It never gets prettier, it only gets uglier…
There were plenty of codfish in the Gulf of Maine when
George Washington was president.
Your children might not be able to eat cod when they grow
up.
It’s possible that, roughly speaking, there won’t be any
codfish to eat.
NYTimes.com ran a piece a few days ago that asked “Where
have all the cod gone?”
Here’s a quote from the reporting of W. Jeffrey Bolster:
“Overfishing has been the norm for a very long time, but the market has
masked the mess in two fundamental ways. At every step fishermen confronting
declining catches developed gear that fished more intensively, taking a larger
percentage of the fewer fish that remained. Such a strategy was clearly not sustainable.
Meanwhile, fishermen continued to earn enough to make fishing worthwhile, even
if many encouraged their sons to pursue other careers because there would be
little future in fishing. The Gulf of Maine cod stocks today are probably only
a fraction of 1 percent of what they were during George Washington’s
presidency.”
If there were only one fisherman, most likely she wouldn’t
be dumb enough to overfish to the extent that there weren’t enough breeding cod
left to replenish the stock.
Sadly, humans in groups generally are dumb enough to do just
that.
The tragedy of the commons is a dangerous element of real
life.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015
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