The article essentially points out extreme overfishing, examples of extinction already occurring, and outlines some conservation efforts. Suggests that we may be the last generation to fish from our oceans.
Article title as I see the article by following the URL kindly submitted here: "How the world’s oceans could be running out of fish." So I see from the URL that there must be an alternate title for this article, which the submitter used (as is quite fair to do). This is an example of an article title that asks a yes/no question for which the answer is yes.
"Entire species of marine life will never be seen in the Anthropocene (the Age of Man), let alone tasted, if we do not curb our insatiable voracity for fish. Last year, global fish consumption hit a record high of 17 kg (37 pounds) per person per year, even though global fish stocks have continued to decline. On average, people eat four times as much fish now than they did in 1950."
This news report is consistent with many other studies I have seen of this issue since the 1980s. The Grand Banks cod fishery
which seemed inexhaustible as recently as my own young adulthood, has collapsed. Many species of ocean-going fish have largely disappeared from the human diet in many countries, not because people no longer like those varieties of fish, but because those varieties of fish are no longer readily available.
Weird, when I originally submitted, the actual title reflected the title in the URL. Guess the BBC changed it at some point, as someone has for this post too.
'Downshifting' sounds like reducing economic growth, which would destroy investment in emerging economies as the developed ones have less use for them. The resulting poverty would kill people. 'Degrowth' sounds like a lot more of the same thing, with even worse results.
Fair enough, if there's enough economic downfall to such extent that basic human needs can't be covered on an area which relies on exporting required resources rather than being able to sustain itself, deaths would be probable. Although in many cases this could be alleviated to an extent by optimal share of available resources rather than allowing huge inequities to form(as is often the case due to corruption for example).
> as developed ones have less use for them
What an interesting way to put it, I have to admit. Talk about lives when you consider entire economies and ultimately people as resources to sustain your own standard of living.
It gets more interesting when one wonders for example the indirect deaths caused by using commercially optimal energy sources(e.g. fossil fuels) rather than relying on sustainable energy sources. Of course the comparison is silly, it is the fundamental greed for having more which drives us into using sub-optimal solutions which simply won't work in larger scale.
There's also the factor of aiming for actual direct happiness via covering the basic needs rather than hoarding for more and competing for resources which happens at the expense of other people's quality of life. Consider Foxconn factories as an example. If only workers quality of life and working conditions would have been given more value, dozens of suicides and years in desperation would've been avoided. But of course, someone would've had to pay more for their iPhone, which wouldn't have been a problem either in that case. Now it really is a big deal.
Ultimately the problem itself is in relying on growth which then requires more resources than there are available to sustain the growth. Either you reduce the resource consumption or the system balances itself at the expense of those who are the least responsible for the unbalance. Of course, starting with the animal life and nature as we've seen.
> What an interesting way to put it, I have to admit. Talk about lives when you consider entire economies and ultimately people as resources to sustain your own standard of living.
That's how it works. Charity certainly hasn't solved the problem.
> commercially optimal energy sources(e.g. fossil fuels)
Interesting argument, that. Do you consider how many would die from spending more on energy by shifting to commercially sub-optimal energy sources? All of the money has to come from somewhere, after all, and foreign investment is usually easy to cut. So's charity.
> If only workers quality of life and working conditions would have been given more value, dozens of suicides
Recheck the statistics about suicides at Foxconn plants:
"The suicide rate at Foxconn during the suicide spate remained lower than that of the general Chinese population, as well as all 50 states in the United States."
> Ultimately the problem itself is in relying on growth which then requires more resources than there are available to sustain the growth.
Malthusianism never stops to consider that one of the main ways to make advances is to make processes more efficient, which is the primary way to sustain growth. Compare how many people farm now to how many people farmed in 1900.
But equally, I think it's unrealistic to expect growth to continue. We live in a finite world - as much as possible we should be looking for sustainable ventures.
And ideally, bringing up third-world standards of living and lowering ours (in the first world) to match. Will be a major culture shock for some people...
I'm sorry, why veganism? You could make an argument for vegetarianism here. Shooting for veganism, on the other hand, just sounds like an agenda. I'm not really aware of non-food animal products we get from fish.
