Hey RT...... I didn't mean to jump all over what you said.......there's much more behind that venting incident than I'd ever have time to explain here.
Tunaman....I have nothing against ferrets...except for the fact that they stink.
I had read that article in NG some time ago. Yes it's pretty sickening. Large scale industrial fishing of this sort should not be allowed to continue unabated. The harvesting of fish while the are grouped together in large aggregations for spawing is simply ludicrous. It's akin to "shooting fish in a barrel." However, the sad truth is that the only thing that seems to stop it is the utter collapse of the fishery. The only thing that drives this machine is money.....and when the money goes away so does the threat. Hopefully what's left will be able to recover, while the "machine," no doubt, will move on to bigger and better things......and the same thing will no doubt happen again. It's like a never ending viscious circle. Fortunately, it seems that fish populations, even utterly devastated ones, have an amazing ability to recover when left alone for a long enough period of time. If the quotas were adheared to and participation in the fishery was tightly regulated from the start, then there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. BUT, as happens all to often in fisheries.....there's an explosion of participants that end up taking more than the resource can sustain. Of course, the problem with limiting participation in a fishery is that there are numerous people that cry about this limitiation not being fair. Tough shit....if commercial fisheries access were properly limited from the get go you would never have these "gold rushes" that end up wiping everything out because of too many people wanting too many pieces of too small a pie. On the other side of the coin, I do think it's pretty unfair to come in after the fact and tell people with susbstantial interests and investments that they can't fish anymore because the fleet needs to be downsized.
In any given fishery I think the best course of action would be a lottery style issuance of "X" number of permits to go after "Y" quota divided equally amongst the permit holders. It would be much easier to make future rational adjustments from this point, rather than being forced to make the same descisions when faced with an imminent disaster of a fisheries collapse and people losing their livelyhoods. If you didn't get in at the beginning you can wait to buy out someone who wants out at a later time. Unless, it could be shown through research, after a set amount of time, that the fishery could sustain the issuance of more permits and the entry of more participants.
But, this will most likely, never happen becasue we live in a world that is run by the almighty dollar, fueled by greed, and driven by excess.