Debbie MacKenzie – The Cod Mother
Starving Ocean – with Debbie MacKenzie and Farley Mowat
In 2004, 20 years after a “deathly silent” response to Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” (http://www.youtube.com/watc… ), Debbie MacKenzie a Nova Scotia naturalist made her own observations on worrisome, visible changes in marine life – and on deficiencies in accepted fisheries science. Her work became the subject of this short television documentary on the “starving ocean.” Farley Mowat was also interviewed in this piece, and he gave his views on why he saw that Debbie was then being “frozen out” by the scientific establishment.
Debbie notes:
“This show was produced by CBC and financed by Canadian taxpayers, including me. I, however, was forced to pay much more than a few tax dollars for personally daring to discuss the inconvenient truth about the ocean in the media. Shortly after this show was aired on TV in 2004, the Nova Scotia government (my former employer) severely punished me for appearing in it. I was ridiculed by government agents, who then clawed back a pension I’d earned years before by working as a nurse, and who still deny me any recourse against that decision.”
Read much much more from this extraordinary woman and naturalist on her web page The Starving Ocean
Being in the same boat as Debbie and receiving the same treatment by government one has to wonder why being concerned about fish and willing to put productive efforts into working on solutions makes one worthy of such attacks.