this is not the case, there are other considerations to be faced. 

 A fisherman in Belize, for example, told me that he understood 

 the need for closed seasons on the lobsters and conchs that his 

 government had written, but that these regulations were actually 

 harmful to him if fishermen from neighboring states continued to 

 enter Belizian waters to catch the lobster in the closed season. 

 He perceived his government ' s regulations as giving someone else 

 an unfair advantage. 



To the government resource manager, the environmentalists 

 must, at times, seem to be akin to religious fanatics and to 

 exemplify the most uncompromising aspects of the environmental 

 movement. I know that some of us take very strong stands on 

 these issues — because we believe so firmly in our convictions. 



Governmental officials may lean toward resource development 

 and conservation but can find themselves working for a government 

 that has other political interests as well. Sometimes one set of 

 interests conflicts with another, causing internal strife within 

 the government. I have seen this in my own country. 



With focus on these social, political and economic concerns, 

 biological realities are often ignored. There is a great danger 

 here, because the resource manager is caught in the middle of a 

 paradox: managing people requires compromise but biological 

 reality defies compromise. 



Let me explain what I mean by giving you a somewhat 

 oversimplified example. Let us say that a turtle population 

 produces 3,000 turtles/yr, that the fishermen want to take 

 6,000/yr and the environmentalists want to limit the catch to 

 2,000/yr. A political management compromise might be somewhere 

 in between what the fishermen want and what the environmentalists 

 want, say 4,000 turtles/yr. But if this political compromise 

 violates the biological reality, the resource is not sustainable 

 at the compromise level of exploitation. 



Of course, economists may tell us that to deplete a 

 potentially renewable resource is sometimes economically 

 justifiable if calculations of short-term monetary profit 

 outweigh the estimated long-term monetary return. However, this 

 kind of reasoning seems to imply that another resource will 

 always take the place of the one depleted. I don't believe that 

 this is always true. 



Nevertheless, whatever the political compromises are, 

 clearly the biology of a species cannot be a party to these 

 compromises if the species is to survive. In the time scale in 

 which management decisions are made, biological realities do not 

 change. If the demands we place upon a species are too great, it 

 will not be able to adjust, and we risk losing the resource. 



199 



