Niaz Dorry

By John Skow/St. Louis

On an unexpectedly cool Saturday morning in August, the Greenpeace Motorbus Terrapin is docked across six lanes of city highway from a farmers' market in St. Louis, Mo. The bus p.a. system blasts rock music, alternating with a short rap against factory fishing trawlers. A woman approaches, says that she agrees the huge ships with huge nets exhaust ocean fisheries and that she would sign a Greenpeace petition against them, except the rock music is noise pollution, so she won't. Somebody turns off the music.

Niaz Dorry rolls her eyes, grins and says she had forgotten how hard collecting signatures can be. She is a big, wide, powerful woman with an amiable, unfooled expression and a finger-in-the-light-socket aurora of curly brown hair. She helped organize Greenpeace's Fish Bus Tour '98, a 30-city caravan that left Seattle in July and crossed the heartland toward a September finish on Cape Cod. Middle Americans may not harvest the ocean's bounty, but they are hearty eaters of the catch.

At 34, Dorry is a veteran of Greenpeace, the big, loose, global network of environmental activists notorious for protesting pollution by sitting, climbing and sailing where they are not wanted. Dorry would have campaign medals if Greenpeace gave medals. She was jailed in 1992 for a demonstration in which she and 75 townspeople scaled a fence at a hazardous-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. And she helped plan the 1994 stunt in which Greenpeacers climbed the side of the Time & Life Building in New York City and hung a banner from the 20th floor decrying the use of chlorine in the making of paper for this magazine, among others.

Dorry's great gift, though, is for living and working, talking and listening in towns shadowed by the threat of ecological calamity--towns like Gloucester, Mass., the heavily Italian old fishing port where she settled four years ago. At first fishermen losing boats to bankruptcy weren't eager to hear their trouble analyzed by a woman environmentalist, and certainly not by a nonreligious Muslim, born in the U.S. of Iranian parents. But the underlying problem, years of overfishing off New England that had caused fish stocks to crash, wouldn't go away. Neither would Dorry. Quietly she spoke to Gloucester residents: this is my information; this is what I think and why I think it. A few at a time, often grudgingly, the fishermen or their wives began to listen.

What she said was what they knew: if the broken ocean food chain were to mend itself, New England fishermen would have to hammer out fairer catch limits, along with rules for gear type and boat size and number. If they couldn't handle this, Gloucester might be finished, except as a picturesque site for second-home condos.

But it's not finished yet. Dorry's campaign took hold last year when fishermen along the East Coast joined to protest a 369-ft. factory trawler, the Atlantic Star. U.S.-Dutch owned, the Star was being refitted in Norway to catch herring and mackerel. The two species are food for cod, tuna, birds, whales and dolphins, and could be a vital link in rebuilding the Atlantic food chain.

Last year Congress passed a moratorium, aimed at the Star, protecting New England from factory trawlers until regional commissions can draw up regulations for their own areas. Meanwhile the Star's owners, rebuffed in Gloucester, are lobbying to operate from Maine. Greenpeace and many other groups contend that trawlers are too efficient and too wasteful. They contribute to overfishing by catching everything in a gigantic swath. A problem with this is "by-catch," undersize fish or unwanted species that go back over the side, dead.

Greenpeace was encouraged when Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, whose pollock stocks are hurt by overfishing, filed a bill to limit factory trawling in American waters. Dorry and her Greenpeace colleagues hurriedly stocked their big bus and took off around the U.S. to support Stevens' bill.

It was a happy inspiration for Greenpeace to take its bus not just to port cities but inland too. In Howard County, Mo., the ocean activists meet Roger Allison and Rhonda Perry, family hog farmers. They complain that Missouri and its small farms are being lied to, undersold and fouled with reeking air and polluted water by huge, corporate-owned, factory-style hog operations. Dorry responds with the parallel case against factory fishing. "It's the same story here!" she says. "You guys are trying to make a living. The factories are making a killing."

Across from the farmers' market in St. Louis, it has been a slow day. A couple of dozen signatures, maybe a mind or two opened. Or closed. The Greenpeacers take down their banners saying STOP FACTORY FARMS! and BAN FACTORY TRAWLERS! The bus eases away from the curb and rumbles toward Lexington, Ky.

Weeks later, home in Gloucester, Dorry hears bad news. Under attack by factory-ship interests, the Stevens bill has been weakened. Of the 45 big ships now operating, only the least efficient nine would be bought out of service, partially at taxpayer expense. "What this does," Dorry says, "is institutionalize factory fishing, not ban it. What it doesn't do is deal with overfishing." She is silent for a moment. Then: "No. No, the bus tour wasn't wasted. At least more people know there's a problem. The fight is in Congress now. It's winnable. We're going after them."

--By John Skow/St. Louis