Meet Sarah Schumann

For Schumann, that moment arrived in 2016, when she led a climate adaptation planning process for Rhode Island's fishing industry. She interviewed roughly fifty fishermen, then put them in rooms together across fleets. What continued to surface was their collective timeline. Fishermen were describing a general northeastward shift of the entire community of fishery species, and dating it to the 1990s, years before climate change became a central topic in fisheries science and management. Alongside it came a surge in black sea bass in southern New England, a rise in nuisance red seaweed, a decline in kelp, and migratory species lingering inshore later into the autumn. 

She is equally careful about the other half of that picture. Not everyone is affected equally, and not every change fishermen are seeing is negative. Bristol Bay has had record salmon runs for a decade, helped in part by warming lakes. But the fleet also knows there are limits. In 2019, water temperatures rose high enough that salmon died before reaching their spawning grounds and washed back into the bay.

That is why comparing notes across fisheries is paramount. One change in one place can be explained away. Put it alongside crab and cod closures in Alaska in the early 2020s, collapsing kelp on both coasts, and California’s salmon crisis, and a much larger pattern begins to emerge. For Schumann, that collective experience is critical to understanding what is actually changing on the water.

What separates Schumann's campaign is who it is built by and who it's built for. It is fishermen organizing fishermen. And its argument is that climate action keeps getting built around fishing communities instead of with them. "The ocean has already absorbed 90% of the excess heat and 30% of the excess carbon generated by humans since the Industrial Revolution," she says. "It's already done more than we ever should have asked of it."

Her worry is what she calls “carbon tunnel vision”, where a solution shifts environmental harm rather than removing it. Offshore wind is the example American fishermen feel most directly. When communities are not involved, she argues, the results can be detrimental to the environment and fishing industry. Hydropower is the older and starker case, decades of clean electricity whose cost included the collapse of anadromous fish runs and the communities that depended on them.

For the fishermen that Schumann works with, climate action takes place from the very large to the very small scale. At the business level, it includes a focus on a lower carbon fleet that fishermen can actually afford to operate. It starts with efficiencies many already want, including better hull design, more efficient engines and propellers, hybrid systems, and fuel-flow meters that make consumption visible. The harder transition comes next, which could involve biofuels, hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and electrification—all of which depend on shoreside infrastructure that largely does not yet exist.