NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

An etching a of whaling scene from the 1880s, showing the killing of a harpooned whale. In the past hundred years, whaling has shifting from a commercial fishery to an aesthetic one.

The economic ethic had humans as the driving force over the environment. We came and cut the forests, killed the grizzly bears and fished. Resources were seen as abundant so conservation wasn't important and conservation laws weren't necessarily followed or enforced.

ic preservation ethic, which says that humans and the environment are equal. This can be seen in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earl. It says that the environment should be protected for it's own right, because of its own characteristics. That's appealing to some people. But for most people it might not really affect them, so a lot of fishermen have trouble relating to that particular ethic.

Most government and universities operate under what is called the utilitarian conservation ethic. That ethic essentially says that the resources are to be used by humans. Our biggest sin is to be inefficient and to be wasteful. It is run by economics, but the trouble is when running by economics alone it tends to fail. We push up the limits of economics and we have biological failure.

as defined by Aldo Leopold about 50 years ago. The idea being that humans are part of the land and marine ecosystems--humans and the environment coexist together; we are a part of it. Our job is to maintain the health of it. Part of the area should be set aside for its own right. If we take care of the environment we will have jobs, we will have employment, we will have recreation, we will have aesthetics, we will have all the things that people value. But we have to take care of the system, which means we have to live within the limits of that system. That's what we're having trouble with right now.

We have all these different ethics operating, depending on your point of view; I think that creates a lot of the problem. Leopold's ethic, called the biotic ethic, essentially encompasses the integrity, stability and the beauty of the system. The thing is right when it observes the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise.

Integrity means all the parts are there, stability means it continues to function in the future, and finally--the one that scientists don't like to deal with because it's arbitrary and subjective--beauty. But beauty is the hook, the human hook. That's why fishermen are fishermen, naturalists are naturalists, conservationists are conservationists, and scientists are scientists. It's the beauty of the system, the works, the aesthetics--all of it. All those are important in the biotic ethic. We cannot prevent the alteration, the management, the use of resources, but the ethic does affirm the right to a continued existence and at least in spots a continued existence in a natural state. That's the criteria the ethic looks at.

Let us look at this within the context of ecosystem fisheries management. Right now we have a single-species management approach.

• Focus. Maximizing yield; economics.
• Mode. "Fix it when it's broken." It is risk prone--we have to break it first before we do anything.
• Requirements for action. Proof that a problem exists. You'll get sued to prove that a problem exists. You can't take action unless you prove that there is a problem.
• Emphasis. Short-term economics; i.e. this year's boat payment.
• Results. Boom and bust cycles; fisheries up and down, crashes--you all know about that.

No-take reserves almost have no role in this particular ethic. I make an analogy to car maintenance. This is the way some people maintain their automobiles--you run it until it breaks down and then you fix it. That's the way fisheries management is right now.

Ecosystem-based management is a little different.

• Focus. Maintaining the health of the system, the ability to regenerate.
• Mode. Prevent failures; risk-averse.
• Requirements for action. Proof that an activity has an ecosystem-carrying capacity. That's an entirely different focus and a lot of problems go away if you adopt that particular requirement.
• Emphasis. Long-term persistence of the system.
• Results. Sustainable fisheries and no-take reserves.

The analogy is more like airplane maintenance--we don't want things to break.

Sustainable fisheries and no-take reserves have an essential role in this management method because reserves are our operating manual. When you buy a new boat or an engine or a car you get an operating manual so you know how to take care of it. Some of these natural areas are our operating manuals to understand how ecosystems work--the dynamics of how things operate. This understanding is crucial as we face more problems regarding coastal and marine resources.

William B. Folsom, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service

Yellowtail snapper caught in recreational fishing off the coast of Florida.

Let me use Florida as an example. When I first moved to Florida in 1960 there were 5 million people; 40 years later there were 16 million people. More and more people were moving to the coast, and this put more demands on resources. We're very good at catching fish--we're very smart--and for the first time in history we can catch fish faster than nature can produce them. We have competing demands and obligations and self-sacrifice on our part.

