Depletion of the Fishing Banks– Overshoot and Destruction of an Environmental System
There are three basic ways humanity’s economic relationship to the environment can work. We can overshoot the physical limitations of the environment and destroy it. We can overshoot the physical limitations of the environment, feel the effects, over-react, undershoot the limitations of the environment, feel the effects, over-react, over-shoot the limitations of the environment again, and so on, always fluctuating around the limitations of the environment but never being in control of the situation, never knowing what to expect, and always causing avoidable problems though our ignorance. The other possibility is, we recognize problems arising and react to them in advance, before the problems get out of hand.
The commercial fishing industry is an example of an overshoot of a physical limitation of the environment leading to the collapse of an environmental system. Fishing hooks were invented about 60,000 years ago. For 60,000 years, fish were income for some people, and they were free food for materially poor people who lived in coastal areas.
What do we have now, but oceans full of fishing trawlers dragging 30-mile-long fishing nets, just to catch smaller numbers of smaller fish every year? Now we have fish farms where we invest a lot of resources into trying to do things the oceans used to do for us for free, and not being able to do it nearly as well. Now materially poor people who live in costal areas can’t catch their own fish and can’t afford to buy them either.
I grew up on the coast of Maine, and so did my mother. We’ve seen this happen almost first-hand.
The fishermen where I come from would go out to fish on George’s Bank, off the coast of Canada. The problem was, nobody knew how many fish there were in the ocean. All anyone knew was that there had always been lots of fish in the ocean, so nobody imagined how it could be possible to catch them all.
Most deep-water fishing takes place in international waters. That meant there was no regulation on who or how many people could fish where or when. Basically, no one thought the situation through far enough to see there could be a problem, no one paid attention, and no one did anything about it until the problem was already upon them.
The most materially wealthy people built the biggest ships with the biggest nets. They made the most money that way, and then they built even bigger ships with even bigger nets. They caught so many fish that materially poor people couldn’t catch fish anymore. They basically stole the food off the materially poor people’s tables and then sold it back to them. What did you expect? What they did was legal, and they made profits from it. Big surprise.
Now people are trying to solve the problem by limiting the numbers of people who are allowed to fish, decommissioning fishing boats, and things like that. If all goes well, the world’s fishing banks will recover within a few hundred years from now.
This is a perfect example of environmental destruction being caused by completely maladapted social structures. Now we’re trying to solve the problem after the fact, and we’re trying to solve the problem by adapting the very social structures that caused it in the first place.