And to all, thanks again for your thoughts.

Looking forward to the next essay!

Kaufman writes: “Every human intervention effects a change in the health and dynamics of the ocean system….” and “Most serious of all is the steadfast resistance by all involved to a systems view.”

The ocean is a complex dynamical system. Humans are complex dynamical systems. And corporations are complex, dynamical systems also.

But our economic “system” — capitalism — emphasizes one factor: profit. Corporations are required by law to elevate their own interests above those of others. While corporations are forbidden to break the law, competition from other businesses means that they can’t afford to ignore the chance to skirt close to the law or hire lobbyists to change the laws or decide to treat breaking the law as a business expense.

Under our economic system, a corporation is innocent until proven guilty. And if you’re not actually breaking a law, you’re not guilty.

Consumer Reports had a story a few years ago about a company that sells remarkable fast-growing trees, something attractive to home-owners. But these trees are so invasive that they kill other plants, and are even outlawed in some states in the U.S. But not outlawed in all states, and so the company merrily hawks these destructive plants wherever it is legal. Think about the effort that must be expended by each state to get rid of just this menace.

What if corporations didn’t have a right to make a profit, but had to serve the public good?

It’s been argued that only capitalism can deliver high productivity and innovation. Ahh… I have a dream. That all businesses could be run on the model of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Or any of the other nonprofits that daily serve up both innovation and sustenance; reasonable jobs and ethical workplaces. Submit your business proposal. Your expert peers review it. And if it isn’t going to make the world a better place, your plan is returned without a priority score.

But could we have innovation and excellence without dangling before people the promise of wild Bill Gates-style personal fortunes? Let’s listen to the anthropologists. Humans are motivated by whatever the society has agreed is important. Humans want status and recognition within their social group, and “social security” for themselves and their family. If one gains status by providing lavish feasts for others, then lavish feasts are provided. The local minimum our culture finds itself in occurred because money and profit have emerged as the primary signifiers of human worth. But different societies have found ways to reduce greed and resource hoarding, including practices of socially shaming those who exploit and hoard. Data has existed for over a decade that living in an egalitarian society is better for your health, even for those at the income-top of their respective societies (see The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health).

The anthroposphere is a complex dynamical system, growing exponentially and pressing profoundly upon the biosphere, which it is capable of destroying — or sustaining.

Kaufman has convinced me more than ever: Let’s take the hard next step. It’s time to change the system.

Encouraging people to express their values about acceptable system state is crucial — it may not even occur to most folk that this is something they ought to be thinking about and have a responsible opinion regarding.

Most fishermen do not display greed as their most salient attribute. A few do, though, and I think you know who in our neighborhood they are as well as I do. It is important to distinguish between greed and success that is achieved through other means. Also, that some people get greedy (most aren’t all the time) doesn’t have much to do with fleet structure (and a fleet of small boats can be just as effective in destroying a fishery as fewer large boats), though having more small boats might well increase the odds that somebody among the community of captains will be a greedy person by nature. The real issue is that the natural predilection that most fishermen show toward conservation is occasionally trumped by seductive opportunities for wealth, and even if these are rare events, they are highly influential and destructive. Much more often, fishermen are driven by dire need. The community of fishermen is as diverse in motivation and emotional tenor as any other group of enterprising souls. That does not change the empirical fact that fisheries are widely overexploited, or the legitimacy of the observation that greed played a large part in this, since there was plenty of evidence — has been for thousands of years — that if you take too much you will deny others what could be theirs. But we must recognize that human behavior scales look different at the individual, community, and national levels, and that instances where individual behavior has impact at the level of a whole society have the potential to have very good or very bad outcomes. As children we aspire to have an impact on society (hopefully a positive one, but sometimes not so), and this interesting possibility is at the root of our Western culture.

