Fish populations are classical examples of commonproperty resources and tend to decline over time. According to the conventional wisdom, they decline through a process popularly known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’, whereby selfish users are locked into a deterministic mechanism in which they are both the villains and the victims. However, the commons paradigm is not the model of reality for all fisheries. There are many sustainable fisheries, and detailed studies of some of them indicate that they do not fit the commons paradigm because there are factors which violate some of the hidden assumptions of the commons paradigm.

In many community-based and small-scale fisheries, there are unwritten regulations or customary laws that prevent individuals from maximizing their private gains at the expense of community interests. Far from being owned by no one and freely open to any user, many of the fish stocks of the world are under claims of ownership by communities of fishermen who exercise use-rights and who control access to the resource. As seen in examples from Oceania and North America's west coast, open-access and common property conditions were created, and the ‘tragedy’ started only after the destruction of such traditional marine tenure systems.

One of the most isolated islands on Earth, Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean stands as a modern-day ‘morality play’ of the consequences of environmental abuse. This tiny piece of land on the fringe of the tropics, emerged as an island through volcanic action some 1.5 million years ago, and acquired its biota mainly by long-distance dispersal from the west. Rodrigues was not inhabited by any people until 1691, and since then has always been administered from Mauritius which lies 650 km to the west.

Burning, browsing, and woodcutting, have almost completely removed the indigenous forest. Close to a third of the native plant species have disappeared, and another third are on the brink of extinction. Giant land-tortoises, sea-turtles, and the Dugong, have vanished. Only two of the ten native species of land-birds survive. The endemic Solitaire was killed off even before the human population started to grow. Forest removal opened new habitats for introduced plants and animals, some of which are now highly invasive pests.

Human impact on Rodrigues has gone beyond biotic effects. Cultivation of row-crops on the hilly terrain, and the keeping of domesticated animals in excessive numbers, led to the loss of most of the topsoil by the beginning of the twentieth century. Soil removal and compaction drastically modified the hydrology of the island, and silt deposition in the lagoon has contributed to fish decline. The inherent vulnerability of the native biota, the twin hazards of cyclones and droughts that befall the island, and demographic pressure, have all exacerbated the rate and degree of resource degradation.

There is an urgent need for improved understanding of conservation attitudes in the Third World because of the increasing rate of resource depletion that is now occurring in the countries involved. Although conservation practices by traditional societies in the Third World have received much attention from research workers, the fact that some practices are intentional and others inadvertent has been largely ignored. However, it is the motivation for these intentional conservation measures and the environmental influences on the people who apply them, which is crucial to understanding variations in conservation behaviour among traditional societies.

Traditional conservation in the South Pacific was based on a complex system of resource-use taboos which prevented overexploitation in the limited island environment. These taboos contributed to the achievement during pre- European times of what appears from historical accounts to have been a state of relative equilibrium between island populations and their resources.

Predictability and extremeness are two environmental factors which are thought to affect the development of conservational behaviour. Both these factors were examined in the light of traditional conservation in the South Pacific. Droughts and hurricanes are the two main sources of environmental unpredictability in the South Pacific, although the islands vary considerably in the degree to which they are affected by them. It was concluded that a distinction between real and perceived environmental predictability was necessary before one could fully understand the influence of predictability upon the development of conservational behaviour in the South Pacific.

During 1975 to 1984, a particularly divisive debate accompanied proposals to conserve Polar Bear Pass, NWT. Virtually all interests that participated in the debate supported a more comprehensive approach towards conservation of natural areas than had hitherto prevailed, and criticized the ad hoc manner in which conservation proposals were being handled by the Federal Government of Canada.

Chastened by the experience with Polar Bear Pass, and suffering land-use allocation problems in many locations, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development responded with a Northern Land-use Planning Policy (Diand, 1981a, 1981b), and is now developing a comprehensive conservation policy.

Future conservation reserves in northern Canada are likely to be established as a result of regional land-use planning. It is important, however, that conservation of natural areas in both Territories support northern political development and devolution of resource management authority to northern governments, and settlement of landclaims made by native peoples.

The Hanford Reach of the Columbia River has experienced a great deal of human-imposed environmental change within the past 40 years, as has much of the adjacent land. The major disturbances have been from hydroelectric dams' construction and an intensive expansion of irrigated agriculture. A notable exception to the steady expansion of agriculture and dam-building has been the 1,400 km2 Hanford Site, which was established in 1943. Today, the Hanford Site consists mostly of undeveloped land that still supports native vegetation. It is free from agricultural practices, and has also been essentially free from livestock grazing and the shooting of animal wildlife. This conservative land-use has favoured populations of native wildlife that use the riverine habitats of the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River—e.g. Mule Deer, Canada Goose, and Great Blue Heron, are notable instances.

The Hanford Reach supports the only mainstem Chinook Salmon spawning habitat on the Columbia River. This population is maintained by a combination of natural spawning and artificial propagation in concert with a regulated harvest of returning adults. Numbers of mainstem spawning Salmon have increased markedly in the past 10 years, and this has attracted increasing numbers of wintering Bald Eagles to the Hanford Reach.

An examination of the relationship between human needs (above and beyond the basic physiological needs and concomitant consumption of resources) has re-emphasized the importance of control of human population in order to meet several other, also important, human needs. Development of human resources to their fullest potential requires utilization of additional resources beyond those necessary for the provision of basic physiological needs.

A preliminary model of resource requirements to meet human needs suggests that resource requirements for meeting the human needs for safety are considerable, those for meeting the cognitive and esteem needs are moderate, while those for meeting belongingness and love, aesthetic, and self-actualization, needs are minimal. Both industrialized and non-industrialized societies can adequately meet basic human needs, but industrialized societies may the better meet some of the higher human needs.

Economic considerations cannot be invoked to justify long-term protection of the environment. The appeal to posterity, as Goethe pointed out, springs from ‘the pure, strong feeling of the existence of something imperishable; something that will, in the end, be gratified by finding the minority turn into a majority’. There is nothing new in the paradox expounded in the opening paragraphs of this account: Goethe also wrote that there is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again. In answer to the question, ‘What is your duty?’ he replied, ‘the claims of the day’.

We should not expect to find a logical reason in the future for doing what seems right now. We should do what appears to be our duty in relation to the environment, as in all else, just because it seems right to do so, and in deference to future generations. We may not be justified in believing that there can be objective vindication of our subjective feelings; but this should never allow us to close our ears to the whispering of our inner conscience. There is much that is true which cannot be assessed, yet it is on the strength of truths such as these that actions have sometimes to be based: to ignore the future would make nonsense of the present.