The r e are currently many plans for sustainable use or sustainable development that are founded upon scienti f ic information and consensus. Such ideas ref lect ignorance of the history of resource exploitation and misunderstanding of the possibility of achieving sc ient i f ic consensus concerning resources and the environment. Although there is considerable variation in detail, there i s rem...

Protecting our environment and natural resources is a major global challenge. “Protectors” (law enforcement agencies) try to protect these natural resources, while “extractors” (criminals) seek to exploit them. In many domains, such as illegal fishing, the extractors know more about the distribution and richness of the resources than the protectors, making it extremely difficult for the protect...

Assessing the performance of management is central to natural resource management, in terms of improving the efficiency of interventions in an adaptive-learning cycle. This is not simple, given that such systems generally have multiple scales of interaction and response; high frequency of nonlinearity, uncertainty, and time lags; multiple stakeholders with contrasting objectives; and a high deg...

Lung transplantation became a reality in 1963 when Dr James Hardy performed the first successful single lung transplant in a patient with chronic pulmonary disease and bronchogenic carcinoma. His patient survived 18 days, eventually succumbing to renal failure. His opportunity for success was hampered by a lack of adequate immunosuppressive agents, limited perioperative monitoring, and a lack o...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the impacts on resource development of e cient management practices that account for possible resource conserving technological, institutional and taste changes. Compared with traditional resource management that ignores these future possibilities, e cient management may not delay or reduce resource development. Under e cient management, higher probabi...

The concept of resilience is now frequently invoked by natural resource agencies in the US. This reflects growing trends within ecology, conservation biology, and other disciplines acknowledging that social-ecological systems require management approaches recognizing their complexity. In this paper, we examine the concept of resilience and the manner in which some legal and regulatory framework...

Different human expectations and environmental ethics are key factors preventing the creation of marine reserve networks. People are skeptical about the benefits of no-take marine reserves because they have adjusted to scarcity and have low expectations about the productive capability of marine ecosystems. Pauly (1995) described this as a shifting baseline in which each generation sets its expe...

UNLABELLED Flooding is the most common and damaging of all natural disasters in the United States, and was a factor in almost all declared disasters in U.S. HISTORY Direct flood losses in the U.S. in 2011 totaled $8.41 billion and flood damage has also been on the rise globally over the past century. The National Flood Insurance Program paid out more than $38 billion in claims since its incep...