Once these businesses are lost, for a myriad of reasons they will probably not be replaced. The case for Ecosystyem Management There has been a growing movement in some scientific circles to adopt a more holistic approach to living marine resource management. Several years ago, when this movement began to receive some notice, it was termed Ecosystem Management and was unfortunately taken by some members of the fisheries management establishment as a threat to what has become the accepted way of managing fisheries - managing fishing effort and ignoring other equally or possibly more relevant factors. Ecosystem scientists argue for a shift away from just managing fishing toward a more comprehensive approach taking into account habitat, current flow and interactions with other species. But the new approaches face many obstacles.
Scientists violently disagree, for example, on the role of chaotic changes in fish populations.
Many fishery scientists say any chaotic changes will almost always be impossible to separate from other factors that aren t chaotic. And while agencies such as the National Marine Fisheries Service employ new techniques as they can, they must function in an era when government is shrinking not expanding its mandates across entire ecosystems. That has the most immediate impact, and that s what the public is most concerned about, said Bradford Brown, director of the Southeast Regional Science Center of the Fisheries Service, who is also an expert on ecosystem modeling. But the biggest problem is history. Institutions are set up and budgets are determined the way they are because agencies have been doing it that way for decades, not because their approaches are the best.