Epilogue: Shifting Baselines for the Future
No one needed to “manage” fish when people were few and fishing pressures were low. Indeed, as Andy Rosenberg is fond of pointing out, the concept of managing fish is fundamentally absurd. Fish can’t read the regulations and they don’t go to management me
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Epilogue: Shifting Baselines for the Future Jeremy B. C. Jackson and Karen E. Alexander
No one needed to “manage” fish when people were few and fishing pressures were low. Indeed, as Andy Rosenberg is fond of pointing out, the concept of managing fish is fundamentally absurd. Fish can’t read the regulations and they don’t go to management meetings, people do. So we must manage people in order to restore the fish, fisheries, and ecosystems that we value. Yet managing people is difficult. People have legal rights, economic interests, and differing notions of well-being that can impede or facilitate management practices. Denial of responsibility permeates fisheries folklore and even scientific literature about the decline of sea turtles, monk seals, whales, seabirds, and many food fish, which until recently has been attributed to everything but overfishing. But the concept of shifting baselines helps to neutralize denial by spotlighting evidence to the contrary. We end by highlighting what gives us hope—substantial changes in human behavior can make a significant difference. Several marine species have been brought back from the brink. Since the International Whaling Commission declared a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, many whale species have rebounded dramatically, to the point that several nations now clamor to reopen the fishery despite substantial loopholes for scientific and other forms of whaling by some J.B.C. Jackson (eds.), Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-029-3_12, © Island Press 2011
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signatories. The extent of recovery is currently debated, but everyone agrees that increases since protection have been great. Establishing large closures on Georges Bank in the 1990s resulted in such a substantial rebound of scallops and haddock that fishing boats now crowd the closure boundaries and there is pressure to reopen the grounds to fishing. Of course no one would care if the closures had not worked. On the newly rezoned Australian Great Barrier Reef, coral trout populations are rebounding, with the possible ecological benefit of their increased predation on crown-of-thorns starfish, which have devastated reef corals in the past. Likewise, the Northern Line Islands escaped heavy fishing largely through benign neglect and today support close to the highest reef fish biomass anywhere. They also exhibit among the highest cover of reef-building corals and coralline algae in the central Pacific despite increasingly high temperatures and coral bleaching. Apparently, marine protected areas confer greater resistance to the effects of global climate change. Although absolute protection has proven more difficult for developing nations, alternative strategies based on long-standing local traditions for management have proven effective in Melanesia and elsewhere. Recognizing shifting baselines is the first step toward creating new ways of thinking that reintegrate the past, present,
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