Lynn,
        How can you always be so right on?  Does your drinking water have
something special in it?  If so, please send me a bottle.  Maybe that's why
we love your editorship so well for COA.
Keep it up.
Dan
 
 
>Marlo said:
>
>>A wonderful elaboration.  Whether it's buying, trading or collecting, if
>>we support the market, we support the desimation of species countries are
>>trying to preserve.
>
>But Marlo, Kate, and all,
>
>In the case of shells, it is often everything, not just this species or
>that species, that some countries want to save. Or should I say "restrict"?
> Or "sell"?  It is too hard, I guess, to differentiate among restricted
>species and other species, so governments just opt to make shell collecting
>off limits.  Or, as Kate suggested, make a profit from their natural
>resources.  This is a preservationist approach with a big bucks spin, and
>it is one which I deplore.  It makes of us all just spectators in a zoo,
>look but don't touch...everything's off limits.  Unless you can pay enough.
>
>We need to be good stewards to our environment, implying intelligent use
>of/interaction with/protection for/management of our resources.  Fisheries
>are managed. Hunting is managed.  If we are instead put in the position of
>tolerated observers, who are restricted from
>interaction/collecting/disturbing/killing, eating, etc, we lose touch with
>our whole environment, our fellow species, our roots and our planet.  It is
>a dead end. Especially if we who are naturalists at heart, by avocation, by
>our makeup and training, buy into it. Keep in mind that no species of
>marine mollusk has ever been driven to extinction by shell collectors.  Or
>even by man, really. (The Hawaiian Achatinellas and Carelias, arguably
>might die out -- or already be extinct as in the case of Carelia species --
>as a result of man's activities, since man illadvisedly introduced the
>snails that killed them.  But keep in mind, even there, that it wasn't
>shell collectors who did this but government agencies.)
>
>It is up to us and others in hobbies and interests like ours, to help
>educate the politicians, the governments, as to the real problems, and
>dangers, and stop taking the rap!  Right, as someone earlier said, our
>collecting activities do add to the pressure on some already scarce
>species.   But our pressures are far less than the least of their natural
>predators.  Want to increase the stock of queen conchs?  Get rid of the
>rays and the lobsters and the blue crabs and the octopus and the tulip
>shells, and, oh yes, and the sea turtles.  This is a web we live within.
>All the strands have to work.  There was a time when early man got a lot of
>his protein from sea life that he could catch in the shallows -- Largely
>mollusks. And there were probably more of those guys than there are shell
>collectors today. (We aren't a large group, you know.) If we weren't
>killing them off by massive dredging operations, garbage dumping,
>fertilizers, beach renourishment, all that litany of horrors we impose on
>the oceans, there would never be any problems for which shell collectors
>get to take the position of scapegoats.
>
>Well, I have about a thousand other things I would like to say on this
>subject.  But I won't. (I don't even want to touch the museum issue!)  We
>are liable to shut down Conch-L again! <GRIN!> Suffice it to summarize:
>
>We aren't the problem. And the sooner we realize that and start hitting
>hard on the real problems, the safer this hobby will be, and, by extension,
>the safer this whole planet will be. We're just on the edge a bad
>situation.  I have been with this list since its birth, almost three years
>ago now, and have seen this business of blaming each other for taking
>shells crop up again and again.  And, as Tom Eichhorst said a few days ago,
>in so many words, we're preaching to the choir.  The 382 people on Conch-L
>today are some of the few who know and care about the fate of shells.
>Don't sling guilt at each other, please!
>
>Lynn Scheu
 
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