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Inaugural C-ESTA Event Strives to Build Network of NetworksThe first Coastal Ecosystem Stewardship in the Americas (C-ESTA) conference, held at URI’s W. Alton Jones Campus in March, brought together donors, social entrepreneurs, and practitioners from North, Central, and South America to create connections, reflect on experiences, explore ideas, and strengthen collective capacity for effective stewardship of the lands, rivers, coasts, and oceans of the Americas. The brainchild of Stephen Olsen, URI Coastal Resources Center (CRC) director; Barry Costa-Pierce, Rhode Island Sea Grant director; and Glenn Page, a principal with the EcoLogix Group in Annapolis, Md., C-ESTA gathered over 40 people from seven countries in the Americas who share similar aspirations yet continue to struggle to achieve the results that lead to better stewardship of ecosystems. In his opening remarks, Costa-Pierce said, “Practitioners are heroes—they have changed the world one community at a time. They are all about the ‘do’ of sustainability principles. Sustainability is not nirvana, but a way to make things incrementally better over time, plateau by plateau, and by providing examples to others along the way.” “Stewardship and governance of coastlines is the focus of C-ESTA,” added Olsen. “There are stewardship principles that hold everywhere and good practices that hold anywhere, yet the places are different, and this event is a way to pull the places together to look for the commonalities and needs that exist across all such efforts to improve sustainable coastal management.” “We met in an attempt to integrate across sectors and disciplines to explore complex, systemic, and multifaceted issues that cannot be solved by any one program, institution, method, or process,” said Page. “We know each location has its own unique sets of issues. We also know that there are overarching societal and ecological conditions that are shared by all coastal stewardship efforts. It is difficult to see the whole picture. Networks of donors and networks of practitioners are forming but they intersect only occasionally.” C-ESTA attendees agreed to strengthen the networks that include URI, CRC, and Sea Grant as an es-sential hub for all nations; to embark on realistic partnering at the local level since all coastal sustainability efforts are local; to involve Canada more explicitly in the efforts due to that nation’s leadership in funding local sustainability efforts; and to hold the next C-ESTA event in 2009 in Latin America. Presentations and a summary of the meeting can be found at: seagran-tadm.gso.uri.edu/cesta/. —Malia Schwartz
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