Paolo Fanciulli was a fisherman with a chip on his shoulder. Like many artisanal fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere, the fish stocks that he relied on for a living off the Tuscan coast of Italy had been depleted by illegal trawler ships that came in close to the coast.
Small-time fishers like Fanciulli couldn’t compete with these ships, which gathered everything in the area and then left it barren for years. “I understood that the success of my fishing activity was intrinsically linked to the good state of the environment,” says Fanciulli.
In Talamone, Fanciulli’s native village in Tuscany, the fisherman wanted to do something. He had tried protesting, but ran into problems with local criminals linked to the illegal trawling who made “threats to my safety,” Fanciulli says.
He began to think of other ways to deal with the issue. The government dropped a few concrete blocks in the ocean, but they were too sparsely placed to block the trawling nets. So Fanciulli dropped some more. Then artists and a local quarry got involved, donating large sculptures to drop in the water.
“One of the most effective solutions is to physically prevent trawling through artificial reefs,” Fanciulli says. “So I started working on this project, trying to combine the protection of the seabed with something that could also give an added value to our environment, something as beautiful as a sculpture.”
Read more:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/underwater-sculptures-stop-illegal-fishing