Wyatt.

Since its launch, the TKF Foundation has funded over 100 “open spaces, sacred places” projects and supported scores of neighborhood-level greening projects in Baltimore, Anne Arundel County, and Washington, D.C. Of the many proposals it receives annually, the foundation chooses organizations that best share its vision: the creation of ‘sacred spaces’ for the purpose of facilitating an increased sense of community and deepening human connections.

At the helm of each of these projects is someone the TKF Foundation considers a “firesoul,” a person whose passion and vision serve as the driving forces behind the creation of a public green space where users might find respite, even an antidote, to an otherwise stressful and sometimes isolating world. “We look for kindred spirits,” Wyatt says.

Though Wyatt resists naming a favorite sacred space, she believes some of the foundation’s projects have made a considerable impact on their target communities.

One is a garden recently created at the Maryland Correctional Institute at Jessup. “To see these guys in prison grow something from seed, it’s amazing,” Wyatt says.

Another TKF-funded project Wyatt finds particularly inspirational is a garden in the unassuming fenced backyard of a rowhouse on Baltimore City’s Belvedere Avenue, which houses the nonprofit Advocates for Survivors of Torture and Trauma. “They get here [to Baltimore], find a room somewhere, and are afraid to come out. This helps them reinvent their lives,” says Wyatt, noting that the garden not only has brought some clients out of hiding, but also has encouraged them to grow vegetables they once ate in their native lands.

Having established over 100 thriving sacred spaces regionally for diverse clients – hospitals, schools, jails and beyond – the TKF Foundation is now embarking on its next and perhaps final phase.

In addition to continuing to support existing regional partners through 2015, the foundation plans to fund up to five new sacred spaces nationwide. Each of these projects would serve as a demonstration and research site to study the impact of nature on the human spirit.

“The research will prove what we [at TKF] believe – that nature is sacred,” Wyatt says.

— Elizabeth Heubeck ’91

Back in 2001, Kaliope Parthemos ’93, psychology, got some career advice that has resonated with her over a decade of public service.

Parthemos was clerking for Baltimore Judge John C. Themelis at the time, and she recalls that he turned to her one day and said: “You belong in the courtroom and you belong as an advocate. Don’t be one of those people who talks about how things should be done, but has never actually worked it and lived it. You know the people. You understand the people. Go fight for the people.”

As Baltimore City Deputy Mayor of Economic and Neighborhood Development, Parthemos is now engaged in that advocacy every day. She oversees 17 city agencies, addressing issues from transportation to tourism to the arts – a great fit given her keen appreciation of Baltimore’s cultural institutions and its underground art and music scene. Some of her current projects – including a “Vacants to Value” housing initiative and a push for “healthy food zones” to transform some of Baltimore’s food deserts – have tackled deep-rooted challenges to Baltimore’s public health and safety.

Parthemos sees her own career trajectory as very individual – based on opportunity as much as her longstanding interest in social issues and her passion to serve the needs of Baltimore’s children. After graduating from UMBC and working as a social service caseworker in Baltimore, she took a law degree at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Having grown up in the Baltimore City public school system, she saw her subsequent job as a public defender focusing on juvenile law as a way to effectively serve Baltimore’s youth. When Parthemos left the public defender’s office in 2006, she intended to start her own practice, but public service beckoned again when Stephanie Rawlings-Blake – a friend and colleague who served on Baltimore’s City Council and eventually became mayor in 2010 – recruited her to work in the city’s administration. Reflecting on her time at UMBC, Parthemos says that her experiences with Choice – a UMBC/Shriver Center program that offers youth in Maryland’s juvenile justice system a wide array of resources, counseling, employment skills development, educational support, and after-school and weekend activities – gave her an opportunity to witness first-hand the struggles that many of Baltimore’s children face when unfairly dealt a tough deck in life.

Parthemos’ work with Choice and the Department of Social Services has informed her approach to serving the needs of Baltimore’s children and other residents while also managing the city’s unprecedented budget problems.

