Is "Waste Not, Want Not" an Adequate Ethic for Managing By-catch?: Five Biblical Ethical Models for Addressing Incidental Fisheries Catch and Ecosystem Disturbance
By Susan Power Bratton
abstract
The "Protestant ethic," with its emphasis on hard work, efficiency, and frugality, has influenced the values of North American fishing communities. Many commercial fishers concur with its principle of "waste not, want not," and believe that discarding marketable fish is wrong. In industrialized fisheries, this ethic by itself, is inadequate, due to the use of mechanized harvest technologies which can capture fish at great depths and sweep over large areas of ocean. Under a general ethic of Christian stewardship of creation, five Biblically based ethical models can offer guidance: "do not destroy" which prohibits wanton disturbance of productive nature; neighborliness, which prohibits damage to another families' livelihood, divine ownership of and joy in creation, which assigns value to non-economic species; stewardship, which requires both active resource protection, and careful resource use; and the Hebrew land ethic, which requires a sabbatical or rest for harvested ecosystems, disallows complete efficiency of harvest, and requires that some of the harvest be left for both God's creatures and for the poor or disadvantaged members of the human community. Although Christian ethical concepts can not replace intelligent ocean policy, they can serve as foci for problem solving, and inspiration to better care of the marine environment.
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