Vol. 4, No. 3 Contents
Headline Back Issues
Summer 2000
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Guardian of the Bay (con't..)
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Working with her communityTobin's belief that people, once educated, will care for the environment is at the heart of her campaign to protect the world's most endangered whale. As the education coordinator for East Coast Ecosystems (ECE) in Freeport, Nova Scotia, she has spent the last ten years turning hard won knowledge into action. Those who have worked with her say Tobin's fervid style and ability to engender trust among a deeply rooted fishing community in which she lives and works has been a major asset to the larger whale recovery network in Canada and the United States. "Deb has great compassion for animals in distress, whether it's whales, kittens or dogs," says Dr. Moira Brown, a senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies, who founded ECE in 1985. "She's been a teacher in her community and knows the people, and all that makes for a great combination." Working closely with Brown and a cadre of other researchers and scientists, Tobin serves as educator, photographer, collector of data, and coordinator of logistics for whale rescue operations. In recent years she has helped develop a whale adoption program, a code of ethics agreement for whale watching operators, and a whale emergency program to increase reporting of entanglements, strandings, and sightings of dead and injured whales. Tobin also coordinated a research project this year involving Bay of Fundy fishermen to test gillnets that were modified to break away if a marine mammal became snarled. ECE has received about $230,000 (U.S. $154,000) in the past two years from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to conduct aerial surveys, develop teaching materials for schools on the right whale, and purchase whale disentanglement equipment. The organization will receive additional grant monies from a package totaling more than $550,000 (U.S. $371,000) from DFO and Environment Canada to expand Canada's right whale recovery plan. Tobin says the money will go toward ECE's whale rescue operations and its education and communication components. Born and raised in St. Peter's, on Bras d'Or Lake in Cape Breton Island, Tobin grew up in a family of eight children. Her father was a stonemason and her grandfather and uncles were coal miners. Influenced by the natural landscape of her home and the activities of Greenpeace International, Tobin says she often thought about getting a degree in marine biology, "but instead I went with my first love, history and literature." She married in her early 20s and for the next 10 years traveled with her husband, whose work moved them throughout Canada. After living in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, they returned to Nova Scotia in the mid-80s where Tobin got a job working in the records management department for Environment Canada in Halifax. Soon after, the couple divorced and Tobin, who had heard about research efforts in Brier Island on the right whale, decided to move to the area. "I simply wanted to teach Canadians about the right whale," she says. She phoned Brown, and began volunteering for ECE.
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