Commercial fishing can be an excellent livelihood for some people. You go into a restaurant and order fish--someone had to catch that fish. But we're hitting the limits of the ecosystem and in some cases have exceeded those limits. People also want recreation. People also want to have fun; they want to enjoy themselves. We also have a third kind of fishery, the aesthetic fishery. People will pay a lot of money just to see things. Clearly, this is part of the fishery but some of these activities are incompatible and we have to balance all these particular activities.

	Thinking Point
	How have new technologies impacted marine ecosystems? List three technological developments that have affected the balance of marine environments.

The point being that in Florida the doubling time of population is about 24 years, but boats are doubling faster than the population. The commercial fleet has increased slightly and the recreational fleet has increased slightly faster than the population increase. So we have more demands and more people out there fishing. But also the technology has changed. We now have electronic depth-finders and all kinds of fish-finders. It used to take some skill to go out fishing to find a good spot and know how to fish. Now you just punch it into the moran system or the GPS and you're out there.

The problems are that biologically fish are vulnerable. They're predictable in space and times. Fish are the underwater versions of lions, bears and tigers--they have no natural fear of humans or evolved fear so they're very aggressive to take bait or get caught by fish traps or other kinds of gear that we have.

Design principles of reserves
I use the criteria established by Bill Ballantine, marine biologist at the University of Auckland's Leigh Marine Laboratory, and I think this should be the null model for any reserve design.

• All representative areas should be included, not just our favorite area.
• All kinds of habitats, not just the coral reef, or the rock ledge, or the bank.
• They should be permanently closed--not seasonal. The three fatal flaws of rotating closures for most species is that it takes years to build up the resource. They'd be depleted within weeks in some cases, and it would cause tremendous social disruption to move these areas all around.
• There should be no-take protection. All species should be protected in the whole water column, just like national parks, where ducks fly through and you don't shoot the ducks when they're in the national parks. They can fly outside the park and it's okay to shoot them, but not inside. We have a problem that our councils have not really adopted this philosophy. They're still dealing with it as a single-species, fix-it-when-it's-broken tool, not an ecosystem protection tool.
• There should be a network of replicating sites that should be geographically dispersed. The goal should be self-sustaining ecosystems in these areas, independent of what happens in the surrounding fisheries.
  
• We should encourage public access. The public is important for a number of reasons. They need to see this thing works--there is a lot of skepticism--and they need to know what happens out there. They are also the eyes and ears in the water through passive enforcement--they keep people honest because they are out there looking.

Reserves should be established under the precautionary principle for the same reason we build schools--we do it because it is the right thing to do. Some areas should simply be set aside. I'd like to point out that on land about 28 percent of the US continental area is set aside as some sort of protected area. Only three percent of our ocean EEZ, the waters that lie adjacent to the coast and extend 200 nautical miles offshore, has been set aside as any kind of protected area. However, only two-tenths of one percent are no-take reserves. Clearly, we need more and more no-take areas and they need to be substantial. The precautionary principle also means we don't know everything; we establish these as much on our ignorance as what we do know. We should set areas aside until we have a better understanding, just as a precaution.

It is an ecosystem protection measure, that's the ideal use of a marine reserve, not to fix every single species one at a time. If you try to design reserves for every species you'll have a hopeless morass--think about it--you have one area for lobster, another area for cod, another area for haddock. If you do it by habitat you'll probably be okay--you get the whole suite of species. It's simple: you just don't fish there. Compliance is easier because everybody has to follow it, and enforcement is a bit easier because you don't have to look at everybody's boat on the whole ocean, you really just have to concentrate on certain areas.

Fishermen don't like this because we're fencing the range. The same way we fenced the range out West and we had range wars. Before fencing, the system didn't work. We had a common area and everyone would put their cattle there and they'd overgraze. So people started fencing off part of the range. So we are now civilizing parts of the ocean. A lot of fishermen find this unpalatable.

Finally, with a little imagination you actually design a range that's adapted to highly mobile species. Rather than have a small area protected, you have a large area protected but within that is a "moveable box" that follows mobile species.

The primary purpose of marine reserves is to protect marine ecosystem structure and function, allow them to support sustainable fisheries and enhance human activities, including ecotourism. There is strong scientific support for this model, which I haven't gone into. This can be an excellent management tool but more than that user involvement is essential, as is the ability to adapt and manage. We do the best we can over time and learn from our mistakes.