Wealth & Money Quote by Maurice Strong

Strong’s line works because it smuggles a moral argument into the cool language of capital management. By swapping “fish” for “asset” and “ocean” for something you can “mine,” he reframes overfishing as the dumbest kind of investment: liquidating principal to juice short-term returns. “Mine” is the killer verb here. Mining implies extraction until depletion, a one-way trip. Farming implies stewardship, systems, and a future. He’s not pleading for dolphins; he’s warning that the balance sheet is lying.

The intent is a shove aimed at financiers and policymakers who still treat natural resources as infinitely replenishing. Strong isn’t talking to weekend anglers; he’s talking to the money behind industrial fleets, the kind that can empty a stock faster than regulators can count it. The subtext is blunt: subsidies and capital flows are the real engines of ecological collapse, and “growth” is often just a euphemism for accelerated drawdown.

Context matters because Strong built his influence at the crossroads of business and global environmental governance, helping define the modern “sustainable development” playbook. That era’s rhetorical trick was to translate conservation into the dialect of markets so the powerful would listen. His phrasing makes a pragmatic, even self-interested case: if you keep financing extraction-as-usual, you’re not just harming ecosystems; you’re erasing the very resource your industry depends on. It’s an indictment of bad capitalism masquerading as common sense.