The Tragedy Of The Commons: Local Lessons By Elinor Ostrom

The complex problem of overfishing, which the World Wildlife Fund website describes as occurring when “more fish are caught than the population can replace through natural reproduction,” is just as intricate and sensitive as its many possible combinations of solutions (“Overfishing”). On a small scale, such as a pond with one species of fish, this situation is easy to visualize, but its simplicity diminishes as the area and species affected increases. Taking into consideration that the ocean has no boundaries and surrounds every continent, all of which interact with their local fish populations in different ways, the exploitation of marine life is an international issue with no one-size-fits-all solution. “The Tragedy of the Commons” describes

Another optimistic, and at some points simplistic, point of view in “Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges” by Elinor Ostrom (1999) states the two issues with fish exploitation are overuse and lack of maintenance. She believes both are solved with a combination of access and equipment restriction and incentives for fishing companies to maintain the resource. She puts more trust into society to take steps toward creating healthy aquatic systems. When it comes a more global view of exploitation, Ostrom emphasizes the diversity of components in any given ecosystem, and believes that each fishery is unique and one solution will not be universally positive. “Current Problems in the Management of Marine Fisheries” by J. R. Beddington (2007) takes a similar point of view by approaching the issue of overfishing with optimism. Agreeing with Ostrom, he believes that the problem and solution of marine exploitation can be found in management of access and usage of fisheries. He states that overfishing can be managed through restricting fishing seasons and licenses, and regulating the equipment used to catch fish, such as vessel size and number of nets. Beddington believes that a balance must be reached between efficient management

Jeremy B. C. Jackson’s (2001) article “What was Natural in the Coastal Oceans?” agrees with an aspect of Pauly and Watson’s argument by focusing on the anthropologic impact on marine harvesting. He notes that humans have no concept of what is “natural” because exploitation has been happening for centuries; we have changed each and every ecosystem and can no longer know how it would organically function. He also states that usable and measurable data collection has only occurred within the past century, implying that it’s nearly impossible to know just what impact humans have made on aquaculture. Jackson states that current exploitation levels are nowhere close to being sustainable over time. Daniel Pauly’s (2003) article “The Future for Fisheries” describes a far less simplistic aspect of global overfishing: the lack of interconnectivity between fisheries around the world. In simple terms, scientific data and regulatory creators often view a fishery as a single entity instead of a small piece of a global web. Pauly believes that simplistic data does not take into considerations the unique characteristics from each fishery, or allows the characteristics of one fishery to determine action taken on all fisheries. Stefan Flothmann (2010) discusses the actual ineffectiveness of government regulation in “Closing Loopholes: Getting Illegal Fishing Under Control.” He