Nearly two centuries elasped between the first commercial slaughter of sea otters in the California Current and the development of plans for managing the system's resources under the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (see Fig. 11.1). Over those two centuries, the commercial harvest left in its wake a trail of devastation: By their end, both the quantity and the diversity of life in the current had fallen to unprecedentedly low levels. The destruction was both cyclical and cumulative, the different sectors of the industry depleting their resources, colonizing new ones, and depleting them in turn without altering significantly their essential characteristics or patterns of behavior. Only during the 1970s, by which time California's domestic fisheries had nearly destroyed themselves, was there any indication that the cycle of depletion and colonization might at last be broken.

Despite changes in the style of government efforts to conserve the fisheries, the century of such efforts that preceded FCMA was continuous in character as well. Ideally, the function of government was to account the social costs of resource use and then to compel harvesters to behave in ecologically conservative ways so as to save them from the self-destruction to which a more narrowly construed market rationality might lead them.