I am of course aware of the history of New England fishing. The consolidation of the fleet is a natural consequence of technological advancement, rational economics, and selection for social efficiency. What I am suggesting is that a shift from small, family-owned vessels to large trip boats was not an entirely positive move. Both large and small boats can foster a conservation-minded relationship with nature, but I think the likelihood is higher in the small boat fleet. This is because small boats cannot go far, and must continually fish in the same areas, so they will feel the consequences of ill-advised behavior very quickly. My argument is that New England’s fisheries are more likely to recover, and persist in a sustainable state, if we take care to ensure the welfare of a near-shore fleet. The loss of dockage injects a ratchet into the system that makes it difficult to rebuild a small fleet once it is lost. Furthermore, area management is essential to fishery sustainability. Fishes (and lobsters, and scallops) can move great distances, but often, and many, do not.

More, and on to Beth’s comments, later. I only regret that a finicky internet meant missing the opportunity to have carried out this discussion with you, Dick, last night over dinner down here on Key Largo, and also that Beth could not be there as well! Which speaks to another matter of some concern. Beth Fulton, Dick Allen, and I are all members of a global community of marine conservationists. It is distressing that there are so few of us entirely dedicated to the health of three quarters of the world’s surface that so many of us know each other personally, and quite a few may be found from time to time, in the same place.

Greed (a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed [Merriam-Webster]) does not explain the severe depletion of fishery resources within range of artisanal fishermen in open canoes. Artisanal fishermen deplete fish stocks because they are trying to survive, not because they are greedy.

New England fishermen may not have faced the same survival imperative as their artisanal counterparts in other parts of the world, but it would be hard to make a case that their overfishing was driven by greed. Paying a child’s dental bills hardly seems to qualify as greed. Perhaps if Les had provided data showing that the average New England fisherman earns three times more than the average university professor, he could substantiate his claim that greed was the driving force in fishery depletion. Les offered no objective criteria to define greed and it is unlikely that New England fishermen would fit any imaginable definition that would not include 99% of the citizens of the Western World.

Fishery scholars from diverse disciplines agree that open access to fisheries provided the main and enduring contribution to overfishing. Greed was not a necessary ingredient.

Les also has his facts wrong when he describes the history of the New England fisheries. He seems to have bought into the claims made by some fishermen and fishery advocates that New England has a 300-year history of small-boat, owner-operated family fishing businesses that sailed forth from every small harbor along the coast. The historical facts provide quite a different picture.

Prior to the late 1970s, and going back at least to the mid-1800s, most of the groundfish landed in New England was caught from large, offshore boats that made multi-day trips and were owned by large fishing corporations based in Boston, MA, Gloucester, MA, Rockland, ME, and Portland, Me. The 1970s saw a dramatic shift in fleet structure, stimulated by multiple changes in law and policy. Subsidized financing made it easier for individual fishermen to buy and build new vessels. Technological advances increased the productive capacity of new vessels compared to older vessels. And, perhaps most importantly, the universal adoption of 200-mile fishing limits pushed the NE groundfish fleet off traditional fishing grounds that fell under Canadian jurisdiction. Fish stocks depleted by foreign fishing boats undoubtedly hastened the demise of New England’s traditional big-boat fleet by the mid-1970s.

From 1975 to 1980, the NE groundfish fleet doubled in size from approximately 600 vessels to 1200 vessels. With a rapidly expanding fleet of technologically advanced, if somewhat smaller, boats fishing on severely contracted fishing grounds, fish stocks that had begun to recover from heavy foreign fishing pressure reversed that progress and had declined to record low levels by the mid-1990s. When the New England Fishery Management Council attempted to control the size of the fleet, it made the mistake of giving every boat that could document the landings of one pound of groundfish a limited access permit for groundfishing. Far more boats qualified for a permit than had ever been dependent on the groundfish fishery. The reduction in the fleet and fishing ports that Les notes suffers from the “shifting baseline” phenomenon that colors much of our reasoning.

