Before I say what I want to say on this subject, let me first state
that I fully support the idea of responsible collecting, and
minimizing one's impact on the environment, whether one is collecting
shells, cross country skiing, boating, hiking, or picnicing.  I do
return rocks to their original positions, I don't drop litter on the
beach, and I do carry a plastic bag with me, to pick up other
people's litter that I find while I am collecting.
Having said that, I also think that the situation has to be viewed in
perspective.  The amount of damage one diver can do on one tank of air
by manually breaking coral heads might look like devastation to
someone swimming behind him, but in an aerial view of the reef, his
"swath of destruction" would look like a bug bite on an elephant.
And like the bug bite, it would heal within a short time, as the
newly exposed undersides of rocks or coral heads became repopulated
with organisms.  Someone earlier today described the recovery of
shelling in an area where hundreds of square miles were totally
devastated by hurricane winds.  That recovery took several years, and
no wonder - that was the equivalent of skinning the elephant.  If the
environment can recuperate from a swath a hundred miles wide and a
thousand miles long, how long will it take to heal a scratch 3 feet
wide and a hundred feet long?  That is not a justification for
irresponsible collecting - but it is a reason not to overreact to the
few individuals who do plow their way through the environment as
though it were their personal property.  What they do isn't nice - it
isn't wise.  Maybe it isn't even ethical.  But no single person is
going to seriously damage a reef, a beach, or a tidal flat, no matter
what they do while they are there.  If nature were that fragile, it
would have ceased to exist long ago.
I also fully support the idea of sanctuaries where wildlife of all
kinds can live as free from human harassment as possible.  But making
silly laws like 2 specimens per species per collector per day doesn't
do much to help the environment.  It just just creates the
impression, accurate or not, that the people who drafted the
legislation are genuinely concerned about environmental issues.  They
can say they did something - why worry about whether it was something
useful?  If a person can locate 10 specimens while walking a transect
along a section of beach or reef, that is proof positive that
thousands of specimens are present (again, consider the aerial view,
the bigger picture).  Whether the person takes two specimens and
leaves the other eight, or collects all ten is utterly irrelevant to
the welfare of the ecosystem.  Of course, if there were ten thousand
people on the reef, the difference between 2 per person and 10 per
person might have some impact - but conchology just hasn't caught on
to that extent yet.  Let's hope it never does!  Another consideration
- while you are trying to decide which two of your five Pectens to
keep, and dutifully turning over stones, that commercial trawler on
the horizon is scouring a swath along the bottom, fourty or fifty
feet wide and three or four miles long.  Nothing that it overturns is
being replaced.  And the ten or twenty tons of scallops being
harvested are all being kept.  Yet, even the swath created by the
trawler will soon heal, provided the creation of such damage is
controlled - now there's a place where regulation makes sense - a
lion attacking our environmental elephant, not a mosquito.
Unfortunately, politicians are not well equipped to tackle a complex
problem that is essentially scientific in scope.  So the tendency is
often to underregulate what needs regulation, and to overregulate
what does not.
The greatest threats of all to the marine environment come from the
land, not the sea.  The intertidal marine environment recovers from
storm damage, commercial fishing, and even million gallon oil spills.
  But it does not recover from industrial pollution and agricultural
runoff, which is a constant destructive force rather than a sporadic
one.  Throw poison on the elephant and it may recover - throw poison
on it hourly around the clock for a week, or a month, or a year, and
sooner or later it's going to die - just as many reefs have.  But in
the meantime, let's get our legislators to make sure that the people
on the beach in front of the fertilizer factory only take two
periwinkles apiece.
Yes, it annoys me when people don't turn rocks back.  Often my
conscience makes me do it for them.  Sometimes I pick up a newspaper
that someone has dropped on the sidewalk too.  But not because I
think the local ecosystem will self-destruct if I don't.  Just
because I think it's the right thing to do.
 
Paul M.