To Risk Stating the Obvious, Seafood Comes from the Sea

To Risk Stating the Obvious, Seafood Comes from the Sea

Photo: Peche’s shrimp I love fishing. I also love seafood. As a recreational fisherman, I almost invariably release what I catch. Which, incidentally, belies the rhetoric of some of my fellow recreational anglers who advocate for fuzzier science, looser regulations, longer seasons, more allocation, and larger limits. “We want to catch more fish! We need […]

Deserts and Oceans: What Bighorn Sheep Can Teach Us About Marine Fisheries

Deserts and Oceans: What Bighorn Sheep Can Teach Us About Marine Fisheries

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to assist with a desert bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis nelson) recovery and translocation project in the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas. We captured 82 bighorns by helicopter, carried them to a processing station where we collected blood samples, hair samples, nasal swabs and the like; GPS […]

Yosemite, 1903, and Two Poles in Fisheries Management

Yosemite, 1903, and Two Poles in Fisheries Management

In his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry identified two poles running through America’s engagement with its natural resources. These two poles he calls exploitation and nurture. “The exploiter is a specialist,” says Berry, “the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The […]

Think Globally; Fish Locally

Think Globally; Fish Locally

A thought that saturates my consciousness with respect to conservation in general is what I have come to think of as the psychological problem of urbanization. Since the high middle ages, in the West, people have been increasingly, gradually, aggregating in cities. And this aggregation is speeding up. A threshold was crossed in the American […]