There has to be some middle ground between the two, some meeting place, (usually the best done with education programs for the locals), but most of the time, neither side in this debate is completely right or completely wrong. I don't know anything about oceans or bays so I'll just say I do see that type in the forest as well, the "nothing the scientists ever do is right" type, but that's not who I am defending or talking about in this case.
Agreed, although that sort of outreach is surprisingly difficult because the people on both sides that you most want to interact with each other are usually the people least interested in doing so.
The point is still excellent though. People really hate being told what to do without being told why, or feeling like they had input in the process, so involving them is the best way to get people on board.
That spiecies are declining due to human impact is a bit of a tough conclusion to draw and i'd like to see how specifically this is proven. Not to say that this doesn't happen, but people are often quick to judge eachother and look at human impact on things, all the while spieces have been going extinct and new ones have been rising up from long long before humans were around.
this study and data since 1950, most likely looks at the impact of fisheries on the area. no doubt. but did it look also at the time before fisheries to see what was happening tot the population then? Is there a good baseline made? I'm pretty sure they won't have the same data pre-fisheries and compare the two, but only look at the data they gathered while the fishing was already going on.
Don't take this as an attack on your opinion, i'm a bit skeptical on anything really, and don't disagree that humans ofcourse in areas have negative impact on nature due to their disregard of it. It jjust pains me to see a lot of small local businesses getting hurt because some studies point to them as a source of a problem while often these studies are fairly shallow. even 50 years of data has potential to be a 1-sided data collection, aimed at proving a specific point instead of trying to show data which might prove OR disprove it. (in a lot of these situations it's practically impossible to gather good baseline data to compare to, as human interactions have been present from before the data collection started, i am aware of that.)
Dr. So and So sometimes is a local. A local who has hard data collected fairly regularly since ~1950 that shows that Chesapeake oyster/blue crab/whatever populations have been in steady decline due to a combination of over-fishing, and massive increases in nutrient levels due to runoff. And yet many water-men resist any sort of limits on catch and fishing methods tooth and nail.
You are probably right in some cases, but "locals" are nearly always the bloody problem. And when you leave them alone, without intervention, they tend to completely destroy whatever resources are near bye. Look at the coral reefs in Cuba for instance vs the protected reefs off the Florida keys.
I'm not saying the having a PhD makes you correct. There are tons of arrogant idiots out there and some of them are definitely wrong, but when the two sides of the argument are leave it alone vs don't leave it alone (and also maybe stop dumping so much chicken poop on your crops), I tend to think that leave it alone is the healthier option a good percentage of the time.
I made this post because I have seen this attitude before so many times, and it is so often combined with a willful ignorance of the situation. The government doesn't spend an obscene amount of money raising and releasing oysters so that "natives", who are often no more native than the people raising and studying the oysters, can scoop them out of protected areas, inhibit the process, and claim that nothing is wrong and they know the bay better than those arrogant scientists.