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.

Last year Congress passed a moratorium, aimed at the Star, protecting New England from factory trawlers until regional commissions can draw up regulations for their own areas. Meanwhile the Star's owners, rebuffed in Gloucester, are lobbying to operate from Maine. Greenpeace and many other groups contend that trawlers are too efficient and too wasteful. They contribute to overfishing by catching everything in a gigantic swath. A problem with this is "by-catch," undersize fish or unwanted species that go back over the side, dead.