From Commercial Fisherman to Deep Sea Ocean Advocate: The Matthew Gianni Story

Most people picture ocean advocates coming up through science or policy school. Matthew Gianni's path started on the deck of a fishing boat.

For 10 years, Matthew worked as a commercial fisherman across a remarkable range of US fisheries. He gillnetted for Spanish and king mackerel in Florida. He bottom trawled off central California, New England, and Florida for sole, redfish, hake, sablefish, shrimp, and other groundfish, sometimes fishing a thousand meters down. He hook-and-lined for salmon and albacore tuna in Oregon and California, ran pots for Dungeness crab in Northern California and Oregon, and dredged for deep sea scallops on Georges Bank.

That range of experience gave him a firsthand view of what deep sea bottom trawling actually does. A trawl net drags across the seafloor, and everything in its path, coral, sponges, fish, and anything else, gets pulled up and dumped onto the sorting table. Much of what came up had no market value and went straight back overboard, often without the crew fully understanding what had been destroyed to get it there, since no cameras had ever documented what the seafloor looked like beforehand.

Two moments as a working fisherman turned that discomfort into action. Matthew helped organize fellow fishermen to fight a $110 million plan to dump San Francisco Bay dredge spoils directly onto prime fishing grounds off the Southern California coast, eventually moving the disposal site off the continental shelf. He also represented the fishing industry in efforts to block offshore oil and gas leases along the central California coast. Both fights showed him what organized advocacy could accomplish, even against agencies as large as the US Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA.

From there, Matthew moved into full-time advocacy at Greenpeace International, where he helped launch the organization's international fisheries campaign, worked on unsustainable aquaculture campaigns across Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe, and represented Greenpeace at UN fisheries and ocean forums including the UN FAO Committee on Fisheries, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and the 1992 UN Earth Summit. He helped secure the UN General Assembly's 1991-1992 moratorium on high seas driftnet fishing [VERIFY dates], and eventually ran Greenpeace International's entire global Ocean Program from Amsterdam, where he still lives today.

In the early 2000s, Matthew co-founded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an international coalition of organizations working to end deep sea bottom trawling on seamount ecosystems in the high seas, pursued through the UN General Assembly process. Since 2014, the coalition has expanded its focus to deep sea mining, applying the same core argument that drove its founding: there is almost no baseline data on seamount or deep seabed ecosystems, so there's no way to know what's been lost until after it's already gone.

It's a genuinely full-circle story. A fisherman who once shoveled coral overboard now negotiates global moratoriums at the UN. This is the first episode in a week-long series on the deep sea, building toward a full interview with Matthew Gianni airing Friday.

Takeaways:

• Matthew Gianni spent 10 years as a commercial fisherman across gillnet, bottom trawl, hook-and-line, pot, and dredge fisheries on both US coasts 
• Firsthand experience with deep sea bottom trawling, watching non-target species get discarded, shaped his later advocacy
• Two advocacy wins as a fisherman (halting a dredge-spoil dumping project, opposing offshore oil and gas leases) pushed him toward formal environmental work
• At Greenpeace International he helped secure the UN's 1991-1992 high seas driftnet moratorium and eventually ran its global Ocean Program
• He co-founded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition in the early 2000s and still serves as its political and policy advisor
• Since 2014, DSCC's mandate has expanded from bottom trawling to deep sea mining, using the same baseline-data argument
• Full interview with Matthew Gianni airs Friday as part of this week's deep sea series