On a purely climate ROI perspective, what's the potential benefit for investing in ways to catch criminals and reduce corruption in ways that benefit the climate vs other climate mitigation and adaption strategies?
I don't recall ever seeing this addresses in any of the climate coverage I've read, but it seems like an interesting angle. Of course there are other benefits to the rule of law as well.
If the goal was solely to ensnare trawler nets, then it could probably be done a lot more efficiently by just sinking some concrete blocks. But by putting sculptures down there instead, it gets media attention and public interest as well, which leads to funding to continue the project.
Huh, seemed pretty effective at first glance. It also lead me down a wiki rabbit hole from the dogger bank to similar nearby features, which came full circle with the Cleaver Bank where Greenpeace also sunk some boulders. Except apparently they were removed by the fishers...
The Cleaver bank is in 2015 considered for protection as a Marine protected area. The Greenpeace organisation considered the actions of the Dutch government in this direction too slow and sunk some large boulders on the seabed in May 2015 to increase the nature value.[7] Dutch fishers lifted the boulders on 16 June 2015, because they were afraid the boulders would damage their fishing gear.[8]
It started w concrete blocks -- but it proved too difficult to fund them in sufficient supply to be effective. Sculptures OTOH were a stroke of genius, flipping the script so they actually generate revenue and a virtuous cycle of attention and more installments.
One of the best things the Greeks decided to do with their artwork was label all the characters.
If we're going to be sinking sculptures into the sea, presumably intended to stay for a long time, I think we should carve statements on them saying why we put them there.
The illegal trawling on the African coast by Chinese trawlers are destroying the livelihood in many African countries. I wish the EU would work with those nations affected to intercept and arrest those boats.
This argues that the only alternative is privatization.
I don’t think that’s true.
The issue here is that land that no one has authority over means that there is also no enforcement and that it’s a race to the bottom as to who will manage to exploit it to the point where it is destroyed and useless to anyone anymore. And why wouldn’t you, morals aside? It’s basically free resources for the exploiter with externalities shared by everyone. It doesn’t mean the solution is private ownership. Look at national parks, they’re publicly owned but they’re not a no man’s land so a government has authority to enforce conservation rules there and punish those who pollute/damage the park.
That’s what parent comment was perfectly illustrating: “not EU waters, not EU trawlers, why even lift a finger if Africa is too corrupt or financially unable to protect these ecosystems and the Chinese too cynical to refrain themselves?”
The semantics of those words are not quite right. Yes a national park may sound like a "public" good. But it is privatized in the sense that there is an owner who looks after it. If international waters had an owner as diligent as the National Park Service things would be a lot different.
I mean I'd assume the world police would handle it. The NOAA and FWS currently manage Papahānaumokuākea but it would be quite a scale up for global areas maybe the Navy could enforce a baseline.
Well I reckon government (or a government-like entity) owned is as close as you’ll get to have laws enforced while not being privately owned (as in by an individual or a corporation).
"Generally, a state's exclusive economic zone is an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea, extending seaward to a distance of no more than 200 nmi (370 km) out from its coastal baseline."
"China has by far the largest distant water fleet in the world with at least 3,000 vessels, some of which have been spotted off the coasts of Africa and as far as Ecuador. This has raised concerns of overfishing at a time when global fish stocks are plummeting.
“It’s their strategy of establishing themselves as a big fishing power,” said Matti Kohonen, executive director of the FTC. “Then they end up breaking a lot of fishing laws by doing that."
The issue with a lot of places globally that Chinese owned fishing fleets(of highly questionable legal status) go is that they will decimate the area like a plague of locus and then just like locus they will move on once there is no longer any viable marine wildlife to catch(or even kelp / sea grass to collect). And the local governments either don't have the resources required to patrol their coastal exclusive economic zone or they intentionally don't want to antagonize China by stopping their illegal fishing fleets either because of political corruption or due to other more serious reasons.
Technically the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) can enforce Maritime law but I am not aware of them doing anything about illegal fishing fleets.
PRC has largest absolute DWF fleet size, but per capita she's underfishing, especially relative to TW and SKR, and behind TW, SKR, JP in terms of transhipping. Ultimately PRC with relatively small EEZ due to geography is naturally going to fish in the "commons" which she's entitled to, and even then she's still extracting less than her proportionate amount relative to population vs other actors.
>The issue
The issue is:
1) international system can't get shit together to legislate against subsidies to harm their own industries, including western nations like Europe, who also fishes illegally off Africa. There's no reason for PRC make herself less competitive unless there's global agreement.
2) bluntly PRC distant fishing drama is US driven propaganda to rationalize sending US coast guards to enforce against PRC interests. Which she did as new lawfare initiative right after these conveniently timed articles seeded narrative into MSM. But curiously not against the other DWF fleets like TW, SKR, JP that also behaves poorly but are incidentally also instruments US use against PRC interests.
For reference, for PRC's DWF fleet to match other top DWF fleet's capita fishing efforts, she would have to fish 3x more to match JP, 7x more to match SKR and Spain, 30X more to match TW. Unless you think PRC fishermen and citizens shouldn't have the same opportunities or access to seafood. They're certainly getting their disprortionate share of western media hit pieces and biased US enforcement efforts.
