An Optimistic Dogma

The concept of maximum sustainable yield, often referred to as MSY, is seductive. It is defined as the greatest amount that can be taken from a self-generating wild population of animals year after year while still maintaining a constant average size of the population. Or, as summed up by the biologist P.A. Larkin in his keynote address to the American Fisheries Society in 1976, it is an optimistic dogma that assumes that “any species each year produces a harvestable surplus, and if you take that much and no more, you can go on getting it forever and ever…”

Sylvia Earle, Sea Change

p. 189