“When we came into office we had a $120 million budget deficit,” notes Parthemos. One of her first tasks was negotiating with area non-profit organizations, hospitals, colleges and universities on a controversial “bed tax” to help plug the budget gap. She attributes the success of that effort, which the Daily Record reported will net the city $20.4 million over six years, to balancing the needs of these groups and their value to the city with the need for new revenue.

Parthemos is now enmeshed in another difficult budgetary challenge: assessing how to spend the city’s limited recreation funds to best serve city children. “They don’t deserve a building that’s basically glued together and only has one person at the door that’s basically just allowing kids to come in, with no actual structured activities in place for them,” she says. “What we’re hoping to do is have a smaller number of recreation centers… but ensuring that the kids have a safe environment with structured activities.”

Parthemos says that her training as a lawyer and the educational experiences that enabled her to make friends from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds has been a key to meeting the challenges she faces in city government. She laments that some Baltimore residents do not have such opportunities to meet people outside of their own circles: “It strikes me really profoundly… how limiting that is to one’s ability to grow and one’s ability to see something through someone else’s eyes.” Being an effective public servant, she says, means “understanding the city of Baltimore, understanding the people, understanding the struggles that people have on a daily basis.” It also means combining awareness of those challenges with knowledge about how government agencies “interact with one another in order to create the services and systems that Baltimore City residents require and should have.”

— Dinah Winnick

In an office on Chase Street in Baltimore, a fiery one-woman pep rally for a young African-American professional is under way.

Diane Bell-McKoy ’73, sociology, is holding forth on the necessity of building as many business alliances as this young woman can, regardless of whether or not she knows precisely where her career is headed. Bell-McKoy is emphatic for a reason. She is determined to see young African-American professionals succeed in the workplace. And she knows first-hand that the strategy she espouses works.

Bell-McKoy credits her long-term career success with her own ability to choose mentors carefully and to build business relationships. Judging by her resume – which includes a stint as a senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a 10-year tenure as president and CEO of Empower Baltimore Management Corporation, and her current position as president and CEO of Associated Black Charities (ABC) – it’s fair to say the tactic has proven effective.

“I would not be where I am today without a host of mentors. I learned early on to go after them,” says Bell-McKoy, who counts former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke; acclaimed developer James Rouse; and Joseph Haskins, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of Harbor Bank of Maryland as some of the many professionals who have guided her career.

Bell-McKoy has always had a knack for making alliances with like-minded thinkers. She found plenty of them at UMBC. Bell-McKoy notes that many of these peers in her time at UMBC later went on to make up the ‘Who’s Who’ of local African American professionals, including David W. Young ’74, sociology, associate judge for Baltimore City Circuit Court and James Wiggins ’75, political science, a lawyer in private practice.

“They [the university’s administration] referred to us as the UMBC Mafia,” Bell-McKoy recalls with a wry smile, explaining that she and her college friends were not averse to challenging the administration when they wanted to effect change on campus. “My friends from UMBC were a great source of support, and provided lots of conversation about issues,” she says.
Conversations in the classroom fed those in the dormitory and beyond. “UMBC helped me develop critical thinking skills,” says Bell-McKoy, adding that UMBC was the first place she attended where learning to problem solve came from critical thinking and deconstruction of issues.

It is on these premises that Bell-McKoy has advanced her career. Most recently, that growth has taken shape at ABC, a 25-year-old public foundation in Baltimore that seeks to close the gap in economic and health disparities among Maryland’s African-American communities, thereby boosting the entire state’s vitality.

Bell-McKoy admits she eyed the job of president and CEO of ABC for quite some time, but doesn’t regret waiting to take the top spot there. “I have developed a huge set of relationships in this region,” she says. “I needed those relationships to move this organization forward.”