I'm familiar with Hardin's original essay (<https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of...>), as well as numerous critiques of it. Those have expanded in recent years, many with allegations that strike me as perilously thin of Hardin's alleged nationalist sympathies. It's worth noting that these concerns all but entirely seem to post-date Hardin's own death (after which of course he can no longer defend himself), and were not markedly present during his lifetime to the best of my knowledge.
Angus's own rebuttal claims, among other points that "it’s shocking to realise that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once."
This is in fact false as even a casual reading of the original essay will show.
Hardin's principle concern was population and the risk of global overpopulation. That presents his first example given the best available knowledge at the time he published the essay:
Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.
A second more trivial example, involves public parking:
A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with red plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space, the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons.
Two more substantial examples follow immediately:
Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance.
And, in the same paragraph:
Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in "the inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).
And a fourth:
The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek the parks are steadily eroded.
The fifth is pollution, to which Hardin sees no market-based solution:
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.
What Hardin's self-described critics seem to miss is that Hardin isn't arguing against commons per se but unregulated commons. That regulation may be provided by the market, through taxation or other incentives, through behavioural restrictions, quota systems, or even social mores. Hardin does suggest that property rights seem to be one of the more effective mechanisms available, but does NOT declar...
There has been some speculation that China is effectively trying to take control over Africa and has been rather successful at doing so on some fronts.
This reminded me of a burial trend I heard about in Florida to help build artificial reefs. Burial at sea is legal in the US(with restrictions) but the Mediterranean has a ton of ecological restrictions and a quick google search doesn't reveal if burial at sea is legal within those protected waters.
It's a cute arty way to draw attention to a huge problem, but lax legislation and penalties are the real culprit here. Net inspection and huge fines would make industrial scale strip mine fishing economically very risky. Again, the issue is that no one can police the offshore globalists who hide behind a veneer of philanthropy, woke virtue signaling and greenwashing.
Why are you blaming globalism for this? I'd argue that a lack of globalism is at fault here. Fishing in international waters is a problem that can only be solved by the global community. The problem here is that corporations and monetary interests act globally and always will while governments aren't.
Very few places outside of national EEZs where boulders would affect IUU fishing. Not much bottom trawling of sensitive areas other than a few seamounts. You have a point about intl management of high seas resources but globalism can result in sanctioned pillaging of nationally sovereign waters. Like "coastal African country, we (the EU) won't buy your peanuts if you don't give us rights to trawl, even though we aren't doing the scientific monitoring required to maintain sustainability for you like we would in our national waters we've already exhausted"
No, this is incorrect. They already do regulate it. It is already illegal. The problem is the regulations and penalties are pretty hard to enforce when any ship in the world can go anywhere else. Italy can pass all the regulations it likes, and a Chinese ship full of somewhat desperate people can illegally fish there anyway with whatever equipment they brought with them, until the ship gets individually caught. And please note: Italy's coastline is ... Big. Really big.
->No, this is incorrect. They already do regulate it. It is already illegal/
Who regulates 'it'? My point was that ships can fish anywhere but if all nation states enforced tight laws about nets the economic penalties would greatly lessen the practice.
This is a tragedy of the commons situation. The illegal fishermen are coming mostly from poor places that don't have the resources or the political will to enforce the rules. They then go fish in places that don't have the resources to enforce their laws.
It has been a consistent disappointment to me over the years that the EU failed to act to restrict these practices effectively. It’s always the poor, poor fishermen who need their livelihoods protecting, never mind that their livelihoods are under threat from their own actions.
Great project. But it makes me think that just dumping some tank traps down there (Three steel bars welded normal to each other) would work well to snag and tear nets and, if they don't encounter a net, support some sea life.
Where's the news-worthy-ness in that, though? I get the sense that a large point of this isn't functional but rather to cause people to talk and think about it.
Oh, I think the art makes it a great project (I should have been less pithy and more fulsome in my praise in the first sentence) for the vert reason you give.
I just meant it inspires me to think of a cheap and easy way to go "monkey wrench gang" in other places. In fact governments could even do this in places where they are trying to restore fisheries.
It will tear a net but either tear through or be lifted when the net is hauled. Seiners and trawlers are used to constantly repairing nets in between shots, it's not a huge deal.
OTOH snagging on a boulder is very disruptive to fishing and is quite dangerous, can result in wholesale loss of the gear and threaten the vessel. That will actually cause fishers to think twice.
55 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadhttp://www.vermontquarries.com/danby-quarry
And then there's also large granite quarries... like the Rock of Ages.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/rock-of-ages-granite-qua...
I don't recall ever seeing this addresses in any of the climate coverage I've read, but it seems like an interesting angle. Of course there are other benefits to the rule of law as well.
It's not. The sculptures also serve as a base for the plant life.
Furthermore, if the sculpture works out well, you can get a bunch of press. If it doesn't, you get to sink it in the ocean forever.
