Care to enlighten me? (cooking LR)

[fkshiu]

There's a school of thought that the harvesting of live rock from the wild (done in a sustainable way) is actually more beneficial to wild reefs in the long run.

The thinking is that since the locals know they can make money off of the reef, it's in their best interest to keep it around. Put another way, if they weren't collecting the live rock for the ornamental aquarium industry, they would probably be blasting it and dredging it for "development".

That's how it works in a capitalist economy - money talks and if you can convince people that preservation of the environment is profitable, then they are far more likely to want to preserve it.

The whole idea of tourism is based on the same principle.