At Memorial University an interdisciplinary team of social, natural, health, and education scientists studied the sustainability of cold-ocean coastal communities, centering on Newfoundland's Bonavista Peninsula and the Isthmus of the Avalon Peninsula. Research began in 1994 to uncover what had precipitated the collapse of the groundfish stocks in the northwest Atlantic. An exploration of the past failures and strengths of rural Newfoundland communities, in terms of both human capital and natural resources, pointed to what future?

The Resilient Outport contains the main findings of the team in a series of connected interdisciplinary chapters that present both the methodology of working in large interdisciplinary teams and an account of the roots of environmental crisis, from archaeological time to the present.

Rosemary Ommer has been Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is the former Research Director of Memorial's Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). She was the Principal Investigator of the Tricounsil-funded Ecoresearch Project, "Sustainability in a Cold-Ocean Coastal Environment," investigating the sustainability of communities of fish and fishers in Newfoundland in the wake of the collapse of the groundfish stocks off Canada's east coast. She is the Director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary. She is also co-editor (with Dianne Newell) of Fishing Places, Fishing People: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries (1999) and project director of "Coasts Under Stress."

Rosemary E. Ommer's profile page

“The book is valuable as a model for collaboration and as a set interdisciplinary of essays that do indeed illuminate the questions of sustainability and resilience in Newfoundland's cold-ocean and rather cold-land environment.”

Bonnie J. McCay, Marine Resource Economics

“We now have in this book a forceful case for an alternative development model.”

James E. Candow, International Journal of Maratime History