Well I think we're slowly getting better at this. There's many cases (at least in the US and Europe) of fisherman organising themselves to avoid an entire ecosystem collapse.
Also, things like aquaculture and the like can help us to sustain things, just like we've helped rebuild populations of some animals.
It's extremely important we continue bringing up the destruction we bring to the environment, but there's some good forces at work to at least slow the collapse (and hopefully rebuild)
Aquaculture can help, but there's been big problems from aquaculture (anecdotally, here in New Zealand) from the intense concentration of species in one area (where that concentration was never present before) and the effect of all their defecation on the ecosystem of the area they occupy. This has been quite a big thing around the salmon farms in the Marlbourough Sounds, for instance.
> Well I think we're slowly getting better at this. There's many cases (at least in the US and Europe) of fisherman organising themselves to avoid an entire ecosystem collapse.
We have done that for rivers (which had gone dry) in the US already, but selling property rights (or exploitation rights instead of property) for water zones could help prevent the overexploitation of sea resources. Once you own the zone or the exploitation rights, it's all in your interest to actively limit fishing in order to keep the value of your property over the long term. Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive. In the mediterranean, there are strict limits for tuna exploitation and they are violated every single year by these fishermen, and not enforced properly.
> Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive.
Well it's happened before. Fishermen associations getting together and being like "we will not have anything left to fish if we don't stop fishing so much" and they agreed. Basically ends up working.
But sometimes it backfires - in EU bans were introduced to stop fisherman from fishing out too much of a certain types of fish - but it's not like you can tell the fish to stay out of your nets, so what ended happening was that they would catch the banned species just like they used to but they couldn't bring it back inland,so it had to be thrown overboard before entering port - already dead. So it was the ultimate waste of resources - those fish have been killed for literally nothing, as they couldn't have even been consumed.
Also, things like aquaculture and the like can help us to sustain things, just like we've helped rebuild populations of some animals.
It's extremely important we continue bringing up the destruction we bring to the environment, but there's some good forces at work to at least slow the collapse (and hopefully rebuild)