Here's a fishy tale of Greenpeace volunteers campaigning on the streets of Dorchester collecting images, messages, poems and letters to David Cameron - asking him to reform the Common Fisheries Policy.
Dorchester is probably the toughest of our regular 'fishing' grounds, so in preparation we baited our hooks carefully for our campaign stall.
Our lures (aka campaign props) included:
- Colour photo of Cameron with thought bubbles to stick on
- Board of bullet-pointed information for the more interested
- Our sustainable fishing game
- A thank you for the tuna campaign – to show these things work
And most importantly a stock of DIY letters to David Cameron for people to sign and adapt with their own personal messages, in a way we hoped would be more interesting than yet another petition.
Quite quickly, the fish (public) started to nibble and many in the local shoal knew about the discards of their fishy friends from Hugh's Fish Fight. A high proportion of those we spoke to were thus well informed and so very happy to sign the campaign letter. A few of the more aggressive species did need a little bit of discouraging from sending rather blunt messages to Cameron that had very little to do with fishing!
Our fishy team of Greenpeace volunteers loved the woman who provided the terrible pun for the blog title and the artistic talent of the guy who drew Cameron caught in a net. The Lyme Regis fishing boat owner, we spoke to, was initially concerned about what he felt might be an anti-fishermen stance, but then shared stories of quota abuse. Some of the smaller species (ie children) played the magnetic sustainable fish game to learn more about threatened specise, until they started to test each other about all of the 10 species we had included.
In the afternoon we tried something completely different. While one of us (using a different set of skills) played in the brass band in the park, two volunteers trawled amongst the scattered shoals on the benches and the grass, again inviting people to sign a campaign letter. In this relaxed atmosphere it was possible to bait one's hook to engage people in longer conversations and so catch the interest of people who would never have stopped in the high street.
Clearly it pays to cast your net wide, and to fish in waters that we would never have dreamed to be so receptive to campaigning about the EU common fisheries policy.
If you would like to help local volunteers campaign to reform the Commons Fisheries Policy, then please contact your local network coordinator. Or you can email David Cameron via the Seas In Crisis page, and/or please share this fishy tale via Facebook, using the button below. Thank you.
Comments