Since taking the reins at ABC four years ago, Bell-McKoy has used her vision and connections to shift the foundation away from its origins as a direct service provider. “It’s much more effective to be a broker, a grant maker, a public policy advocate,” she says.

Bell-McKoy also narrowed the foundation’s focus, shaving it down from a broad swath of issues concerning African-American communities. “Our two core focuses now are health and wealth disparities. We need to close those gaps to have a vibrant state,” Bell-McKoy says.

One of ABC’s primary wealth-building initiatives, dubbed More in the Middle, seeks to retain, grow, and attract middle-income African-American residents throughout Maryland. ABC is concentrating on five core investment areas: higher education, workforce development, homeownership and foreclosure prevention, business and economic development, and asset building.

Of these investment areas, ABC is honing in on workforce development at present. ABC is choosing up to ten area African-American-owned businesses it sees as potentially prolific job engines as pilot companies, which it will then pair with larger more established organizations which will act as mentors. It’s a chance for Bell-McKoy to adapt her personal reliance on relationship-building and mentoring to a larger stage.

One might think that after 35 years of forging business relationships of her own, Bell-McKoy would be ready to think about retirement. So what keeps her in the fray? Bell-McKoy responds candidly: “I have to make sure I develop a pipeline.”

— Elizabeth Heubeck ’91

Zombies have been multiplying rapidly in our popular consciousness in recent years. Whether it’s the high drama of AMC’s new television hit The Walking Dead or the high comedy of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Jane Austen parody Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the dead aren’t just walking, but marching on popular culture. Arnold T. Blumberg ’93, English, thinks a lot about zombies and pop culture. He’s written a book – Zombiemania – about the phenomenon and even teaches a course on zombies in media at the University of Baltimore. (He’s also written widely and taught on other topics in popular culture, including Doctor Who and comic books.) So why are zombies worth a scholar’s attention? Professor Blumberg clues us in:

When you say the word “zombie,” you get predictably strong reactions. We’re more fascinated with all those shambling (or running), undead (or alive), flesh- (or brain-) eating hordes of zombies (or “walkers”… you get the idea) than ever before. They’ve arguably even passed their vampire cousins in the zeitgeist. But why am I teaching a course about them?

For me it began with a VHS box cover in a shadowy corner of the local video rental store in the early ’80s. Anyone of a certain age who was steeped in genre entertainment – especially horror – will remember the skull-faced monstrosity on the box, worms wriggling in one eye socket, and below that nightmarish visage and a chilling tagline (“We are going to eat you!”) one word in bright red letters:

Zombie.

I never actually saw the film back then. Only the cover. But it was enough to convince me that one day I just had to watch that movie. Until then, I contented myself with Night of the Living Dead, Re-Animator and countless other zombie romps that were just one part of my lifetime diet of comics, science fiction and horror entertainment. As the years passed, that box cover image became a standard, worn proudly by the horror fan community on countless black t-shirts. Ol’ Worm-Eye was everywhere. But why?

Step two came in my freshman year at UMBC, when I met fellow pop culture enthusiast Andy Hershberger ’99, American studies. Years later, we wrote an exhaustive guide to zombie cinema, Zombiemania. While working on that book, I realized just how varied and complex the genre truly was. When the opportunity arose to help the University of Baltimore launch its new pop culture minor with a course that could take my interest in zombies to the next level, I jumped – not shambled or shuffled – at the chance.

So why are we fascinated with zombies? On one level, what we’re really asking is why we are so fascinated with death. Zombies are the embodiment of life’s ultimate mystery, the terrifying and inexorable certainty of an end to our existence arriving prematurely to torment and claim us.

But there’s more to it than that. “Zombie” has become an umbrella term that grew out of western culture’s first exposure to the Voudoun traditions of the West Indies and now encompasses a wide range of similar fantasy creatures, living and dead and everything in between. They are one of the most direct and potent reflections of where we are at any given time as a people, as a culture – what we think, feel and fear. They’re our family, our friends, even ourselves.

