The state can no longer bury its head in the sand and hand over our reef animals in unlimited quantities to be sold for private profit without first examining environmental consequences. That is the moral of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Umberger case. The court’s unanimous ruling enforces our state’s cornerstone environmental law, the Hawaii Environmental Policy Act. HEPA demands that agencies and those who would profit from mining public resources first study the potential environmental impacts through a cooperative, collaborative and transparent process.

The Umberger decision’s practical effect is that existing commercial aquarium collection permits issued in violation of the law are invalid, and commercial collection must come to a halt until the necessary environmental review is complete. (As for recreational collection, those permits remain in effect, pending further proceedings in the circuit court.) What this means for the aquarium industry in Hawaii depends on what is revealed in the environmental review process — a process the Department of Land and Natural Resources and the industry should have undertaken decades ago.

The judicial moratorium on current collection is the direct result of DLNR’s and the industry’s longstanding refusal to engage in HEPA’s public vetting process — except to pronounce, out of thin air, that a trade that captures millions of fish from Hawaii’s reefs each year has no impacts on fish stocks. But unilateral, unsubstantiated declarations of sustainability are precisely the type of uninformed, closed-door decision-making HEPA forbids.

In fact, fish abundance is declining — on Hawaii’s reefs and in oceans throughout the world. DLNR’s own data show declining population trends among aquarium species along the heavily mined West Hawaii coastline. According to its 2015 report to the Legislature, fish are significantly depleted in areas the trade operates; a number of species have failed to respond to no-take areas established to protect them and have actually decreased since 1999.

In 1998, DLNR’s “State of the Reefs” report concluded that studies are necessary if aquarium collection is to continue. Yet no HEPA studies were done, while commercial collection intensified.

DLNR’s inaction is especially offensive to the plaintiffs in Umberger, who have witnessed first-hand fish, even whole species, disappear from the reefs they know and mālama. One wonders how our government could ignore the pleas of these recreational divers, Native Hawaiian subsistence fishermen, and conservationists for so long.

In a time when our reefs face unprecedented threats — ocean warming and acidification, coral bleaching, pollution — we can no longer play make-believe and imagine our oceans provide a bottomless bounty of fish. We can no longer tell ourselves our reef ecosystems will recover miraculously, no matter what we do to, and take from, them. Allowing vast numbers of marine animals to be exported and sold for private profit without any scientific assurance of sustainability — that is, guarantees of abundance, function in the ecosystem, and beauty — should never have been allowed to occur in the first place.

DLNR has several options for how environmental review should look. It could require all commercial permittees to prepare their own assessments or environmental impact statements (EISs); it could arrange for the top commercial collectors to complete a comprehensive EIS accounting for all permits; or it could establish a bona fide permitting program and complete the comprehensive EIS on its own. The ball is in the state’s court, as it always has been and should be.

For when it comes to our natural resources, it is unacceptable for the state to sleep at the wheel, or even worse, allow private entities to take the wheel. The state must be in the driver’s seat safeguarding our public resources from commercial exploitation, to ensure the Hawaii we enjoy and cherish today remains here for generations tomorrow.

Summer Kupau-Odo is an Earthjustice attorney and Rene Umberger is a longtime scuba diver; they were among plaintiffs in the recent Hawaii Supreme Court case over aquarium-fish collecting.