The sustainability myth

Abstract

Fishery science, by which I mean the study of the dynamics f exploited fish stocks, may be unique among the scientific isciplines: it produced a corpus of theory that was taught in niversities and applied at sea, but which has since proved to be rong. In his posthumous essay of 1998, Beverton discussed the gruesome story’ of the repeated stock collapses and depletions hat started to take our attention during the 1980s; this was not at ll what had been anticipated when he and others established the asis of contemporary stock assessment and management theory n mid-20th century. His analysis of what went wrong contains key remark that is easily overlooked: during what he called he carefree period when modern theory was being established n mid-century, ‘biology became subservient to maths, in both taffing (of the laboratories) and philosophy’. Beverton drew no specific conclusions from this important bservation but it perhaps explains why concepts such as the nfortunately named surplus production model should have been pplied so uncritically in the real ocean. Indeed, the conseuences of the primacy of mathematics in fishery science are nly now coming to be acknowledged, as in the essay on the use nd abuse of fishery models by Schnute and Richards (2001). ecause such models must contain states that can never be bserved, and are dependent on arbitrary assumptions that influnce their outcome, these authors argued that fisheries science ust reach beyond mathematics. This direct and unanswerable criticism of the fundamenal tools of stock management represents one of the few real esponses to the wise words of Francis in 1980 that fisheries cience was ‘reductionist, hierarchic, quantitative and homogeous’ and that this fact was sufficient explanation for ‘our probems in coming to grips with environmental matters, exemplified y the failures of fishery science to date’. He suggested that we might be better served to consider more primitive logical ystems . . . holistic, non-hierarchical, qualitative and heterogeous’. Francis concluded that all advances in fisheries science ver the previous 20–30 years had occurred in the branches of