IT WAS THE period historians call the Second Cold War. After a few years of détente, relations between East and West broke down toward the end of the 1970s—all over the world, capitalists and communists were once again at each other’s throats. But as the saying goes, “You don’t start a revolution on a full stomach”*—or, to put it plainly, you’re less likely to become a communist if you aren’t dying of hunger. The United States understood this and went to work on food aid and development in poor countries with the help of the United Nations and the FAO, though they also used private funds. In 1977, part of the Rockefeller family’s huge fortune went toward the creation of a new marine resource management organization in the Indo-Pacific region: ICLARM.†
Initially based in Hawaii, the organization quickly moved to Manila thanks to some very effective lobbying by President Marcos. The research center was well funded and charged its first director, Jack Marr, with recruiting a “tropicalized” dream team. Marr was already an experienced researcher who had written a seminal work on Californian sardine fisheries that documented their collapse in the 1950s. He had also been director of the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council and of another large FAO program in the Indian Ocean. Because ICLARM needed the best and had money to spend, Marr invited a small number of young scientists to come stay in Manila for a few months—including Daniel, whom he had heard of during a trip to Indonesia.
The young doctoral student packed his bags and put his romance with Miss Wade on hold for a while to go to Asia, from mid-June to mid-August of 1978. “By inviting a young Black scientist, Jack Marr showed he had an attitude that was uncommon for a white American of his generation,” Daniel notes, remembering that Marr welcomed him with a very simple to-do list: “You are going to develop a theory of tropical fisheries.” Daniel was petrified. “I was scared so stiff, I seriously considered turning around and going back to Kiel.” But instead he jumped in headfirst, reading up on tropical marine environments and consulting a few general works on ecology, including a textbook1 by Robert Ricklefs, then a young professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
After digesting the material, Daniel wrote a summary of thirty-five pages, with seventy-five bibliographic references.2 It is a tour de force, considering how quickly he turned it out, but it is important to note that today, such a summary would require reading several thousand publications, reports, and books. Daniel benefited from the gaps in his new field and the unburdened freedom of pioneers. His report included a review of the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia followed by a presentation of the mathematical methods available to ensure their management. After that, he included a case study on fisheries in the Gulf of Thailand and finally, a general road map for the management of tropical fisheries.
Jack Marr’s evaluation was nothing if not thorough: he submitted the whole thing to several notable colleagues, including the formidable British scientist David Cushing. Daniel’s text was approved without any major modifications and published directly by ICLARM in 1979. Unfortunately, as with his thesis, it was shared with only a very small network of researchers—and yet his paper quickly became a classic in its genre, and remains one of his most cited articles today. The text is written in English, the style simple and elegant, a Pauly trademark that proved his high school language teachers in La Chaux-de-Fonds wrong. The tone is frank, particularly when it comes to the governments of Southeast Asian countries, which he very directly accuses of developing industrial fisheries for export despite the fact that artisanal fishing actually employs the most people and feeds the local population. He also points out a “serious conflict” between short- and long-term objectives, and particularly the temptation to make a lot of money quickly in the short term. This problem has notably affected the Gulf of Thailand, which, Daniel showed, was already severely overfished. Daniel also threw a few barbs at the FAO for not proposing methods suitable for the management of tropical fisheries.
In many ways, this seminal report founded a new discipline and set down the major themes that would become Daniel’s obsession over the next four decades. Poring over the pages, you can see the key terms: “overfishing,” “collapse of the stock,” “artisanal fishery,” “multitude of tropical species,” “fish growth,” “removal of larger fish then smaller ones,” “mesh size,” “underwater natural parks or similar (non-) uses of the resource.” The author concludes: “Almost all problems that can occur in a fishery do occur in a tropical multispecies fishery,” and he suggests establishing a vast research program in this area of study. Whereas most researchers faced with a scientific problem would ask for more measurements, more data collection, Daniel simply suggests producing a synthesis of existing knowledge and asks for “a large computer capable of rapid operation and . . . therefore quite costly.”
More than satisfied with young Pauly’s work, Jack Marr offered him a one-year research contract with the potential for renewal. Daniel accepted, leaving Northern Germany with his wife immediately after his thesis defense to settle in Manila in July of 1979. Ferdinand Marcos had been in power since 1965, martial law had been in place since 1972, the size of the police force and the army had quadrupled, and tens of thousands of political dissidents were behind bars, including the famous opposition leader Ninoy Aquino. Gun culture had also become deeply ingrained in the Philippines after the United States’ violent takeover of the country following the end of Spanish colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In sum, not a very welcoming setting for expatriate scientists, most of whom lived as though in a war zone. This was the case for Ziad Shehadeh, the genteel Palestinian researcher who took over the direction of ICLARM after Jack Marr left suddenly following a disagreement over funding.
