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Fisheries managers in the United States are required to identify and mitigate the adverse impacts of fishing activity on essential fish habitat (EFH). There are additional concerns that the viability of noncommercial species, animals that are habitat dependent and/or are themselves constituents of fishery habitat may still be threatened. We consider a cap-and-trade system for habitat conservation, individual habitat quotas for fisheries, to achieve habitat conservation and species protection goals cost effectively. Individual quotas of habitat impact units (HIUs) would be distributed to fishers with an aggregate quota set to maintain a target habitat "stock" of EFH conservation. Using a dynamic, spatially explicit fishery simulation model we explore the efficiency and cost effectiveness of an IHQ policy versus alternative marine protected area (MPA) configurations, at reducing the risk of extinguishing a habitat dependent species of unknown spatial distribution. Our findings indicate that an IHQ policy with a conservatively established habitat target is better suited to the protection of non-target species than a rotating or fixed MPA policy.

This dissertation contributes to recent scholarship on the cultural significance of the sea in pre-modern Britain by examining how writers from Chaucer to Marvell marshaled historically specific representations of seafaring to explore the intricacies of a basic problem that underlay such questions and that was becoming increasingly complicated by the momentum of religious reform, that of how and whether it was even possible to discern a divine reality that structured human existence. Moreover, during what might be called the "long" era of reform from the later Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, sea imagery gradually reveals the emergence of skepticism out of the theological controversies of that era--skepticism ranging from doubts about the medieval Church's claim to be the uniquely authentic representative of God on earth to anxiety that, rather than being organized by a beneficent divine providence, human life was a matter of weathering or navigating the vagaries of fortune in an indifferent cosmos.