If we're going to be sinking sculptures into the sea, presumably intended to stay for a long time, I think we should carve statements on them saying why we put them there.
How does that compute?
http://links.org.au/debunking-tragedy-commons
I don’t think that’s true.
The issue here is that land that no one has authority over means that there is also no enforcement and that it’s a race to the bottom as to who will manage to exploit it to the point where it is destroyed and useless to anyone anymore. And why wouldn’t you, morals aside? It’s basically free resources for the exploiter with externalities shared by everyone. It doesn’t mean the solution is private ownership. Look at national parks, they’re publicly owned but they’re not a no man’s land so a government has authority to enforce conservation rules there and punish those who pollute/damage the park.
That’s what parent comment was perfectly illustrating: “not EU waters, not EU trawlers, why even lift a finger if Africa is too corrupt or financially unable to protect these ecosystems and the Chinese too cynical to refrain themselves?”
It seems solvable with a consensus of the stakeholders.
I mean I'd assume the world police would handle it. The NOAA and FWS currently manage Papahānaumokuākea but it would be quite a scale up for global areas maybe the Navy could enforce a baseline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone
"China has by far the largest distant water fleet in the world with at least 3,000 vessels, some of which have been spotted off the coasts of Africa and as far as Ecuador. This has raised concerns of overfishing at a time when global fish stocks are plummeting. “It’s their strategy of establishing themselves as a big fishing power,” said Matti Kohonen, executive director of the FTC. “Then they end up breaking a lot of fishing laws by doing that."
https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2022/10/26/Chinese-fi...
The issue with a lot of places globally that Chinese owned fishing fleets(of highly questionable legal status) go is that they will decimate the area like a plague of locus and then just like locus they will move on once there is no longer any viable marine wildlife to catch(or even kelp / sea grass to collect). And the local governments either don't have the resources required to patrol their coastal exclusive economic zone or they intentionally don't want to antagonize China by stopping their illegal fishing fleets either because of political corruption or due to other more serious reasons.
Technically the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) can enforce Maritime law but I am not aware of them doing anything about illegal fishing fleets.
PRC has largest absolute DWF fleet size, but per capita she's underfishing, especially relative to TW and SKR, and behind TW, SKR, JP in terms of transhipping. Ultimately PRC with relatively small EEZ due to geography is naturally going to fish in the "commons" which she's entitled to, and even then she's still extracting less than her proportionate amount relative to population vs other actors.
>The issue
The issue is:
1) international system can't get shit together to legislate against subsidies to harm their own industries, including western nations like Europe, who also fishes illegally off Africa. There's no reason for PRC make herself less competitive unless there's global agreement.
2) bluntly PRC distant fishing drama is US driven propaganda to rationalize sending US coast guards to enforce against PRC interests. Which she did as new lawfare initiative right after these conveniently timed articles seeded narrative into MSM. But curiously not against the other DWF fleets like TW, SKR, JP that also behaves poorly but are incidentally also instruments US use against PRC interests.
For reference, for PRC's DWF fleet to match other top DWF fleet's capita fishing efforts, she would have to fish 3x more to match JP, 7x more to match SKR and Spain, 30X more to match TW. Unless you think PRC fishermen and citizens shouldn't have the same opportunities or access to seafood. They're certainly getting their disprortionate share of western media hit pieces and biased US enforcement efforts.
Angus's own rebuttal claims, among other points that "it’s shocking to realise that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once."
This is in fact false as even a casual reading of the original essay will show.
Hardin's principle concern was population and the risk of global overpopulation. That presents his first example given the best available knowledge at the time he published the essay:
Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.
A second more trivial example, involves public parking:
A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with red plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space, the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons.
Two more substantial examples follow immediately:
Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance.
And, in the same paragraph:
Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in "the inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).
And a fourth:
The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek the parks are steadily eroded.
The fifth is pollution, to which Hardin sees no market-based solution:
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.
What Hardin's self-described critics seem to miss is that Hardin isn't arguing against commons per se but unregulated commons. That regulation may be provided by the market, through taxation or other incentives, through behavioural restrictions, quota systems, or even social mores. Hardin does suggest that property rights seem to be one of the more effective mechanisms available, but does NOT declar...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9554253/How-China-b...
There has been some speculation that China is effectively trying to take control over Africa and has been rather successful at doing so on some fronts.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18417/china-taking-over-a...
https://www.cremation.com/cremation-memorialization/eternal-...
Who regulates 'it'? My point was that ships can fish anywhere but if all nation states enforced tight laws about nets the economic penalties would greatly lessen the practice.
It has been a consistent disappointment to me over the years that the EU failed to act to restrict these practices effectively. It’s always the poor, poor fishermen who need their livelihoods protecting, never mind that their livelihoods are under threat from their own actions.
I just meant it inspires me to think of a cheap and easy way to go "monkey wrench gang" in other places. In fact governments could even do this in places where they are trying to restore fisheries.
OTOH snagging on a boulder is very disruptive to fishing and is quite dangerous, can result in wholesale loss of the gear and threaten the vessel. That will actually cause fishers to think twice.