As a counter point, management of US fisheries seems to be finding a good balance:
U.S. seafood catch at 17-year high
"Last year's increase, up 23% by weight over 2010 levels, is evidence that fish populations are rebuilding. Still, a number of fisheries remain in trouble."
Canada thought it was finding a good balance with increasing fish caught while the Grand Banks fishery was collapsing.
Then they discovered that improvements in technology were letting them more efficiently catch the few remaining fish, and there were suddenly no more fish left.
Therefore an increase in fish being caught is not necessarily evidence that populations are being managed sustainably. It could merely be evidence that they are being managed less carefully. (Good for now, worse in the long run.)
(For God's sake can we skip the predictable Betteridge's Law Wikipedia reference?)
This seems to happen a lot and not just in the ocean. Population dynamics are complex. Things often seem inexhaustible until they're not and that changes has a nasty habit of happening almost overnight. Look at the Passenger Pigeon, the Alaskan King Crab, bison, various whale species (some may never recover from the whaling industry), cod, etc.
I think this is exacerbated by it being hard to tell what exactly is in the ocean. With land animals it tends to be somewhat more obvious.
Some governmental oddities haven't helped here. Britain really screwed up in how it joined the EU (then the EEC) in the 1970s with the CFP (Common Fisheries Policy) [1], which is (now) a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons.
Norway didn't join. And they're swimming in oil wealth. Not that I think oil fields would've become a common resource (the North Sea oil fields aren't AFAIK).
And then there's the insatiable appetite of the Japanese for bluefin tuna that will probably drive the fish to extinction in a matter of decades at most.
IMHO all of these resource problems stem from the fact that there are simply too many of us and we're unable to live within our means.
"too many of us and we're unable to live within our means"
To me a change of practices would be far more preferable to eugenics, which itself is a horrendously ugly option and a proxy for stupidity. Even with 90% of the population murdered, who's to say the same problems wouldn't reappear some time further in the future when the population reaches current levels again.
It's entirely possible to say "there are too many people on the Earth" and not believe in eugenics at the same time without being contradictory. Strongly implying that they're one and the same isn't conducive to progress.
To me, the OP's statement read as "we have too many people for the resources/practices we have at the moment", which means a change of practices is most likely our best (only?) option.
We have too many stupid people, or rather stupid people in power. And with that, we have evil as its replacement.
But my suggestion would be people try to awaken to their lifeforce which is infinite, (just like the cosmos) and then to look at places with the highest and then lowest birthrates: to lower birthrates you raise standards of living, right, you don't kill people?
I am pretty sure that you do not need to worry about Betteridge's Law coming up. The headline is not a question and after reading the article I do not know how you could restate it as a question with the answer being "No."
Almost all the fish I buy is farm-raised. I trust it more than wild-caught for some reason; I don't want to be eating anything caught off the coast of Fukushima for example.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has an excellent guide to sustainable fish, web searchable, printable and as Android and iOS apps. They also distinguish between farmed, wild caught and if appropriate method of catch:
I've often thought that the US should set up "national parks" in some coastal waters, where no fishing of any sort would be allowed, and no motorized boats.
These would then serve as "reservoirs" of marine life.
Well, this is the perfect time to introduce sea farming - famers seasteading and growing fish (and other seafood) on the open ocean (on their own lots of water). I always found the idea pretty interesting...
This is an interesting thing. Fish are over fished, stocks decline, the price goes up, fishing companies go out of business. The response has been sustainably farmed fish, that market is up hugely of course (its worth investing in if you are a futurist) There are also indications that changes in the ocean temperature and acidity are moving fish populations around such that a 'fishery collapse' might also be 'they went somewhere else'.
The last few years the salmon season was halted in California. Between low water for spawning and lots of fishing the catches were going down and few fish were returning to spawn. Now they have recovered somewhat and California is getting a better idea of what the population can support. Meanwhile it gets very expensive to eat fish.
Its for this reason I doubt that fish stocks will go completely extinct. Unlike land stocks where it 'cost' zero to wait for game to go by, fish require that you be in a boat to go get them. That costs money. If the return becomes so uncertain that you don't know if you will make or lose money on the outing, rational actors will stop playing.
