Already for decades, ecologists are aware that proper modelling and management of fisheries has to incorporate the behaviour of fishermen. An early example was a model of two different fishing strategies (Allen and McGlade 1987). A more recent analysis investigates different harvesting strategies in an anegnt-based simulation model (ABM) (Brede and de Vries 2009). Let [...]
The force of technology is illustrated with some numbers. Fishing power, defined as the product of number of ships and potential catch per ship, has globally increased sixfold between 1970 and 2005. There was a massive increase in ship size, with supertrawlers as floating fish factories operating for months on sea. In 2016 the global [...]
Island are offering examples of how societies did or can evolve – think of the historical reconstructions of Easter Island (see blog on this website). One feature is their openness for external influences – sometimes beneficial, sometimes catastrophic, and often a mix of both. In the novel Island, Aldous Huxley describes an ideal society on [...]
Forests in Japan have been under pressure already for millennia (Totman 1989). More than 2000 years ago, rice culture caused the first dramatic modifications of woodlands and bronze and iron smelting started to put pressure on the forest due to the demand for high-quality charcoal. Metallurgy led to new, more powerful tools and the assault [...]
‘For us, it has no sense or benefit because the industrial fishing boats don’t leave us any chance of survival. They fish right up to the coast without being stopped and the government doesn’t have the means to control their activities. If the government would listen to us, we wouldn’t sign an agreement with people [...]
Northeastern Canadian fisheries – cod, haddock and other species – are in serious crisis since the 1990s. It is “the classic case of the failure of conventional science-based fisheries management: the collapse of the northern cod of Newfoundland and Labrador” (Finlayson and McCay 1998:311). For centuries the extraordinary abundance of cod has been exploited by [...]