Its About Time: Rethinking Fisheries Management

by

Gary D. Sharp, California State University, Monterey Bay

and Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study

[link to the full article]

  

This is the abstract from a paper Dr. Sharp presented at the Second World Fisheries Conference in Brisbane, Australia in August of 1996. The title, the abstract and the paper say, along with a lot of the other materials on this site (but more eloquently than most) that we have been and are continuing down the wrong path in fisheries management.  The link above is to the text of the paper, which is posted on his web site. Use this link to get to the introductory page of Dr. Sharp's site, It's All About Time... And Place - a fascinating visit, but count on spending an awful lot of time there.    Abstract   The recent decades' catastrophes in ocean fisheries are among many signs of lack of societal will in resource management contexts. Although abundant theory, and sometimes adequate information from fisheries activities exist, continuous surprises and stock failures provides impetus to revise not only the basic theory of resource management, but even the philosophies of conventional fisheries management practice. Gross perturbations of ecosystem structures due to fishing have often been denied. Habitat degradation and losses, along with declining natural biodiversity define the principal issues of anadromous and estuarine species. Uncertainties of context-free fisheries stock assessments form the bases of legal contentions. Pitting government science against industry lawyers is clearly ineffec-tive. Beyond CPUE, Yield-per-Recruit, VPA, and their associated faulty assumptions, necessary information need to be defined and integrated into ecosystem-wide monitoring, resource assessments, and management processes. We have a global crisis needing revolution, not consensual fiddling.