Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 76
way to Canada where they eat the jellyfish and come
back. This 100-million-year-old species, a contemporary of the T. Rex, is in so much trouble. But this
woman, Suzanne, grew up in Trinidad and she grew
up seeing these turtles nest. But then she saw young
men poaching these turtles and stealing the eggs. And
so she started to fight with them right there on the
beach. She turned that whole community around from
a poaching community to a conservation community.
It’s a complete transformation. If businesses want to
support real progress, they need to get behind these
kinds of folks.
I love that, but how are they making money with this
alternative? At the end of the day, all the consumer
wants is to know what’s in it for them.
Dasilva: So it has taken years and it’s not worked in lots
of other places. What Suzanne did was she was also a
social worker—she got these young men arrested at one
point but then she retrained them and she helped this
whole town make a transformation through ecotourism
and tried to make this beach as exciting a destination
in Trinidad as the Carnival, so people come for the
nesting season. You know, these turtles are the size
of a Kia, they’re massive. I’ve never seen anything like
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START SMALL Dax Dasilva believes businesses can make an impact by supporting individuals. For example, a small
community in Trinidad came together to protect the nesting grounds of the leatherhead turtle, a vulnerable species.
