Paella season on Martha’s Vineyard begins with the first full moon of summer. Before I think about ingredients, my mind travels back to Nerja, a whitewashed village on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where I learned to cook a giant pan of paella over an open fire.

Paella was never meant to be a fixed recipe. It started as a peasants’ dish, built from whatever the fields and waters offered that week. Farmers used what they grew. Fishermen used what they caught. The meal simply reflected the place. When I carried that tradition home to Martha’s Vineyard more than 30 years ago, our waters wrote their own version of it — scallops, mussels, clams, squid and local fish standing in for whatever grew along the Spanish coast.

And for 30 years, I’ve watched that pan change with the ocean itself.

In the 1990s, harpooned swordfish from Menemsha and northern “popcorn” shrimp from Maine were regulars in this dish. Every January and February, I’d buy 50 pounds of those little shrimp and freeze them away just for summer gatherings, scattered over the rice like confetti. And every Fourth of July, you could count on finding Everett Poole behind the counter at Poole’s Fish Market, slicing thick steaks from a gleaming swordfish on ice. It felt as dependable as the tide.

Then, almost without anyone noticing, it was gone. The shrimp fishery closed as warming waters pushed the stock past what the ocean could give. The harpooners largely disappeared. Today, the only striker left in Menemsha Harbor is bronze and steel: a sculpture standing watch over the water where fishermen once gave chase. The swordfish, remarkably, came back. The fishery is considered restored. But the tradition that went with it did not come back with it. The fish remains. The way of catching it does not.

That’s the strange, hopeful, sobering thing about a pan of paella: it becomes a running record of the ocean itself.

I recently spoke with Daniel Pauly, one of the world’s leading fisheries scientists, about something he calls “shifting baseline syndrome.” He describes this as the way each generation accepts the ocean it’s handed as normal, with no memory of what came before. Stand at any seafood counter and the shelves look endless: shrimp from Asia, salmon from the Faroe Islands, trout from somewhere beyond the horizon. That abundance is, in many ways, an illusion, built on long-distance transportation and industrial fish farming rather than the health of the water right in front of us.

The good news is that this baseline doesn’t have to keep slipping. Today our pan holds scup, fluke, black sea bass, mackerel, oysters, littlenecks and squid, and every one of them is a sign of life, not loss.

Since 1976, the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group has seeded our ponds with somewhere between 10 and 30 million juvenile quahogs, oysters and bay scallops every year — not maintenance but restoration, season after season. Shellfish grow by filtering that same water. No feed, no fertilizer, no antibiotics. It is just oysters and clams doing the unglamorous, essential work of keeping our ponds clean while they grow into dinner.

But healthy water alone doesn’t keep a fishing community alive. When the Menemsha Fish House closed, fishermen lost their largest year-round buyer overnight. That’s one of the gaps the Martha’s Vineyard Seafood Collaborative, an initiative of the Fishermen’s Preservation Trust, stepped into — buying fish and shellfish directly from the people who catch and raise it, and getting it onto our tables before it has to compete with a fillet that traveled 3,000 miles to get here. You’ll find them at the farmers’ market every week. And here’s the part people don’t expect: yes, it’s flash-frozen. It is filleted the moment it comes off the boat, and the best part is that you’d never know it. That’s not a compromise.

That same spirit is behind The Sea Table: Stories of Fishermen and Recipes from Martha’s Vineyard, a cookbook that came out last year from the MV Fishermen’s Preservation Trust, written with culinary expert and teacher Catherine Walthers, recipes photographed by Randi Baird, fishermen portraits photographed by Brooke Marriott Bartletta, along with many other talented Iamukamucsland photographers, and designed by Bluerock Designs. It does two things at once: it teaches home cooks how approachable local seafood really is, and tells the stories of the people who bring it to us.

That’s exactly why it matters. For any home cook who cares about where their food comes from, this book belongs on the shelf, not as a souvenir but as a working tool. The moment a cook learns how simple it is to sear a black sea bass or toss scup on the grill the way they would salmon, everything changes. Local fish stops feeling difficult, intimidating or like a lesser choice. The next time they’re at the counter, they reach for the scup instead of the farmed salmon, the local squid instead of shrimp shipped in from across the planet and raised in horrific ways that destroy the environment. One of the recipes in the book is my own paella, built from whatever our waters and our fishermen offer that week, the same way it was built on the Spanish coast generations ago.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: The most powerful thing any of us can do for this ocean is small, simple and happens at the stove. Ask your fishmonger what came in today. Ask about the lobster, the oysters, the clams. That one small act of kitchen confidence trades the illusion of abundance for the real thing — fish from our own waters, brought in by people we actually know.

The strikers may be gone from Menemsha harbor (mostly, the Mayhews still know the skill), but the work and the preservation, the stewardship, the stubborn devotion to these waters, is still very much here, carried forward by the growers, the fishermen, the volunteers, and now by the MV Fishermen’s Preservation Trust that connects all of it to our tables.

This paella, and this cookbook, are a celebration of that connection to everyone who raised or caught what ends up in the pan, to those who wrote down the stories, and to all of us who get to carry this book home and pass those stories on.

Because what ends up in that pan tomorrow depends entirely on what we choose to protect and to buy today.

Jan Buhrman lives in Chilmark. She is a chef, author and educator.