Marine Parks - 15 May 2008

Roger Bradbury’s talk and paper seem to leave little hope that oceans can be saved from their muddy fate. “The world needs to stop fishing” is a conclusion not dissimilar from “the world needs to stop emitting greenhouse gases”. Both quite possible technologically, both not happening because the incentive structures involved make cooperation devilishly hard: each country’s contribution to the global bad is small, so the benefits of doing the right thing are dispersed while the costs are concentrated. To top it off, most of the impacts will only become apparent long after the point of no return, going down the river toward Roger’s Niagara Falls.

Fishing for solutions: Let’s assume people will keep taking protein from the oceans. Would the oceans stand a better chance if people took smaller organisms instead of the large fish? Could industrial fishery be re-oriented in that way?

Jellyfish sushi and spicy-sea-slime soup?
…you try first, Frank!

More seriously, unlike climate change (or salinity issues in Australia), marine ecosystems will respond more rapidly to fishing bans as we are talking here about direct exploitation rather then cumulative and indirect effects.

Pascal

Roger’s ’stop fishing’ solution has a nice simplicity to it, recognising of course that he was trying to animate the discussion with some controversy - to very good effect I might add.

Let’s remember though that there are livelihoods, economies, and cultures built around marine resources, and that not all users are hitting these resources to the same extent. Should small scale fishers be subject to the same restrictions as large scale commercial fisheries? Picking up on Frank’s climate change analogy, there seems more openness in international climate change negotiations to the concept of differentiated obligations according to historical contribution to the problem than we see in the marine case.

Regardless of the value of marine parks in ecological terms, I’m more interested in a richer understanding of the roles that different actors play at various points in the value chain (just so we somewhat comfortable urban consumers aren’t left out of this slimey picture) in the problem of marine degradation and therefore in the potential ’solutions’ to it. I put ’solutions’ in inverted commas because we know that in resource management 1+1 rarely equals 2, so we need to think beyond linear solutions.

Not being able to make it to the argument, I can’t comment on what was said there. My concern with marine parks though relates to its widespread adoption as a ‘one-size fits-all’ or ‘win-win’ approach to both marine conservation and fisheries production. Proponents of marine parks have frequently tended to gloss over the fact that the effect of them on fisheries production (i.e. outside the core zone through the ’spillover effect’) is far more limited than their impacts on ecological and biodiversity conservation (within the core zone).

Despite the obviously immense ecological value of such a conservation function, I’m concerned about the ways in which marine parks in many regions (such as the Asia-Pacific) have tended to impact the economic livelihoods of poorer groups of coastal people so far. These groups of people are also frequently the groups of people who have contributed less to overall marine environmental degradation, being relatively small-scale inshore fishers. This is not only an issue of social ethics or justice, but it also has significant implications for what level of impact marine parks will have on more environmentally degrading activities such as more intensive commercial fishing, which often take place in areas outside the regions usually proposed as marine parks.

Are there other management measures that could be adopted which may be able to target more environmentally damaging activities in a more sophisticated way?

Living in the Batemans marine park and being a humble fisherman the people feel we have been let down by the academic’s as MP were only ever created for the green vote in Balmain and are controlled by the mighty dollar and not science

Adding to Roger’s rather bleak future here a post on Alternet about Taras Grescoe’s book Bottomfeeder on the ‘Dead Zones’ - Apocalypse in the Ocean. One of his suggestions which is simple to follow and with which we all can start with is: “avoid the farmed, the faraway, the overfished, and those large, long-lived, high-on-the-food-chain species such as halibut, tuna, shark and swordfish” and eat “the sardines, sea urchins and squid” - that is the bottomfeeders…