Environmental tipping points: a new slant on strategic environmentalism.

• Author: Marten, Gerald

Step off the outrigger canoe and Apo Island greets you like a palm-shaded Shangri-La. It's early afternoon, but the men have already come in from fishing. A dive shop and two small hotels overlook the shore, catering to tourists enticed by the pristine coral reefs. Thirty minutes from the coast of Negros, in the Philippines, the island supports an easygoing existence.

But Apo Island was a paradise almost lost. Twenty-five years ago, like countless communities around the world, islanders found their livelihood headed for collapse. Fishing had always been the foundation of the village economy, and the fish were disappearing.

What saved their fishery and their way of life was that they found a positive environmental tipping point.

Day by day, we're flooded with news of environmental devastation. We read that natural systems, from rainforests to ocean currents, are nearing "tipping points" of irreversible change. But around the globe, a positive kind of environmental tipping point is quietly emerging, one that tips towards sustainability instead of away from it. In places where top-down regulations and high-priced technical fixes aren't working, these tipping points offer a third way to restore communities, both natural and human. Instead of trying to fix nature, or to change human nature, they're tapping the inborn powers of both to heal themselves--and one another.

Malcolm Gladwell's recent bestseller The Tipping Point explores how "little causes have big effects" for everything from footwear fads to crime rates. Such thinking is inherently ecological. It recognizes that dynamic systems have the power to reorganize themselves. If we broaden our view, to connect natural systems with social ones, we find a similar phenomenon. In a wealth of cases worldwide, a minor change in one part has jumpstarted profound changes throughout an eco-social system. Like a lever, which uses a small force to move a large object, a catalytic action and its spin-offs can tip a whole system from ruin to restoration. Apo Island shows how it happens.

Like many other fishing villages in the Philippines, where fish stocks have dropped as much as 95 percent in the past 50 years, Apo had been in a slow decline. Population growth had triggered heavier fishing. New methods, like dynamite, cyanide, and small-mesh nets, were more effective but more destructive than traditional ones. Over time, fishermen got stuck in a vicious cycle. They were traveling farther and working harder to catch fish that became ever scarcer, as they exhausted one fishing ground after another.

The rescue of Apo Island began with Angel Alcala, a marine biologist from Siliman University in nearby Dumaguete City. Based on his prior experience at another island, he proposed a small change. Banning fishing around 10 percent of the island could create a nursery from which to repopulate adjacent fishing grounds. "We already had proof that no-take marine reserves increased fishermen's catch, enhanced fisheries, and maintained coral reefs," says Alcala. "Marine reserves allow fish to grow larger before they're caught. They allow fish to mature and reproduce."

In 1982, 14 families began guarding the coral-covered fishing grounds off a 450-meter strip of beach. After three years, the resulting explosion of aquatic life convinced other islanders to make the sanctuary official. At the same time, they prohibited destructive fishing methods throughout Apo's waters. They set up a volunteer marine guard to enforce the rules and keep out fishermen who weren't from the island. Within 10 years, fish stocks had rebounded so much that fishermen could pull in a day's catch within 500 meters from shore.

The lever of a marine reserve had tipped Apo's vicious cycle of destruction into virtuous cycles of reconstruction, growing stronger and stronger over time:

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* Less-intensive fishing produced more fish, which meant even less need for aggressive...