The other two key points I think we need more discussion of in resource management are both related to long held concepts, at least in societies shaped by western thought. Sustainability is often spoken of as if it were some stationary target to aim at. This may not be what was meant in this piece, but it is still not widely appreciated what a moving feast a complex system is. There needs to be an increased public awareness that sustainable management isn’t easy. It is not a recipe book to roll out and tick off. There is also a desperate need for education around the fact that ecosystems have no stable states; that they are dynamic and ever changing and our responses will need to morph along with them. Lastly, the dualistic vision of “humanity” and “nature” has an immensely long history in the west, embedded at it is in religion and philosophy (and even science) back beyond Aristotle. An appreciation of the true integrated nature of what has been dubbed CHANS here is growing. To my mind CHANS doesn’t go far enough in appreciating that integration, but that may be semantics. Without appreciating that human behaviour, responses and decisions are as key to system dynamics as climate drivers, trophic interactions and habitat (etc.), advice given and management decisions still run a significant risk of unintended and counterintuitive outcomes. There is always a risk with complex systems, but if we ignore key feedbacks and drivers we make that risk much, much larger. Which brings us back around to whether people believe we can successfully model human behaviour or not….

Before ending, one last point. I know I am supposed to be responding mainly to the main piece, but I can’t help saying I second Peter’s call for a wider discussion of what defines acceptable change and acceptable system states across a broad swathe of society. Without that we may not be wandering in the dark, but we are certainly stumbling around in a grey twilight. Without more clarity on what people want from systems, not just system function, we may still find ourselves faced with unintended consequences or undesired conflict.

We actually have the sort of nexus you envision close at hand- each of us. It is our individual system of morals. Unfortunately, prevalent religious and philosophical creeds are a bit thin on the moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with nature and other natural beings. By clarifying these tenets and espousing moral responsibility, the clergy can positively impact this relationship through the large percentage of people who are of one or another faith. As for the a-religious there is no convincing to do, for the acknowledgement of trade-offs and the taking of responsible action in making trade-off decisions is a fundamental aspect of a rational existence.

Les

Here I would like to comment on the central concept of your essay, and that is about Coupled Human and Natural Systems or CHANS. I think some significant degree of extant controversy about how best to exploit wild populations of fishes in a “sustainable” manner is nested within a poorly defined concept of the “H” in CHANS. That is, what is the universe of “humans” are we managing for? To some this might be irrelevant as many think there is a single answer to how many fish we can sustainably remove and keep all of the pieces moving in the right direction. Unfortunately the world is much more complex, as you point out, and much controversy exists about what we want from the public commons. Certainly the fishing industry has a seat at the table, as do fish-hugging conservationists, truckers, farmers, factory workers, wind-farm operators, computer programmers, hoteliers, philosophers, and little old blue-haired ladies … hence the commons. Perhaps I have gone a bit overboard providing examples of the universe of stakeholders but I do this to suggest that there will likely be a universe of different ideas for the goals of sustainability. Certainly our governance structures in both State and Federal waters provide goals but in general these do not often add a high degree of clarity and purposely leave wide flexibility for interpretation. For example, in the fisheries context the definition of optimum yield leaves much flexibility, such as choosing to leave more herring in the water to serve as prey for fish and whales than standard fisheries models would predict is necessary for sustainability. Life gets really complicated when we try to incorporate conservation of diversity writ large, of which fish are a part, into the equation. What are the actual targets? How precautionary should we be, given our imperfect knowledge of how all of the components of communities are connected and the scope of our impacts? Controversy and conflict emerge despite common goals of all stakeholder groups to conserve and sustainably use the ocean commons. Most acknowledge the need to reach a middle ground, but we continue to battle about the central gray zone that defines the middle. While models like MIMES will provide an outstanding foundation and common language for the intellectual sparring that is involved in environmental decision-making, do you see a path to find a nexus in our value systems that will bring us closer together to better focus on the hard choices we will need to make?