“Ziad lived in a U-tube,” recalls Roger Pullin, one of his colleagues from that time. “He lived on the tenth floor of an apartment building, and he would go down to the basement, where his driver picked him up in a big limousine and drove him to the basement of the Metrobank building, where he took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, and repeated the process. That’s how he lived. His family was also very scared and they would soak all their vegetables in potassium permanganate [to disinfect them].” His Lebanese wife eventually convinced Dr. Shehadeh to move to Kuwait, where the Iraqi invasion would make him regret leaving behind the peculiar charm of the Philippines. His departure was all the more unfortunate because everyone at ICLARM liked Shehadeh—a good man, always willing to listen to his colleagues. The boss was, however, slightly perplexed by Daniel, whom he found a little too spirited. Shehadeh discreetly contacted several European and American colleagues, whose responses partially reassured him about his new recruit’s character. “In the end, it was my wife who won him over,” Daniel remarks. “Ziad liked Sandra a lot—he even made sure our company car had an automatic transmission because he knew she was American.”
DANIEL’S NEW JOB paid well, and for the first time, at thirty-three years old, he attained a degree of financial stability. He still felt insecure about his future, though, and threw himself into his new work body and soul, only coming home to sleep. Sandra found herself isolated, stuck inside after curfew in the middle of Asia, far from her family, her studies, and her political activities. But prepared for this moment by a lifetime of nomadism, she landed a job as a teacher at an international school, where she initially taught psychology. After that, she deliberately worked her way up the ladder, ultimately becoming the head of the social science department, where she specialized in European history. Almost four decades later, Sandra says she has nothing but good memories of Manila and especially of the friends she made at work.
With their respective jobs in the nice part of town, Daniel and Sandra moved up in the world. They rented a large penthouse on the top floor of a very chic building across from a golf course and, after hesitating for a long time, hired a maid and a driver. Sandra, who loves plants, decorated their huge terrace with leaves in every shade of green, helped along by the tropical rains. From the point of view of their Filipino coworkers, the Paulys lived like royalty—they even had an open-air pool. “But I wonder if Daniel ever dipped a toe in it,” Cornelia Nauen muses. Though researchers from the Global North who work in developing countries often enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle, moving south can also mean sacrificing their ambitions. Accepting a job on a tropical island with an organization like ICLARM normally means turning one’s back on the big universities. This wasn’t the case for Daniel Pauly, however. He worked “like crazy” all through the 1980s despite the fact that he found himself isolated from the European and North American circles that so totally dominated research at the time.
Daniel had another good reason to push himself. In 1980, he “retrieved” Ilya from Jakarta during an assignment in Indonesia. His son was not in good health, asthmatic and covered in scabs. Meeting another abandoned child, this time his own son, was incredibly painful for Daniel. “But it was love at first sight—I bought him a little toy car, and we played together and understood each other right away. I did my best to make up for what had happened.” Indeed, according to his friends at the time in Jakarta, Daniel had left Indonesia in a less-than-honorable fashion, but he made up for it later. Ilya was a happy child, and in Manila as well as in his French and American families, everyone fell in love with “the most adorable little boy.”
The next year, Sandra gave birth to a baby girl. The Paulys named her Angela as a tribute to the famous African American activist. The kids grew up next to the pool, around coral reefs, the prince and princess of a tropical kingdom that stretched from the family home all the way to ICLARM by way of the international school and weekends at the beach, with occasional intercontinental flights to California and France, via Hawaii. A photo from that time shows the Paulys, now a family of four, standing under some palm trees on the beach: a peaceful postcard from their tropical exile. Daniel wanted the best for his children and didn’t joke around with their education. He sent Ilya to the French school: Daniel’s son needed to master the language of Voltaire as quickly as possible, which wasn’t easy in Manila, where he mostly spoke English with his Filipino neighbors and with Sandra. Ilya had just turned five and Daniel, with his usual extremism, decided to send him to live in France for a few months with Gérard and Jocelyne Pauly in La Rochelle. Sandra remembers, “I had just spent eighteen months becoming his mom and I cried every tear in my body, but Daniel had made up his mind.”
Luckily, the La Rochelle Paulys were warm and welcoming, and little Ilya remembers those three months fondly: “I took the airplane by myself. I remember certain things very distinctly—the layout of Gérard and Jocelyne’s apartment, going fishing for sea snails on the Île de Ré. After a couple of weeks, I was speaking French. When I got back, it was tough—I had forgotten all my English. It was my little sister who helped me remember.” Family life picked up a regular rhythm. When the Paulys weren’t working, they took care of their children; their friends were their coworkers, and Daniel soon threw himself into his first big Filipino research campaign.
* Jules Vallès.
† International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management, called the WorldFish Center since 2000.