No doubt about it, the sea lions have become a major nuisance and cause of our fishing resource losses. The Marine Mamals Act combined with the sea lion's big eye appeal, especially to the touchy-feely crowd and to the overboard enviornmental folks have made them a real PITA.
The commercial fishermen down here would love to shoot as many of them as possible with the 30-30's they usually carry on board if only they could. Most of us who fish for salmon have also experienced the ending of a good hook-up only to find just the head of the fish left on the line after a sea lion took the rest for itself!
Unfortunately, these problems are more complex than just to have a simple, one cause, one cure, easy fix structure. This is too bad, otherwise we could simply string up the one group responsible and have the problem solved!
There are probably 25, 50, or 100 interrealted causes of the loss of fishing resources. While we often look to a 1-2-3 cause-effect-solution type explanation to justify our own conclusions about what we think ought to be done to solve the problem, the truth is far more complicated, and the cure sometimes seeminly beyond our control.
Problems like this, instead of having a short, linear cause-effect-solution structure, are much more like a big complex three dimensional lattice work of interconnected causes and effects that look more like a web of interactions.
All this makes the understanding and control of such problems and their various issues enormously complicated, and often seemingly beyond control. But the bottom line is that each person, interest group, and governmental body must assume responsibility for their section of the web if any progress is to be made at all, least we give up all together and suffer the loss of everything we want to save.
These webs of cause-effect relationships also have many dimensions: social, cultural, biological, legal, geographical, economic, and territorial, among others. Careful study often reveals that the economic causes are fundamental in many cases, e.g., who wants what for themselves.
Too bad personal greed is such a major factor in our basic behavior, but it's a basic factor in human endeavors.
All of this is not to spread dispair about the conservation of our fishing resources, but to help put the various problems and their solsutions into proper perspective when viewed as a whole, and to encourage each individual to assume responsibility for their share in protecting the neighborhood for all. We're all in this together, it's only one world, one Mother Earth to share together in the end.
Joe.
