When Zita Cobb was 10, her hometown almost disappeared. Not just her hometown, but all of the communities on Fogo Island, the island off Newfoundland where Ms. Cobb was born in 1958. The crisis was triggered by the collapse of the near-shore cod fishery, a resource that had sustained her ancestral community since the 17th century. In response, the Newfoundland government proposed to resettle the population to other parts of the province — or somewhere.
“I remember my parents whispering in the night, and my mother saying, ‘What’s going to happen to us? Where are we going to end up?’ And my dad saying, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s terrifying for a child,” Ms. Cobb remembered during a recent interview.
“They had no running…
