Habitattitude | Protect Our Environment | Do Not Release Fish and Aquatic Plants

Prevention

Educate yourself about your hobby's potential environmental consequences - Like any hobby or activity that shares resources, there is an implicit, yet often unrealized responsibility to conserve these resources.*

In the case of aquarists, pond owners or water gardeners, our shared resources are water (our aquatic systems) and the live species we keep. By caring for these species in enclosed systems, we assume certain responsibilities:

• to care for the species well-being
• to maintain the "closed" aspect of their artificial environment<
• to properly dispose of these species (fish or plants), if they do not fit into our artificial aquatic system, and<
• to follow the laws of the State regarding the acquisition, collection, possession, purchase, sale, release and transfer of ownership

If we fail to embrace these responsibilities, our hobbies and sources of enjoyment will continue to face greater scrutiny regarding what we are allowed to do, and will continue to add to negative public misperceptions about these activities.

*The "law of the commons" is as follows: Each household has the right to take resources from and put wastes into the commons. To accumulate wealth, each household believes that it can acquire one unit of resources or dump one unit of waste while distributing one unit of cost across all of the households with whom the commons is shared. Thereby, the gain to the household appears large and the cost very small. Some households accumulate wealth more rapidly than others and this, in turn, gives them the means to access an even larger share of the commons.

The fallacy in the logic of the commons lies in the failure to recognize that all households are attempting to do the same thing. Thus, on average, one unit of gain for a household actually produces a net one unit of cost for each household. However, selfish households accumulate wealth from the commons by acquiring more than their fair share of the resources and paying less than their fair share of the total costs. Through Habitattitude^TM, we want to avoid this fallacy, educate aquarists, pond and water garden owners about their responsibilities and promote these alternatives to release as a new way to conserve our environment. To learn more about "The Tragedy of the Commons," see this resource.

Resource: "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin, Science, 162(1968):1243-1248.