And so it begins...

What drives a 31 year old to leave a job in IT, sell his house and drag his unbelievably understanding wife 130 miles to start a new life in a new city as a penniless student?

Cod.

For 9 years I have existed in a world where despondency is not only rife, but accepted as part of the process. Projects are more likely to fail than they are to succeed. Deadlines and budgets go whistling by with little more than a raised eyebrow. Even when a project does complete within budget and on time and is delivered to a client like the rarest glittering diamond, one finds that the client would have been happier with a cubic zirconium from QVC which they will replace within 6 months.

IT is an industry where no-one speaks the same language. Clients and sales staff converse in pseudo-technobabble whose sole purpose is to cause the till to ring each time a buzzword is abused. Phrases such as “Enterprise Architecture” are worn like a fake Rolex watch – devoid of value but oooh, shiny and impressive to other fake watch owners.

Whatever dark agreement is birthed from this relationship is then passed down the chain, translated and mistranslated into ever more ambiguous terms until a stage is reached where all working on the project are on a journey to wildly different destinations. Fueled by quantum requirements which twist and writhe each time they are observed, and managed by people with little or no understanding of what they do, developers push onwards, churning out code to feed the Gantt-chart beast - unconcerned that their goal isn’t shared by anyone around them. When original costs and timelines are long forgotten, the end product is pushed out the door, a partially tested crippled abortion of a once golden dream. Concerned parties then collectively shrug their shoulders and enthusiastically agree that mistakes will be rectified and the dream restored in the next release. Unconcerned parties are just grateful that another 6 months has gone by in which they haven’t been made redundant and that each collapsing phase brings their mortgage down and their holiday closer.

Conservation efforts, particularly in marine conservation share much in common with the IT industry. The collapse of the cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland in 1992 sent up a flare, illuminating what happens when ecosystem management gets it wrong. Like a failed software delivery, blame was quickly apportioned and policymakers all agreed that they would get it right in the next release. With cod stocks on the verge of collapse in the North Sea, tuna stocks crashing in the Mediterranean and under serious threat around the globe, cold-water corals disappearing faster than they are being discovered and only 10% of large pelagic fish stock remaining, it is abundantly clear that the next release is going to be a catastrophic failure.

Like software development, each layer of marine conservation policy making and implementation has their own goal and their own interpretation of the information. Governments are desperately trying to protect their local economic interests, conservationists are trying to ignore international boundaries and protect biodiversity. Local fishermen, like team leaders, would like to see the project succeed as their livelihoods depend on it. They feel like they have the ability to affect the outcome but are constantly frustrated by the management levels above them failing to nail down a common goal. Corporate fisheries are the contractors of the marine world. They are there for the money and once the source fails, they will move on and acquire that money somewhere else.

The difference between IT and marine conservation is what happens when it all goes wrong. In IT, companies absorb the cost of the failure and either move on or go under, scattering their components into other companies, relatively untouched and ready to make the same mistakes again. When marine conservation policy fails species start to disappear, never to return. Biodiversity is reduced and dependent species die. The public, with its insatiable need for fish, barely blinks at the disappearance of a species and simply pushes the requirement onto another species, further shortening its path to critical endangerment. As species vanish and the oceans empty, policy makers move at a languid pace, seemingly unaffected by the devastation that is occurring under their noses.

Well, shit needs to change. I can no longer sit by and watch an environment I love be destroyed by apathy and a failure to reach a common goal quickly. This is therefore the journey of a man who wishes to make a difference, to shake up the status quo and to die knowing that at least for part of my life my contribution to the world was to try and stop the wholesale destruction of the oceans. And if I have to give up £40k a year and a life of internet browsing to achieve it, then so be it.