It is mostly human greed. In the environmental issue, it is possible to have our cake and eat it too. No one except the most fanatic green ideologues really think that we have to return to a 18th century pastoral existence in order to save the environment. Most terrestrial resources are renewable, and managed harvests can guarantee indefinite use of the earth's resources, if we are willing to exercise some personal responsibility and curb our appetite for short-term profit.

There is nothing new about this, past generations, wihout the benefit of our biological science, always made at least an effort to conserve and protect the resource for future users. They weren't always doing it right, due to their ignorance, but at least they tried. Crop rotation, windbreaks, contour plowing, fallow seasons and other techniques were long practiced by farmers to protect the land so their children could benefit from it too. At least, farmers did so before it became "uneconomic" to do so. My own grand-uncle Cheto, a waterman in Tampa Bay in the early 20th century, always released the female blue crabs from his traps so there would be crab the next year, too. It was an ethic all the fishermen traditionally practiced, Cracker, Cuban and Black, professional and sportsmen. Now it takes armed patrols and a highly politicized and contested regulatory system to accomplish the same thing.

We now have the expertise to be able to evaluate a resource and monitor it, to institute harvesting seasons keyed to the biota's life cycle, species-targeted pesticide rotations, catch limits, habitat protection and other strategies to be able to maintain the harvest, and the industries and jobs which depend on it, indefinitely. The price we pay is a curtailment in production and profit in the short term. It's worth every penny.

It is a price I believe individual private producers with a personal stake in the resource will gladly pay, and one which the corporate farms, the factory fishing ships, amd other collective resource-gathering combines will do everything they can to evade. When the sardines go away, the cannery owners will just start investing in real estate.