Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
new conditions many will not and mass migrations will alter food web dynamics
and increase pressure on these green marine pastures that survive.
Scientists and conservations have argued for a number of years that the global
fishing industry is doing irreparable harm to the marine environment. Indeed, there
have been a number of well-documented collapse of fish stocks and ongoing
controversies over hunting, particularly of whales, tuna and dolphins, which have
gained increased notoriety through films such as
The End of the Line
and
The Cove
(Clover, 2005; Blewitt, 2010b). Despite some optimism at the beginning of the
twenty-first century that fisheries depletions were being successfully dealt with, the
IPSO report suggests that such optimism is not well founded because serious depletions
remain the norm, the quality of fisheries management is poor, the catch per unit
continues to decline and marine pollution remains an unresolved problem. The key
features of an ecosystem fisheries management has not been introduced to any
appreciable degree, and illegal and unregulated fishing probably accounts for 35 per
cent of the global catch (Lam and Pitcher, 2012). In any case, a quota system
restricting future catches may be swamped by environmental factors. This means
that the livelihood of many coastal communities are threatened or have already col-
lapsed, and long-term prospects for food security based on harvesting the oceans is
increasingly a cause for concern. However, there are solutions as the marine scientists
Tony Pitcher and William Cheung clearly state:
A fundamental solution to many of these problems is to ensure effective
implementation of community and ecosystem-based management, favouring
small-scale fisheries. There is sufficient scientific knowledge for developing these
measures, many of them are already embedded in national, regional and inter-
national legislations and guidelines such as the FAO Code of Conduct. Examples
of the broad-scale solutions . . . include introducing true co-management with
resource adjacent communities, eliminating harmful subsidies that encourage
high fishing effort, careful spatial marine planning and protection of vulnerable
ecosystems eliminating fishing gear that give rise to significant damage to marine
habitats or have high bycatch, combating illegal and unreported fishing and
dealing with the food web complexities of implementing ecosystem-based manage-
ment. The challenge is in effective and ethical implementation of these measures,
which could be fostered in several ways: provide economic incentives, foster the
realization of moral obligations and improve monitoring, control and surveillance.
These require effort from all levels from individual communities to international
bodies.
(2013: 506-16)
Capitalism and conservation
For Igoe
et al
. (2010), conservation and capitalism are shaping both the protection
of nature and the sustainable development industry according to neoliberal market
logics and the ideology of economic growth and capital accumulation. For a growing
number of environmentalists and ecologists, wildlife conservation has become a
crude exercise in materialism, economic valuation and development (Oates, 1999;
Terborgh, 2004). The application of neoliberal market ideologies and policy prescrip-
tions are in effect re-regulating nature, creating new forms of territorialization that