Today, the zombie tends to embody our fears of terrorism, of the collapse of society following insidious attack from without and within, and the idea of widespread viral infection or contagion. However, the zombie is a constantly evolving symbol that has shown us how we feel about other religious traditions, how we respond to military conflict, and how we address our own natural drive to survive when faced with insurmountable obstacles. As anyone watching the new TV series The Walking Dead can understand, zombies often form the backdrop for an exploration of morality, ethics, racial and gender issues, and other fundamental aspects of our “civilized” society.

And what’s the value of a college course in zombies? In one important respect, zombies are not the point. As educators, it is not just our duty to prepare young people to pursue a trade and build a career. We need to give them the tools they require not just to build computers or cars or homes, but to interpret the torrent of media that bombards them from every direction on a daily basis. Students should become intelligent, informed consumers of that media, rather than allow its often-manipulative messages to shape their identities. If we fail, we will raise generations of passive workers with no ability to think for themselves. And if the process of learning to sift through and analyze those media messages means having some fun as well, where’s the harm in that?

There are people that think I “love” zombies. I don’t really… well, not in that way. I do love Doctor Who, however; ask me about that sometime. And Zombie? I finally saw the movie when I co-wrote Zombiemania, and it’s not the masterpiece some think it is. But it does have a zombie fighting a shark to a draw, and that’s something no other cultural or academic experience can hope to equal.

Want to know more about Arnold T. Blumberg’s work? Check out his website: www.atbpublishing.com.

In UMBC’s Department of Marine Biotechnology, Yonathan Zohar and his colleagues are creating sustainable fish farms that may revolutionize our notions of fishing and seafood.

– By Anthony Lane

A well-known proverb appears on a wall near the entrance to the Columbus Center on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

A worthy sentiment, yes. But what happens if we use up the bounty of the world’s oceans and seas? Talk for a few minutes with aquaculture pioneer Yonathan Zohar and you might be moved to coin a new proverb:

Teach too many people to fish, and there might one day be nothing left to catch.

Zohar is chair of UMBC’s new Department of Marine Biotechnology. At the Columbus Center, he and his colleagues develop new techniques and technologies to protect the world’s oceans and seas and preserve the life inside them.

Pollution, climate change and gushing oil wells are all threats to aquatic systems. But even the act of fishing itself has advanced to a point of deadly efficiency: high-tech fishing fleets use spotters in airplanes and other techniques to maximize their catch and meet a growing global demand for seafood.

“If we don’t do anything about it,” Zohar observes, “the oceans could be out of 90 percent-plus of the major fishery stocks by the year 2050.” Many fisheries are already in serious trouble in 2011, he adds: “Cod used to be one of the most abundant fish out there. Now the cod fishery is almost gone. The giant bluefin tuna has been fished almost beyond repair.”

One answer to overfishing of natural waters is fish farms. But much of the news there is also troubling. Marine fish such as salmon and sea bass are typically raised in offshore floating net pens, where they cause pollution, absorb toxins, and exchange diseases with their wild cousins. Selectively bred farmed fish sometimes escape from their pens, displacing the natives or getting cozy with them.

So where will seafood come from in the future?

Zohar and his colleagues think they have an answer: a sustainable aquaculture system that they have developed in the Columbus Center’s basement. It uses a system of filters and pumps to clean and recirculate artificial seawater, providing ideal conditions for marine fish to grow and breed in safety. The fish can’t escape, and the design eliminates the risk of transmitting diseases or polluting coastal waters. Even the fish wastes are put to productive use: they are converted to methane, which can be used to help power the whole aquaculture system.

Humans have domesticated an array of animals and plants over the course of centuries to meet most of our food needs, Zohar observes. That still hasn’t happened with seafood.

“You don’t go to the wild to catch poultry or bovines,” he says. “Seafood is the only hunt-and-gather crop.”

