Liu

Connie Liu

Environmental problems are tangled balls of yarn: there is never one definitive cause or clear solution. This is why I believe an interdisciplinary approach is so critical to the understanding of environmental issues. My goal to develop a balanced toolbox for dissecting such issues led me to major in environmental science and policy and minor in political science. In my semester at the Duke Marine Lab, I had the great fortune of taking Xavier’s Class on the Governance of Social-Ecological Systems in which we studied the Mexican fishing community of Kino Bay. This trip was the inspiration for the project I worked on at the Basurto Lab which was an analysis of the role of fish buyers in the seafood marketing chain. I examined logs kept by Kino Bay fish buyers which detail transactions, profits, and expenditures. With this information, I examined how fish buyers influenced resource extraction and if their position in the supply chain allowed them to drive exploitation.