Climate and Fisheries: Costs and Benefits of Change
By Gary D. Sharp
ABSTRACT
Many records provide the bases for a clearer understanding of the roles of climate regime shifts and short-term perturbations in ecosystem dynamics, hence fisheries responses. Too few people have taken the long view of the role of humans in this "Grand Fugue". As one of many predators, it is imperative that humans begin to understand that our various activities are also subject to basic ecological principles, such as the concepts of growth limitations imposed by scarcities and habitat debilitations. Most of human history, evolution, growth, colonizations, displacements, resource scarcity, competition for resources, are direct consequences of normal, natural climate fluctuations, and local, regional and global ecological responses. While over the recent two to three centuries humans have swarmed over the remaining terrain, and spread out onto the seas, we have also become extremely vulnerable to any persistent climate changes that might occur. Following the Medieval Warm period (~900-1350), the onset of the Little Ice Age (LIA) brought changes in regional productivity, disease, and death that began the global transition from Feudal society to the "pay as you go" economics that dominate the world's major economies today. Most fisheries in the pre-LIA period were subsistence levels, with some situations where fishing communities bartered or traded for goods from adjacent highlands or forest cultures. The Tlingkits of western Alaska come quickly to mind. Modern history relates the continuous growth, expansion and generalized superposition of industrial fisheries onto older coastal subsistence communities, initiating extensive competition, overexploitation, and with resultant dwindling resources and habitat destruction. I have begun to create a Timeline of Fisheries Development that provides the skeleton of information upon which these facts are derived. I will continue to glean examples, and add to the Timeline, so that others might learn how humans have resolved the issues of complex aquatic ecosystems, limited resource sharing,
or not.
KEYWORDS: Climate, Fisheries Responses, Social Responses, Socio-ecological Interactions, History, Fishing Cultures, economics of fisheries ecosystems, Changing Environments
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