Environmental Management: Principles and practice

particularly sensitive to suffer damage: an inappropriate resource development
approach can easily cause stress.
Where common resources have sustained livelihoods for a long time, thanks
to local people developing social controls, exploitation may break down as a
consequence of changing attitudes. For example, in certain traditional fisheries in
Amazonia, fishermen left areas undisturbed, or only occasionally fished, allowing
stock to recover. The enforcement was through superstition and tradition, but this
has broken down as outsiders have been seen to break the rules without mishap.
Islands
A recurrent problem has been the decimation of endemic island flora and fauna, by
accidental or deliberate introduction of alien organisms, e.g. the decimation of native
songbirds of the main Hawaiian islands, partly because of the introduction of disease-
carrying mosquitoes (Elton, 1958). Woodcutting, overgrazing, building, and more
frequent fires have also caused damage. Island biogeography can assist those
developing sustainable management strategies for islands (Mueller-Dombois, 1975;
Gorman, 1979; Troumbis, 1987; Beller et al., 1990; D’Ayala et al., 1990). Managers
of island environments must consider dispersal of biota as well as on-island
conservation; for example, disturbance of migrant birds on a particular island may
have a much wider impact if they are denied that island stepping-stone. Study is vital
to uncover situations where the degradation of an island environment may have causes
elsewhere; Margaris (1987) reported the breakdown of terrace agriculture in the
Aegean Islands as a consequence of the falling demand for dried fruit and olives
caused by European women entering full-time employment and changing to ready
prepared or frozen food, and to large-scale mainland production which floods the
market with cheaper produce.

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