[Ecotheology 8 (2000) 111-128] Religious Responses to Fisheries Decline in Irish Coastal Communities with a Comparison to the Pacific Northwest Region, USA * Shawn Hinz and Susan Power Bratton Introduction Worldwide, there is great concern for the depletion of commercial fish stocks (FAO 1997; Le Sann 1998). Much academic ethical analysis of fisheries has been based on Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the com- mons’—a simple model of human behavior that concludes: ‘individu- als locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring universal ruin’ (Hardin 1968; de Steiguer 1997; Baden and Noonan 1998). Fishing management has integrated Hardin’s presuppositions into policy design, thereby assuming all fishers are self-profit maxi- mizers, who are inveterate free riders, unaware of conservation. Recently, anthropologists have drawn attention to the dynamics of small, traditional fishing communities, many of which have existed for centuries without collapsing the populations of harvested species, and all of which have some form of indigenous environmental regula- tion (McGoodwin 1990; Cordell 1989; Dyer and McGoodwin 1994; Pinkerton and Weinstein 1995). This work points to two important deficiencies in the religious environmental ethics literature—relatively little is known about: (1) how specific communities or trades develop an ‘environmental ethic’; and (2) how religious practice and belief respond to changing environmental concerns in industrialized cul- tures. The purpose of this study is to document the impact of fisheries decline on religious beliefs, superstition and concepts of animal pro- tection in coastal communities in the Republic of Ireland. Fisheries in the North Atlantic, North Sea and the Irish Sea have suffered major collapses in the last two decades (FAO 1997; MacGarvin 1990; Ken- nedy 1995; Charles 1996; Berrill 1997; Kurlansky 1997; Soares 1998; * This project is funded by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust as part of a Ramp-up grant to stimulate undergraduate involvement in research.