Mary, Mephistopheles, Machiavelli, and Menhaden

AUTHOR(S): Henry A. Regier

CITATION:

Regier. H.A. 1971. Mary, Mephistopheles, Machiavelli, and Menhaden, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, 100:4, 804-812. https://doi.org/10.1577/1548-8659(1971)100<804:MMMAM>2.0.CO;2INTRODUCTION:

For many thousands of years man has had the ability to think complex thoughts. Whether or not interpreters of man’s story have taken note of it, there must often have been some insight and concern about what man, through his numbers and his actions, was doing to his environment and thus to himself. If we knew the full story, we could–if we wished to do so–stratify it temporally into cultural periods of enlightenment and into ages of darkness, or regionally at some point in time into advanced and backward cultures. From an ecological viewpoint we might classify the North America of the last hundred years as dominated by a backward culture that threatened to plunge the world into a particularly black period of ecological darkness.

These were the first hundred years of the American Fisheries Society.

FULL TEXT – Regier