feature writers In most publications, you will find "feature writers", who write stories about news, rather than writing the news itself. Feature writers are able to organize and comment on information, and often intend to influence public opinion. Making personal connections with local feature writers opens the possibility that one of them may do a helpful article on your group, and your concern. A personal connection is important because feature writers are also independent journalists, and are not obliged to tell your story they way you might want them to. In particular, they will look for opposing points of view, and may well present those as well. The following example of feature writing has been contributed by Silver Donald Cameron: THEIR COUNTRY'S PRIDE 22 Jan 03, Halifax Sunday Herald "The ones that catch the least amount of fish are being squeezed out," says Ronnie Wolkins, "but the ones that catch "em all are being given 'em all." And there it is: the pathology of Canadian fisheries policy in a single utterance. Ronnie Wolkins is president of the South West Fishermens' Rights Association, based in Cape Sable Island. He's one of the central figures in Clearing the Waters, a sobering documentary by Halifax film-makers Chuck Lapp and Bill McKiggan which airs next week on Vision TV. Ronnie Wolkins and his buddies are inshore fishermen. Remember them? Inshore fishermen are the ones who used to set out each morning from every little notch in the Atlantic coastline. Like their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, they sailed into the fog before daylight, returning in the afternoon with whatever catch the sea had given them. They maintained their own boats, mended their own nets, carved their own buoys. The inshore fishermen and their families were the spine of the coastal villages, the people who supplied the little fish plants, sustained the local storekeepers and boatbuilders, reared the children. The inshore fishermen were the symbolic Nova Scotians, the ones who defined the particular character of this little society. And in a single generation they've virtually disappeared, along with the fish they used to catch. But not in South West Nova. Not yet. Ronnie Wolkins, Fred Sears, Tony Cunningham and Scott Nickerson, the four fishermen at the heart of Clearing the Waters are "hand-liners" who catch fish on long lines of baited hooks. Because a small fish can't take a big hook, hand-lining is inherently sustainable; it only captures mature fish. A dragger, however, tows a huge open bag of netting along the bottom, pounding and raking the ocean floor and scooping up everything in its path: big fish, small fish, tin cans, food fish, car tires, junk fish, rubber boots, shell-fish and drowned mens' skulls. Fifty thousand pounds of hand-lined fish consists of about 6000 individual fish, each one weighing eight to ten pounds. By contrast, 50,000 pounds from a dragger represents 20,000 crushed and bruised twopound to threepound fish. But dragging has been the dominant fishing technique for half a century, simply because--like clearcutting--it is highly mechanized, and it yields so much product for so little effort. Dragging fits naturally into corporate, industrial fishing, and it is still favoured by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, despite the fact that it has demolished what was once the world^s greatest fishery. Big, centralized operations are more convenient to manage, whether they be fisheries, schools, banks or municipal governments. It's easier to regulate the fishery if you organize and privatize the fish, too. The device for this is an Individual Transferable Quota, or ITQ, which gives the owner the right to catch a certain quantity of fish. ITQs have their merits, but because they can be sold and moved, their long-term effect is to concentrate the fishery in the hands of footloose corporations, promote social inequality, strangle fishing communities, and encourage wasteful and destructive fishing. Enter Ronnie Wolkins and his merry men, who fish under a shared group quota--a community quota, in effect--and who are bitterly opposed to the privatized, corporate fishery encouraged by DFO. Their immediate problem is that DFO has been shrinking their quota (and now threatens to close the ground fishery in their district altogether.) They want equal access to the fishery, and an end to privatization. Finding DFO unresponsive, and desperate to publicize the larger issues, they have been engaged since 1995 in various acts of civil disobedience: occupying DFO offices, fishing illegally to provoke prosecution, chaining themselves to a Province House flagpole and mounting a sit-in in the rigging of Bluenose II. Clearing the Waters is their story. The title is significant, recalling the Highland Clearances which rousted the Gaels from Scotland, the Enclosure Acts which stole the common lands from the rural yeomanry of Merrie England. Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village is a meditation on the ruin which follows such rampages of theft and greed. Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay... But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied. Our "bold peasantry" were the inshore fishermen -- and they are being destroyed before our eyes by rapine and regulation. Their distress shows up in alcoholism, migration, family breakdown and a rash of suicides. One of the fishermen in Clearing the Waters is an engaging young man named Scott Nickerson. He has a wife, a couple of children, a house and a mortgage. Salt of the earth, pillar of the community, hope of the future. His country's pride. By the end of the show, he is dead by his own hand. Silver Donald Cameron

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