Catching Air

Catching Air documents the lives of diver fishermen navigating changing marine environments and shifting conservation policies in the Dominican Republic. As nearshore ecologies decline and conservation policies are enacted to protect them, commercial divers follow fish into deeper water, risking decompression sickness, injury, and death. An incisive case study of a community on the front lines of the climate crisis, this book explores the unintended impacts of environmental regulations that—while meaning to protect vulnerable ecologies—often magnify experiences of bodily risk and dispossession among those who are the most vulnerable to environmental change.