Miscellaneous Thoughts and Sayings…

“Fish are like trees…” :  the original statement was…

“Managing fisheries is hard: it’s like managing a forest, in which the trees are invisible and keep moving around”

(from an unpublished lecture at Princeton University, ca 1978)

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“The real goal of fisheries management is to avoid finding out what the stock-recruitment relationship is. Once you have depleted the stock enough to know, it’s probably too late”

(from an argument with David Cushing, ca 1980)

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“Those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to misunderstand the future”

(re-working of “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by philosopher George Santayana, in The Life of Reason (1905). First used in a lecture promoting the study of past climate, ca 2004)