Niaz Dorry

On an unexpectedly cool Saturday morning in August, the Greenpeace Motorbus Terrapin is docked across six lanes of city highway from a farmers' market in St. Louis, Mo. The bus p.a. system blasts rock music, alternating with a short rap against factory fishing trawlers. A woman approaches, says that she agrees the huge ships with huge nets exhaust ocean fisheries and that she would sign a Greenpeace petition against them, except the rock music is noise pollution, so she won't. Somebody turns off the music.

Niaz Dorry rolls her eyes, grins and says she had forgotten how hard collecting signatures can be. She is a big, wide, powerful woman with an amiable, unfooled expression and a finger-in-the-light-socket aurora of curly brown hair. She helped organize Greenpeace's Fish Bus Tour '98, a 30-city caravan that left Seattle in July and crossed the heartland toward a September finish on Cape Cod. Middle Americans may not harvest the ocean's bounty, but they are hearty eaters of the catch.

At 34, Dorry is a veteran of Greenpeace, the big, loose, global network of environmental activists notorious for protesting pollution by sitting, climbing and sailing where they are not wanted. Dorry would have campaign medals if Greenpeace gave medals. She was jailed in 1992 for a demonstration in which she and 75 townspeople scaled a fence at a hazardous-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. And she helped plan the 1994 stunt in which Greenpeacers climbed the side of the Time & Life Building in New York City and hung a banner from the 20th floor decrying the use of chlorine in the making of paper for this magazine, among others.

Dorry's great gift, though, is for living and working, talking and listening in towns shadowed by the threat of ecological calamity--towns like Gloucester, Mass., the heavily Italian old fishing port where she settled four years ago. At first fishermen losing boats to bankruptcy weren't eager to hear their trouble analyzed by a woman environmentalist, and certainly not by a nonreligious Muslim, born in the U.S. of Iranian parents. But the underlying problem, years of overfishing off New England that had caused fish stocks to crash, wouldn't go away. Neither would Dorry. Quietly she spoke to Gloucester residents: this is my information; this is what I think and why I think it. A few at a time, often grudgingly, the fishermen or their wives began to listen.

What she said was what they knew: if the broken ocean food chain were to mend itself, New England fishermen would have to hammer out fairer catch limits, along with rules for gear type and boat size and number. If they couldn't handle this, Gloucester might be finished, except as a picturesque site for second-home condos.

But it's not finished yet. Dorry's campaign took hold last year when fishermen along the East Coast joined to protest a 369-ft. factory trawler, the Atlantic Star. U.S.-Dutch owned, the Star was being refitted in Norway to catch herring and mackerel. The two species are food for cod, tuna, birds, whales and dolphins, and could be a vital link in rebuilding the Atlantic food chain.