Zohar believes that the aquaculture system at the Columbus Center – which could be used in landlocked Iowa just as easily as it can be used near the Inner Harbor – could be a green, clean and efficient way to raise fish anywhere.

A Tricky Business

Zohar grew up in Jerusalem, and he developed an early fascination with oceans and marine life studying magazines such as National Geographic. Though he was close to the Mediterranean Sea all his life, it was not until he was teenager that he first visited the water during a school trip to the beach. “I loved it from first sight,” he says.

This passion for the sea eventually brought Zohar to Baltimore. In 1990, he joined the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University System of Maryland to conduct aquaculture research. He later became the director of that center, remaining in that position until July 2010, when the center became the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a partnership between UMBC, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Zohar continued on as IMET’s interim director, and he is chair of the new Department of Marine Biotechnology at UMBC.

Aquaculture was in its early stages when Zohar studied biology as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Completing his master’s degree in oceanography in the mid-1970s, the young researcher started working at a national lab in Israel dedicated to developing techniques for raising marine fish such as European sea bass and sea bream. But progress in aquaculture in that era was stalled by a roadblock: The fish would not reproduce in captivity.

“We had to go collect juvenile fish in the wild,” Zohar recalls. “It was very clear this was not practical or reliable.”

Zohar eventually became an expert in reproduction, completing his Ph.D. in comparative endocrinology at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris in 1982. Reproduction is a tricky business with marine fish. In the wild, they will migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach the spawning grounds where their offspring are most likely to survive. During these migrations, changes in temperature, water depth, salinity and other environmental factors essentially serve as an elemental sort of foreplay. The fish spawn only when these conditions are just right.

One way around the reproduction roadblock would be to mimic these environmental conditions in captivity. This approach wasn’t working, so Zohar decided to try something different, examining instead how the fishes’ hormonal systems respond to the environmental changes that lead to reproduction.

In an effort to understand why fish held in confinement fail to reproduce, Zohar’s research team collected spawning fish from the wild to compare them with their captive, reproductively challenged cousins. It became clear that a surge of a particular hormone resulted in spawning. His group traced the failure of captive fish to release this hormone to a malfunction in a related hormone system in the brain that produces what are known as gonadotropin-releasing hormones (GnRHs). They eventually found completely new forms of GnRH, a breakthrough that spurred reproductive research in animals and humans.

Zohar and his colleagues learned to synthesize a specific type of GnRH, and they discovered that injecting it into captive fish would trigger the reproductive response. Or the start of it, at least. After the injection, it turned out that enzymes in the fish would naturally break the hormone apart. So Zohar’s team spent a period of years developing a novel form of the hormone resistant to that process. They also engineered a “sustained delivery system” so that the hormone could be released at just the right pace to induce spawning.

That approach effectively cleared a path for the field of aquaculture to develop. In the recent New York Times bestseller Four Fish, Paul Greenberg details Zohar’s aquaculture research, characterizing his impact in bold terms. “Over the years he has gained a reputation as one of the world’s best at cracking the reproductive codes of the marine world.”

A Sustainable System

Challenges in marine aquaculture are not limited to reproduction. For a system to be sustainable, it must be engineered to reproduce in miniature the microbial processes that support life in the oceans.

The system Zohar and his colleagues have developed over the last 15 years now sprawls across 18,000 square feet in the Columbus Center’s basement. Zohar beams proudly as he leads tours through the facility, explaining how it defines a new level of sophistication in aquaculture systems.

“Ours is the first system in the world to be fully and completely self-contained,” Zohar says.

The Columbus Center is only two blocks from the National Aquarium in downtown Baltimore, and its aquaculture facility feels in many ways like an industrial version of its tourist-oriented neighbor. Massive round tanks brim with European sea bass, sea bream, cobia and other fish species. The fish circle intently, abruptly striking with open mouths when Zohar throws in a handful of food pellets.

