Chuck Cook, The Nature Conservancy
Sustainable Fisheries Group, Collaborator

Chuck, a 30-year veteran of The Nature Conservancy, is a marine and fisheries conservation practitioner that works in tropical and temperate ocean environments with a strong focus on fisheries reform and habitat protection.  Over the past 15 years, Chuck has concentrated his efforts on improving the economic and environmental performance of the west coast groundfish fishery, anchoveta fishery in the Humboldt Current and coral reef fisheries in Indonesia and Micronesia. More recently, Chuck’s professional focus has been on the design, development and implementation of market and incentive based solutions to ocean and fishing concerns.  In 2005, Chuck led The Nature Conservancy’s efforts in forming an alliance with NGOs, fishermen and government regulators to execute a privately funded buyout of bottom trawling permits and vessels from fishermen who wanted to leave the industry.  Those actions contributed to the protection of 3.8 million acres of ecologically valuable seafloor habitat in California – four times larger than Yosemite National Park.  Now these conservation groups and fishermen are working together to transition the struggling groundfish fishery into a more sustainable economic enterprise utilizing more selective and finer scale fishing gears. Between 2007-2010, Chuck was the Project Leader for The Sustainable Fisheries Group at UCSB, where we encouraged the use of emerging market based tools that better align the economic interests of fishermen with the health of the ocean. Previously, Chuck was the Director and Lead Negotiator of the Conservancy’s Palmyra Atoll Project, a 515,000 acre tropical marine complex managed in cooperation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  Both the Palmyra Atoll and trawler buy out project have pioneered efforts to demonstrate how NGOs and the government can forge public/private partnerships to conserve large seascapes and marine systems cost effectively.  Chuck earned his BS in 1974 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in Animal Science and Husbandry. He earned his MS in 1977 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with a Major in Agricultural Biology, Minor in Ecology.