Holistic Fishery Management

Management today is vulnerable to, and often incorporates, major logical errors. Such management frequently leads to the depletion of populations, or extinction of species, including important resources. Consequently, various marine fisheries have collapsed and most others are demonstrably overharvested. Signs that things are beginning to change involve efforts that acknowledge the complexity of ecosystems, and, in a few cases, the complexity of coevolutionary systems. Hardly anyone rejects the fundamental principles behind such progress. Principles, however, are not management advice. Principles and management are two different things and there are significant fallacies in any attempt to convert principles to management. These errors have yet to be adequately appreciated.

There is an alternative devoid of these problems. Systemic management is reality-based management that accounts for all systems whether they be ecological, evolutionary, physical, chemical, social, political, or economic. All principles associated with all systems are included. The integral nature of natural patterns provides holistic guidance for management that avoids the abnormal in quantitative measurements characterizing system interactions. This form of management is not only holistic but also objective. Stakeholders confine their activities to asking good management questions followed by management action based on scientific information defined by those questions.

Examples of holistic management include harvests from ecosystems based on estimates of consumption from those ecosystems by other mammalian species. Similar data is used to find sustainable harvests from individual populations, species, or groups of species. The evolutionary impact of fishing is not only taken into account by integral patterns, but is also dealt with directly by mimicking the selectivity exhibited by other predators—again, to achieve normalcy or healthy systems and system interactions. The allocation of harvests among species, the allocation of harvests over time, and the allocation of harvests over space can likewise be guided by consistent empirical patterns. Holistic guidance for establishing marine protected areas avoids the political and economic bias of today’s management to achieve objectivity and apply to any region. The applicability to any region includes any ecosystem, the geographic ranges of any individual species, any particular habitat, or any geopolitical part of the Earth.

Biodiversity can be involved directly in systemic management through policy requiring the maximization of biodiversity in patterns of relationships among biotic systems. Thus, the biodiversity of any set of interactions (and specifically those involving fisheries) can be maximized so as to simultaneously and consistently achieve normalcy, and systemic sustainability.