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Climate and Fisheries: Costs and Benefits of Change
Many records provide the bases for a clearer understanding of the roles of climate regime shifts and short-term perturbations in ecosystem dynamics, hence fisheries responses. Too few have taken the long view of the role of humans in this "Grand Fugue". As one of many predators, it is imperative that humans begin to understand that our various activities are subject to basic ecological principles, such as the concepts of growth limitations imposed by scarcities and habitat debilitations. Most of human history (evolution, growth, colonizations, displacements, resource scarcity, competition for resources) are direct consequences of normal, natural climate fluctuations, and local, regional and global ecological responses. Early fisheries were subsistence levels, with some situations where fishing communities bartered or traded for goods from adjacent highlands or forest cultures. We have also become extremely vulnerable to any persistent climate changes. Following the Medieval Warm period (~900-1180), the onset of the Little Ice Age (LIA) brought changes in regional productivity, disease, and death that began the global transition from Feudal society to the "pay as you go" economics that now dominate the world's major economies. Over the recent two to three centuries humans have swarmed over the remaining terrain, and spread out onto the seas. Modern history relates the continuous growth, expansion and generalized superposition of industrial fisheries onto older coastal subsistence communities, initiating extensive competition, overexploitation, and with resultant dwindling resources and habitat destruction. I have started a Timeline of Fisheries Development that provides a framework of information upon which these facts are derived: I will continue to develop the Timeline, so that others might learn how humans resolve the issues of complex aquatic ecosystems, limited resource sharing, or not.KEYWORDS: Climate, Fisheries, History, Cultures, Economics, Ecosystems, Environment