From Sheep to Sharks
Alumnus Fighting to Stop Overfishing of the World's Oceans
While growing up, Dustin Cranor tended sheep, cattle, horses, and 4-H pigs on a small farm in southeast Kansas. Today he works to save sea turtles and safeguard sharks, as the communications manager for the non-profit Oceana, the largest international conservation organization dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans. He oversees the day-to-day communications and media efforts of Oceana’s campaigns to restrict government subsidies for fishermen and to protect sea turtles and sharks in North America.
Governments in countries of the European Union and Japan offer subsidies to commercial fisheries — subsidies, Cranor says, that have helped produce a worldwide fishing fleet that is up to 250 percent larger than what is needed to fish at levels that are economically and environentally sustainable.
Governments are providing these subsidies because 90 percent of all the “big” fish – tuna, marlin and sharks – are gone. Fishermen are finding fewer and fewer fish near their coasts and are forced to fish in more distant waters, which requires government support.
“What governments fail to realize is that if we don’t stop overfishing subsidies soon, there won’t be any more fish to send boats after. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are now overexploited, fully exploited, significantly depleted or recovering from overexploitation,” says Dustin.
Dustin came to the University of Arkansas after spending a year at the College of the Ozarks in Branson, Missouri. After he finished dual degrees in political science and communication, he was offered a position at TheWadeGroup, a small boutique public affairs firm in Washington, D.C. A year and a half later, after quickly working his way up in the firm, he was recruited in 2007 to be the new manager of communications at Oceana.
“I actually attended five days of graduate school before moving to Washington in February of 2006. It was a hard decision to make – school or a career? But my professors at the university were supportive of my decision, saying that only I could decide what is best for me. I’m a firm believer that – whether good or bad – everything happens for a reason. My professors always made me feel special — they truly believed in me, sometimes when I didn’t even believe in myself,” recalls Dustin.
He had not even seen an ocean until a little over four years ago. Today he travels the world, taking pride in a job that he says is helping him truly make a difference.
“It’s definitely a rarity to enjoy your job as much as I do,” says Dustin. “Yet it is frustrating to realize what we
as a people have done to our oceans in such a short amount of time.”