Most of the mass extinction / exhaustion theories I've read are based on predicting a systemic collapse rather than the last fish of a particular type is removed manually. What is not clear is whether or not these systemic collapses actually occur. Localized food chains have some great examples (like coral reefs dying due to trawling and then losing the entire ecosystem sort of like the rain forest becoming farmland) but the deep sea stocks are much more difficult to kill off in that way.
Rare breed here, non-mil, non-gov, non-local computer programmer in the Florida Keys. Fish stocks are declining so noticeably year after year after year. You will not be able to mark-off coordinates as a fish refuge without local multi-generational fishermen families (with more political clout than you can imagine here in not-quite-Florida) complaining and getting their way. It's quite a lost cause. And I won't purchase farm-raised fish, because I'm well aware of the PCB content of your Tilapia. I wish I knew what to tell you, except that your children won't know anything about Tuna, Ahi, or Hogfish.
You shouldn't be surprised by the confusion. I sometimes suspect it is intentional on the part of restaurants; "ahi" sounds a lot classier than "tuna", because it doesn't make you think of canned tuna.
I understand your point. But when someone starts out their sentence with "I wish I knew what to tell you" you would like to think that they knew that Ahi, AKA yellowfin or bigeye tuna, was two species of tuna.
"More than 80% of the fish has disappeared from your oceans. Your children, when they are your age, will not be able to see wild fish. The oceans will be completely empty in 30 years. Unless..... YOU stop eating fish now AND please vote for political parties that will stop subsidizing the fishing industry." http://www.thebestofrawfood.com/Raw-Food-blog.html#Stop-Eati...
Myself, I personally would just ban fish farms globally. They are polluting, don't provide healthy fish for consumption and require smaller wild caught fish to maintain.
I might add: I'd also place a ban on all Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations as unhealthy, cruel, environmentally unfriendly (requiring cleared land growing GMOs for feeds) and perhaps unnecessary. Although, some are better than others such as those that feed sprouted grasses rather than grains.
Animals should live in their natural habitats. First and foremost we should adapt to them and serve them, not them to us. Domestication can only go so far, and ironically as we overly domesticate animals, so we ourselves become domesticated and consumed without even knowing it.
I am not in favour of population control and mentioned it in a comment I made above.
I think feeding the population now has become a form of population control anyhow. Did you see the latest French study on GMO? Irradiated and pesticide laden food takes its toll not only humans but animals and bees (colony collapse disorder) too. I'd suggest moving to biodynamic farming methods gradually. Such food is more nutritious anyhow. For your interest, I can stop my appetite dead in its tracks with a zinc supplement, (that's soil depletion for you.)
Fish farms probably need improvement, but among our options for farmed protein sources, fish are one of the best. Generally very healthy, and they have a good conversion factor.
Also, good luck banning them globally. We don't have a world government just yet.
Lastly, refusing to eat any fish seems somewhat silly, unless you are willing to give up meat entirely. Our various other farmed meat sources really aren't that much better, and there are responsible fish options available. Just do some research.
Heavy metal toxicity in seafood from larger fish is a worry, even if the ocean was bursting with fish of all species all of a sudden. I haven't found farmed fish as yet up to my standards, just look at the colour of farmed salmon, and it doesn't make me feel too good after consuming. The best fish I have access to presently are sardines in glass from Spain.
World government worries me as it would threaten Israel (let alone everything else it deems bad) because it would become a scapegoat and distraction from its own evils. So I just ban certain fish in my own mind.
47 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 97.6 ms ] threadDon't bother if you are from the UK...
The article essentially points out extreme overfishing, examples of extinction already occurring, and outlines some conservation efforts. Suggests that we may be the last generation to fish from our oceans.
"Entire species of marine life will never be seen in the Anthropocene (the Age of Man), let alone tasted, if we do not curb our insatiable voracity for fish. Last year, global fish consumption hit a record high of 17 kg (37 pounds) per person per year, even though global fish stocks have continued to decline. On average, people eat four times as much fish now than they did in 1950."
This news report is consistent with many other studies I have seen of this issue since the 1980s. The Grand Banks cod fishery
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/grandbanks.htm
which seemed inexhaustible as recently as my own young adulthood, has collapsed. Many species of ocean-going fish have largely disappeared from the human diet in many countries, not because people no longer like those varieties of fish, but because those varieties of fish are no longer readily available.
