The resource cycle in forestry and fishing

While renewable resources appear to be the ideal basis for sustainable development, such development assumes that extraction can be restricted to the rate of natural increase in an intact ecosystem. The long record of failure to sustain the yield of biological resources suggests that such restriction is possible only in theory. While fish and timber are renewable, in practice they have not been sustainable. Although both may remain abundant, or at least stable, on a national basis, aggregate data disguise a sequence of regional cycles of boom and collapse, in which the market shares of regions in decline are taken by other regions which have not yet reached the point of crisis. Sustainability in regional resource extraction is achieved only in the chastening aftermath of resource collapse, and usually at levels significantly below those theoretically attainable from the productivity of the original ecosystem. This paper reviews the multiple, and mutually reinforcing causes of the cycle of overexploitation and collapse, termed the resource cycle. It closes by considering the limitations that the resource cycle imposes on public policy, and their implications for the recovery of depleted resources.