HIST 20 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Fisheries Science, Shifting Baseline, Dredging
Document Summary
Case study: histories of fisheries / the history of fisheries biology. Forests, lakes, streames, grasslands, oceans, mountains, other places. Nature commodities; swept up in the process of modernization. Commodity: material that has been abstracted; taken from ecological/biological context to be bought or sound on the market. 1900 and after: fast speed and scale of transformations. Grasslands, woodlands into agricultural goods, including wheat, corn, cotton. Geological materials, minerals (iron core/coal) into steel and energy. Marine and freshwater animal populations into bait, human food, animal feed, fertilizers. Technological innovations: speeding up the process of rationalization. Assumption that people want to transform natural goods into commodities for money. Science: understanding and learning more about natural resources. Steam engines, railways, improved vessel design, harvesting tools, fish hatcheries Scientific , rationalizing investigations of resource problems (these are factors contributing to the speed and scale of overexploitation of commonly held resources) A story about how and why natural resources get exploited.
