Jean Wiener

Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine (FoProBiM) – Haiti

Jean Wiener is a Haitian marine biologist. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for his efforts in successfully creating the Three Bays National Park, the country’s first marine protected area to preserve the swath in Haiti’s northern coast, while working with the community to promote sustainable fishing practices.

Wiener who was born in Haiti, decided something needed to be done to preserve the environment after seeing firsthand the degradation of it growing up. Wiener studied biology at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and returned to start the Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine (FoProBiM) in Haiti in 1992, with the goal to protect the environment, its coast and marine resources.

Over twenty years ago, Wiener set out, alone, on an almost impossible journey—to revive the seas and coasts of one the most dilapidated nations on Earth. His crusade would mobilize entire villages and rescue hundreds of thousands of acres of endangered corals, critical wetlands, and everything in between.

“You can’t do anything without the local communities being onboard.”

Since French colonial times, Haiti’s forests have been indiscriminately leveled; 98 percent of the trees are gone. At the same time, the country lies at the center of so-called Hurricane Alley, the warm, storm-spawning waters between Africa and the Caribbean. Relentless natural disasters (ten full-blown hurricanes in the past eleven years), on top of a long history of revolution and corrupt leaders, have wiped out Haiti’s natural areas, farmlands, infrastructure, and economy. Today, some 8 million of its 10 million people are living off a battered and beaten land and sea—with virtually no rule of law.

Locals mine corals and crush them to make concrete, or burn them into a powder and add water for cheap white paint. Fisherman trap basketfuls of underweight lobsters and fish—all the big ones are gone. On land, villagers hack down mangroves, the last coastal trees standing, and cook them into charcoal—a high-demand product, the main fuel used for cooking. All the while, each storm season, tens of thousands of pounds of garbage and topsoil from the denuded landscape wash into the Caribbean sea, burying seagrass beds, smothering reefs, and blocking the light that fuels the food chain.

He’d spend the next several years cleaning other beaches and meeting with everyone he could—fisherman, farmers, church groups, hotel owners—to pinpoint problems, teach them about the bigger environmental issues, and rally folks into action. He also gathered research papers and reports from international scientists and institutions that had conducted projects in Haiti and then gone home with their data—creating the country’s only repository of local information on coastal marine science and resource management. He translated fisheries laws, written in French, into Creole—the only language understood by those the laws pertained to—and developed a field guide to marine life that unified terms in Creole, French, and English.

“No one will protect any resource until their basic livelihood needs are met. I can guarantee you that there is nowhere in the world where there is a hungry conservationist…The mangroves get an army of people guarding them like their lives depend on it.”

His team created “coral gardens” away from reefs, to continuously sprout new specimens to bolster populations. And they built new reefs: one from 10,000 concrete blocks, and another out of 8,000 pounds of seashells. Both are thriving today. On shore, they harvested mangrove seeds and grew seedlings offsite in makeshift nurseries. They paid some villagers to make bamboo pots, and others to plant young trees back where they belonged. FoProBiM is helping others start fruit tree farms, and is developing a project to grow specific seaweeds from which companies extract commercial gelling and thickening agents. Wiener hopes to get folks farming oysters next year.

“Jean knows how to get things done in Haiti,” says Greg Cronin, an applied ecologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, who helped Wiener assess the potential impacts of a controversial U.S.-backed industrial park built just upstream from one of his priority sites. “He persistently pushes forward in the face of adversity.” Their most ambitious project turns fisherman and charcoal makers into beekeepers.

Thanks to Wiener’s indomitable drive, Haiti’s coasts are making a comeback, and communities throughout the country are stepping up to protect their backyards and improve their lives.

“The fool didn’t know it was impossible. So he did it.”

Publications: Generating Fisheries Management Advice in Data-limited Situations: Examples from the U.S. South Atlantic and Caribbean; Inferring trends in a small-scale, data-limited tropical fishery based on fishery-independent data; Preliminary Effort and Yield Estimates from the Haitian Fishery at Navassa Island; Apparent rapid fisheries escalation at a remote Caribbean island

Website: FoProBiM

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foprobim/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/foprobim/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jean-wiener-27916127/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeanWiener2, https://twitter.com/FoProBiM

Video 1) Whitley Awards 2014
Video 2) 2015 Goldman Prize ceremony