This case study examines the link between marine resource management, and the universal contraceptive use as part of family planning among married couples in the lobster fishing village of Punta Allen, located in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Several reasons appear to contribute to small desired and actual family sizes. Some of these include a medical clinic staff effective in promoting family planning, cooperative and private resource ownership, changing cultural attitudes, geographical limitations to population and economic growth, and a desire to conserve the environment for aesthetic and economic motives. Lastly, families desired to preserve a sustained balance between benefiting from lobster harvests today and safeguarding this marine resource for their children in the future.

If people engaged in economies of primary resource extraction are to enjoy an economically sustainable future, and if we are serious about helping bequeath to our children natural wildlands worthy of protection, it may behoove communities to follow the example of the Punta Allen fishing cooperative. This approach will not work everywhere. Where population pressures on dwindling and degraded resources are high, privatizing resources to the exclusion of intruders will not reverse an inherently unsustainable situation. Nevertheless, Punta Allen’s privatization of aquatic resources supports the notion that, in places that have resources left to conserve and a sustainable population, conservation and economic sustainability can be achieved wedding resource tenure with community-level regulations.