Let’s go fishing!

Last week we discussed renewable resources, such as grass that cows eat to produce milk, and fish populations that have a capacity to regrow. In scientific research we call this “socio-ecological dynamics”, expressing that human behaviour and natural systems depend on each other.

Fishing has been a standard example in explaining socio-ecological dynamics for a long time, because it is easy to understand that fishing too much may lead to a collapse of fish stocks. In this course we will focus on fisheries, but bear in mind that fertile soil, forests, fresh water basins and basically biodiversity in general can also be understood as socio-ecological systems.