Next to each tank, water churns through towering filtration units filled with what appear to be wagon-wheel pasta pieces. A labyrinth of pipes and tubes connects with a web of filters and sensors to keep the water within healthy limits for the fish.

The “seawater” in the tanks is actually manufactured; the system starts with dechlorinated tap water, which is mixed with salt and other trace elements to simulate what is found in the oceans. In this water, the fish go about their daily business, leaving behind wasted food and producing ammonia and feces that would soon turn the water into inhospitable sludge.

A network of filtration systems keeps the water in pristine condition. The first separates out the food and feces, producing a viscous, salty sludge. In freshwater systems, the sludge can be used as fertilizer. This can cause pollution, however, and it’s not an option given the leftover salt in marine systems.

Enter Kevin Sowers, a professor in the Department of Marine Biotechnology who is an expert on methane-producing bacteria. Over the years, he has helped find a blend of organisms that can effectively devour the sludge created in the Columbus Center aquaculture system and convert it into methane.

“It’s very critical that all these organisms stay in balance,” Sowers observes. And when they do, 90 percent of the waste can be converted to methane.

The aquaculture system developed by Zohar and the marine biotechnology team has already been licensed to a private company for commercial production. When that system is up and running, Sowers says, it should be able to meet at least five to 10 percent of its electricity needs by burning this methane.

The other major waste product created by the system is ammonia. It’s relatively simple to convert ammonia into less toxic nitrogen compounds: Those filters filled with wagon-wheel-shaped pieces are designed specifically for this purpose. The plastic pieces are coated with a film of bacteria that thrive on ammonia, converting it into the nitrogen compounds nitrite and nitrate.

That’s only part of the process, however. The nitrogen compounds build up in the system over time. The nitrate, in particular, renders the water toxic. To get rid of it, aquarium owners and the operators of other land-based aquaculture systems are accustomed to frequently changing their water, but doing that in a commercial marine aquaculture system would be both costly and unsustainable.

Marine biotechnology faculty members Hal Schreier and Keiko Saito, along with other colleagues at the Columbus Center, developed a parallel filtration system that keeps the nitrate in check.

This system amounts to something of a high-wire act. Sulfate is a compound that occurs naturally in aquaculture systems, but aquaculture engineers have shied away from trying to use it productively due to an undesirable side reaction that produces toxic hydrogen sulfide, which could turn the water into an acidic broth.

The Columbus Center aquaculture system harnesses that reaction. Hydrogen sulfide is produced in one step by the bacteria residing in one waste chamber, and the compound is then channeled to another chamber where it is available to a special crop of finicky bacteria. Some of these bacteria consume a cocktail of hydrogen sulfide and nitrate, and churn out sulfate, hydrogen and harmless nitrogen gas in the process.

“We used the process that everyone wanted to avoid,” Schreier explains, “and we turned it to our advantage.”

Fishing for the Future

So where does the aquaculture system developed by Zohar and his colleagues go from here?

Adapting it to a commercial scale is one challenge. It could happen soon: A start-up company called Maryland Sustainable Mariculture has licensed the technology and is now looking for warehouse space that can accommodate an expanded operation. Zohar and his team will help with that effort.

Schreier says there are still parts of the innovative set-up that could be fine-tuned. Though the present aquaculture system minimizes pollution, it still produces a minimal amount of phosphate. The compound shows up as white flakes that must be collected and removed.

Schreier imagines that researchers will one day find a chemical or biological pathway to eliminate this waste product.

Marine biotechnology members are also continuing research on other fronts, including the use of bacteria to break down contaminants in the ocean, the development of algae that can be used in the production of biofuels and the exploration of the seas as a source of new pharmaceuticals.

Zohar envisions a future where aquaculture and marine biotechnology both contribute to the health of the world’s oceans.

“We have too many fishermen,” Zohar says, “and too many fishing boats.”

For now, anyway. Zohar predicts a more sustainable future: “Fishermen, I think, can readily become aquaculturists.”