Towards an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production, and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry

The court found for the usurper Pierson. The majority reasoned that finding a “capture rule”—where property rights in a previously unowned resource came into being at the moment of possession, before—would provide a clear standard for hunters to follow and cut down on future litigation. Implicit in the commission's laissez-faire approach to fishery depletion was a tripartite, hermetic system of boundaries between social thought, market behavior, and ecology. As fatal to Progressive-style management of the sardine fishery as the implicit dichotomy between ecology and human action was the fundamental distinction it made between market behavior and lawmaking. English farmers met twice a year at manor court to plan production for the coming months. Finally, the tragic tale of the commons recognized that legal structure influences the way people use their resources, but it portrays people as profit-maximizing automatons, without culture, without feeling for their work, and without community.