Given the FD and related trends discussed here, it appears rather urgent to now implement the reforms long proposed by most fisheries scientists and economists: to radically reduce fishing capacity (Mace 1997), notably, by abolishing the government subsidies that keep otherwise unprofitable fleets afloat (Munro & Sumaila 2002), and to strictly enforce various equipment restrictions (Chuenpagdee et al. 2003).
Such measures may not allow us to increase future landings, i.e. to continue to meet an ever-increasing human demand (Pauly et al. 2003). Rather, these measures may allow us to sustain what we have, and which we are in the process of losing (Dulvy et al. 2003; Pauly et al. 2003), thus intensifying the food security issues that reduced per capita fish supply in developing countries has begun to create (see figure 5 in Garcia & de Leiva Moreno 2003).
However, we believe that these traditional measures, even if they succeed in stabilizing bulk fish supply, will not be sufficient to prevent the loss of large and hence vulnerable fish species. Given the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ mentioned above, re-establishing functional ecosystems and sustainable fisheries will require us to identify firmly anchored baselines representing earlier states of the population and ecosystems in question, and to rebuild our stocks accordingly. This makes the reconstruction and description (or simulation) of earlier states of ecosystems important, and new areas of research (Pitcher 2001), which will have to be multidisciplinary if they are to be successful.
As another important change, we will have to re-establish, as also demanded by the WSSD, the refugia earlier fish populations enjoyed, and which made it possible for some of our fisheries to last for centuries, although they were unregulated. Some of these refugia, now called ‘marine reserves’ or no-take zones, should be inshore, to protect coastal species; some will have to be large and offshore to protect oceanic fishes (Russ & Zeller 2003; Balmforth et al. 2004). The alternative is that we lose many of the species upon which our fisheries have so far depended.
No-take marine reserves will have to be perceived not as scattered and small concessions to conservationist pressure, but as a legitimate and obvious management tool, required for preventing the entire distribution area of various exploited species from being accessible to fishing. Indeed, avoiding the extinction of species previously protected by their inaccessibility to fishing gear should become a major goal for future management regimes. This would not only enable fisheries, for the first time in their history, to become truly sustainable, but also to address the issue of uncertainty, as eloquently stated in a posthumous edition of some of Rachel Carson’s re-discovered writings:
… To convert some of the remaining wild areas into State and National parks, however, is only part of the answer. Even public parks are not what nature created over the eons of time, working with wind and wave and sand. Somewhere we should know what was nature’s way; we should know that the earth would have been had not man interfered. And so, besides public parks for recreation, we should set aside some wilderness area of seashore where the relations of sea and wind and shore—of living things and their physical world—remain as they have been over the long vistas of time in which man did not exist. For there remains, in this space-age universe, the possibility that man’s way is not always best. (Carson 1998, p. 124)
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