Doing the daily mechanics of harvesting from nature, such as setting gear, following seasons and watching catches, gives a working knowledge of how that ecosystem fits together. The rhythm of the job also trains a person to the slower pace at which nature itself moves. Hands-on labor in nature can be a form of ecological education, not just a way of using it up.
Someone who makes a living from nature can shift from seeing it purely as a resource to take from, to seeing themselves as one part of its cycle of life with a stake in keeping it going. The change comes from inside the work, not from outside instruction.
A lifetime spent working one stretch of ocean lets a person measure decline against what they saw with their own eyes: a sea once crowded with fish, lobsters, whales and seals. That firsthand baseline makes loss visible in a way that later arrivals, who never saw the abundance, cannot easily grasp.