Back To Ecosystem Based Management
This is the sixth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.
It seems simple enough: we should manage our marine resources to protect the whole ecosystem, not just a single species. That’s the basic premise of ecosystem-based management (EBM), the topic of this week’s class at Scripps (Read a previous post on EBM by Sheril here). EBM is all about interactions: between predator and prey, parasite and host, nutrients and phytoplankton, humans and our environment. The need for EBM comes from too many cases of a single-species management practice resulting in unintended impacts on the surrounding environment.
Take the Atlantic cod, for example, a fish that supported America’s most lucrative fishery in the 19th and most of the 20th century. Atlantic cod was overfished so heavily that its stocks are now virtually commercially extinct. We’ve all eaten cod, but you might not know what it looks like: it’s a voracious predator with an impressive set of teeth. Its jaws are powerful enough to easily crack the shell of all but the biggest, feistiest Maine lobsters. When cod stocks were depleted, the lobster populations boomed, free from the threat of one of their only predators. Now the North Atlantic lobster fishery thrives, while the cod fishery lays dormant. Lobsters are lured into traps by dead, smelly fish, which means millions of tons of Atlantic herring are caught every year and sold to lobstermen as bait. My personal research has indicated that increased herring fishing effort may have driven humpback and fin whales away from their traditional feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine in search of a different food source.
Did you follow that? We went from cod to lobster to herring to humpbacks. To be fair, even the most fervent supporter of EBM would have struggled to predict that exploiting cod might eventually affect whales. But if the theory of EBM had been around during the heyday of the North Atlantic cod fishery (EBM has only entered the mainstream consciousness within the past two decades), someone likely would have at least raised a red flag. At its core, EBM is about taking a precautionary approach to management. Marine resource managers have historically thrown caution to the wind, even in the face of scientific uncertainty. This reckless style may become a thing of the past—NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco is one of EBM’s most prominent supporters.
EBM is a great idea in theory, but the practice is difficult to implement and even define. I just spent a three hour class learning and talking about it, but before writing this, I still had to brush up on the topic with NOAA’s 1998 Report to Congress on EBM. We can attribute the haziness of EBM to its relative infancy as a concept. As more scientists and policymakers continue to embrace EBM, we may see it transition from merely a good idea to a realistic strategy.
One of the shortcomings of ecosystem based management has been the tendency to confuse measurement for management. The sweet spot rests somewhere between the observational scientist’s penchant for measuring everything, everywhere, all the time and the prediction fetish of physics envy. I’m skeptical that the sweet spot is discoverable.
Sheril,
My sense is EBM is hazy because it assumes one can know things that are unknowable. The philosophy of EBM sounds good but any strategy has to take into account the uncertainty of man’s understanding of the marine ecosystem and an appreciation of the natural dynamics it exhibits. Since management perfection is unlikely the more important goal should be to define measures of ecosystem robustness and monitor how well those benchmarks are realized.
Mark: “…observational scientist’s penchant for measuring everything, everywhere, all the time and the prediction fetish of physics envy.”
Suddenly I wish I hadn’t given up troll bait for Lent.
You might consider Judith Layzer’s 2008 Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment. She poses the right question. Does “Ecosystem Based Management” actually deliver better environmental results?
So given the choice between cod and lobsters, how does one decide?
What claptrap. Codfish is nowhere enar “commercially extinct” and the annual US quota for herring isn’t, and never has been, anywhere close to a million tons. If this itypifies what is being taught in our nations’s schools it’s no wonder the American educational system is going down the toilet.
Lab lemming: “So given the choice between cod and lobsters, how does one decide?”
The principles of “ecosystem-based management” include stakeholder collaboration to identify the desired state of multiple ecosystem attributes. So it’s quite straightforward. First assume consensus is reached among competing or mutually exclusive values in a legitimate, fair, and timely process that involves all stakeholders. Second, …
Wow Fishsense, considering the Atlantic Cod is red listed as a threatened species, I’d say you have it about exactly backwards.
Now please remove the Fish from your handle.
Fishsense: thanks for pointing that out. I wrote “millions” when I meant to write “thousands.” Atlantic herring landings in the last decade have ranged from 78k – 121k.
I can assure you that my slip-up does not reflect the quality of my education. Nor does this change the fact that we’re harvesting an important forage species to use as bait for the ultimate luxury fishery. As a Maine native, I support the lobster fishery, but I think management would benefit by incorporating more principles of EBM into its policies.
If the Atlantic cod is “nowhere near” commercially extinct, then why did Canada shut down its cod fisheries in the mid-90s? If cod is not commercially extinct, then it’s certainly knocking at the door, especially when a country feels the need to suspend fishing activity to let the stocks recover. The current North Atlantic cod fishery is a classic example of the Shifting Baselines syndrome, where the cod biomass is deemed large enough to fish despite existing at a tiny fraction of what it once was. I encourage you to read Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod” if you haven’t already.