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Dr. Rosemary Ommer casts a line to fisheries and coastal communities

For Dr. Rosemary Ommer, her interest in economic history and geography came from her father, a geographer.

“The reason I was interested in fisheries, particularly, is because we used to go on holiday to a little fishing coastal community in Scotland where I was born,” said Ommer. “[My dad] used to go fishing … and he spoke to me often about fishing and fishing life and how difficult it was for fishing communities.”

After completing her BA and teacher’s training certificates by 1965 in her native Scotland, Ommer immigrated to Canada and moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. There, she pursued a master’s in historical geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and became interested in exploring the geography and economic history of the fishing communities in the province, inspired by her father’s and her own experiences.

“I was fascinated by both the similarities to what my dad had talked about, but also to the real difference[s],” Ommer explained.

Ommer is an eminent scholar and educator, recognized for her significant contributions to key international and national research initiatives in social and ecological systems, coastal communities and informal economies, the history of fisheries and environmental degradation. She’s currently an adjunct professor with the department of geography at UVic but has previously held faculty positions at Memorial University, UBC and the University of Calgary.

For Ommer, her career has been defined by an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and the goal of producing findings about the humanities and the climate crisis that can be understood across all fields and communities.

“With the work you do, it's really important to be accessible to your readership. So what does your readership want? What will your readership understand?” said Ommer.

“The problem of elitism is that it's talking down, and it's not the way you want to be if you want to change minds.”

Following the current

When Ommer moved to Newfoundland and Labrador, the fishery was in the midst of a crisis.

She recalled auditing an elementary ecology class, where she learned about fishery ecology in a new light. The course was lectured by Dr. Richard Haedrich, a professor at Memorial University, who was well-known for his work on the biogeography and ecology of deep-sea fishes.

“That was the first time I ever [learnt] about the importance of salmon to the whole ecosystem,” said Ommer. “It was the first time I widened my thinking to think beyond the fish swimming in the sea or the people catching them.”

By the time Ommer started working with Newfoundland and Labrador’s fisheries, they were already in serious decline.

“I became very interested in both the geography and the economic history, because I wanted to see what the picture was, how things had gone wrong. And then the cod collapsed.”

In 1992, northern cod populations fell to near-extinction levels, largely due to decades of overfishing. A two-year moratorium was imposed by the Canadian government, leading to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery and putting more than 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador out of work.

Ommer sought to learn more about fishery and fishing communities and understand the implications of the cod collapse.

“[Haedrich] explained to me one of the most dramatic things I've ever seen,” said Ommer, recalling her conversation with Dr. Haedrich. “He put a map of the Humboldt Current up and he said, ‘… here is how we organize fisheries, and it's all in boxes. It's not at all like what the fish actually do.’”

As the research director at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Memorial University, Ommer formed an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study the fishery crisis in Newfoundland and Labrador. The project, titled “Sustainability in a Changing Cold Ocean Coastal Environment,” was awarded the Tri-Council Eco-Research award from the Canadian government. Its final report was published shortly after.

Ommer went on to work on various multidisciplinary projects throughout the course of her academic career.

While still working in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ommer edited a book called, Fishing Places, Fishing People: Issues in small scale Canadian fisheries with Dr. Dianne Newell, who was a professor in UBC’s history department and is currently serving as the interim director of the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at UBC.

“What Diane and I really shared was the interest in the science and the interest in the social science, and the interest in getting the view from the beach, if you like,” said Ommer. “Getting down to ordinary people in fishing communities and getting the handle in that.”

She went on to collaborate with Dr. Harold Coward, the then-director of UVic’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, to look into the question of justice in Canadian fisheries and the ethical foundations of fishery policy and guidelines on both the east and west coasts, including perspectives from First Nations across Canada. They edited a book together titled Just Fish: Ethics and Canadian Marine Fisheries.

Shortly after publishing her research on the fishery crisis, she attended a conference in Seattle to present it. There, she met with Dr. Daniel Pauly from UBC, who was a professor and the director at the UBC Fisheries Centre, now known as the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries.

Ommer shared her team's research with Pauly, citing maps and diagrams detailing the environmental impact of the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, and discovered he had a similar map illustrating his research at UBC. That’s when Ommer realised the fishery and fishing communities on Canada’s east and west coasts were facing similar issues.

“We looked at one another and said, ‘We have to talk,’” said Ommer. “So I went across to UBC, to the Fisheries Centre, as it was called at that time … and we started talking about fish and fishing communities.”

UBC became an important place for her fisheries research and writing.

In May 2024, Ommer was awarded an honorary degree from UBC in recognition of her academic achievements and leadership in numerous fields and community-based research.

“I was hugely privileged and excited,” she said. “It was the kind of recognition of what I had been trying to do that just warms your heart.”

‘A question of vision’

Ommer acknowledged the challenges of coordinating interdisciplinary research.

“All knowledge is contexted,” said Ommer. “It's a question of vision and goals.”

She highlighted the need for humility and collaboration to overcome disciplinary silos and achieve interdisciplinary success.

“If you're thinking only about your bottom line, that's a very narrow perspective,” Ommer said. “If you think about the richness of the context and from which your bottom line is coming, you've got a better chance of understanding what's going on.”

She emphasized the importance of accessible language and avoiding jargon to facilitate communication across disciplines.

Ommer explained that when she began to lead her first big team of academics, a big box sat on a table outside the group’s meeting room.

“And it had a label on it that said, ‘Please leave your ego here and you can pick it up again on the way out,’" Ommer laughed. “And it was important, because people get very protective.”

“Interdisciplinarity is not easy, but it's the way forward, because the world we live in is complex and constrained with all kinds of difficulties and barriers that need to be broken down.”

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Dr. Daniel Pauly. The Ubyssey regrets this error.

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