Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History

Abstract

Amount of fishing effort. The consequence has been the elimination of some substocks, such as herring, cod, ocean perch, salmon, and lake trout. He concluded that an MSY based upon the analysis of the historic statistics of a fishery is not attainable on a sustained basis. Support for Larkin's view is provided by a number of reviews of the history of fisheries (2). Few fisheries exhibit steady abundance (3). It is more appropriate to think of re- sources as managing humans than the con- verse: the larger and the more immediate are prospects for gain, the greater the polit- ical power that is used to facilitate unlim- ited exploitation. The classic illustrations are gold rushes. Where large and immediate gains are in prospect, politicians and gov- ernments tend to ally themselves with spe- cial interest groups in order to facilitate the exploitation. Forests throughout the world have been destroyed by wasteful and short- sighted forestry practices. In many cases, governments eventually subsidize the ex- port of forest products in order to delay the unemployment that results when local tim- ber supplies run out or become uneconomic to harvest and process (4). These practices lead to rapid mining of old-growth forests; they imply that timber supplies must inev- itably decrease in the future. Harvesting of irregular or fluctuating re- sources is subject to a ratchet effect (3):