Endangered, Threatened, and Protected Species: Challenges of Managing Living Marine Resources in an Internally Conflicted Regulatory Environment and the Opportunities they Present

Abstract

Natural resource management is a challenging undertaking in the best of circumstances. However, managing living marine resources is frequently confounded by the vast, alien, and oft-times hostile physical environment within which the organisms reside. The subtleties and complexity of the marine life-web, which in important respects have come to include the traditional relationships, forged over millennia, of individual human populations, all contribute to the intricate biological, political, economic, and social undercurrents that define and drive the management decision-making process.

The remarks and observations offered here pertain primarily to the U.S. Federal resource management process, as it bears on the exploitation and conservation of the fish, shellfish, mammals, birds, and other marine organisms of the U.S. Extended Economic Zone (EEZ). Prior to the establishment of the U.S. extended management zone, the principal role of the “Feds” in marine fisheries management was connected with bilateral and multilateral international agreements on “high-seas” access to (and conservation of) these open access or common-property resources. The predecessor agency of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, by-in-large, represented the U.S. “marine fisheries management” interests on the world ’s oceans. (Click here for paper)

Source: Queirolo, L.E. 2000. “Endangered, threatened, and protected species: challenges of managing living marine resources in an internally conflicted regulatory environment and the opportunities they present.” In: Proceedings of the Tenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade: Macrobehavior and Macroresults, July 10-14, 2000, Corvallis, Oregon. Corvallis, OR: International Institute for Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET).

For more information, please contact: Lew.Queirolo@noaa.gov