And how many would this kill?
> as developed ones have less use for them What an interesting way to put it, I have to admit. Talk about lives when you consider entire economies and ultimately people as resources to sustain your own standard of living.
It gets more interesting when one wonders for example the indirect deaths caused by using commercially optimal energy sources(e.g. fossil fuels) rather than relying on sustainable energy sources. Of course the comparison is silly, it is the fundamental greed for having more which drives us into using sub-optimal solutions which simply won't work in larger scale.
There's also the factor of aiming for actual direct happiness via covering the basic needs rather than hoarding for more and competing for resources which happens at the expense of other people's quality of life. Consider Foxconn factories as an example. If only workers quality of life and working conditions would have been given more value, dozens of suicides and years in desperation would've been avoided. But of course, someone would've had to pay more for their iPhone, which wouldn't have been a problem either in that case. Now it really is a big deal.
Ultimately the problem itself is in relying on growth which then requires more resources than there are available to sustain the growth. Either you reduce the resource consumption or the system balances itself at the expense of those who are the least responsible for the unbalance. Of course, starting with the animal life and nature as we've seen.
That's how it works. Charity certainly hasn't solved the problem.
> commercially optimal energy sources(e.g. fossil fuels)
Interesting argument, that. Do you consider how many would die from spending more on energy by shifting to commercially sub-optimal energy sources? All of the money has to come from somewhere, after all, and foreign investment is usually easy to cut. So's charity.
> If only workers quality of life and working conditions would have been given more value, dozens of suicides
Recheck the statistics about suicides at Foxconn plants:
"The suicide rate at Foxconn during the suicide spate remained lower than that of the general Chinese population, as well as all 50 states in the United States."
http://www.economist.com/node/16231588
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-05-26/tech/30097107...
> Ultimately the problem itself is in relying on growth which then requires more resources than there are available to sustain the growth.
Malthusianism never stops to consider that one of the main ways to make advances is to make processes more efficient, which is the primary way to sustain growth. Compare how many people farm now to how many people farmed in 1900.
And ideally, bringing up third-world standards of living and lowering ours (in the first world) to match. Will be a major culture shock for some people...
U.S. seafood catch at 17-year high
"Last year's increase, up 23% by weight over 2010 levels, is evidence that fish populations are rebuilding. Still, a number of fisheries remain in trouble."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-seafood-20120920,0,261...
Then they discovered that improvements in technology were letting them more efficiently catch the few remaining fish, and there were suddenly no more fish left.
Therefore an increase in fish being caught is not necessarily evidence that populations are being managed sustainably. It could merely be evidence that they are being managed less carefully. (Good for now, worse in the long run.)
This seems to happen a lot and not just in the ocean. Population dynamics are complex. Things often seem inexhaustible until they're not and that changes has a nasty habit of happening almost overnight. Look at the Passenger Pigeon, the Alaskan King Crab, bison, various whale species (some may never recover from the whaling industry), cod, etc.
I think this is exacerbated by it being hard to tell what exactly is in the ocean. With land animals it tends to be somewhat more obvious.
Some governmental oddities haven't helped here. Britain really screwed up in how it joined the EU (then the EEC) in the 1970s with the CFP (Common Fisheries Policy) [1], which is (now) a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons.
Norway didn't join. And they're swimming in oil wealth. Not that I think oil fields would've become a common resource (the North Sea oil fields aren't AFAIK).
And then there's the insatiable appetite of the Japanese for bluefin tuna that will probably drive the fish to extinction in a matter of decades at most.
IMHO all of these resource problems stem from the fact that there are simply too many of us and we're unable to live within our means.
[1]: http://www.global-vision.net/facts/fact9_3.asp
To me a change of practices would be far more preferable to eugenics, which itself is a horrendously ugly option and a proxy for stupidity. Even with 90% of the population murdered, who's to say the same problems wouldn't reappear some time further in the future when the population reaches current levels again.
To me, the OP's statement read as "we have too many people for the resources/practices we have at the moment", which means a change of practices is most likely our best (only?) option.
But my suggestion would be people try to awaken to their lifeforce which is infinite, (just like the cosmos) and then to look at places with the highest and then lowest birthrates: to lower birthrates you raise standards of living, right, you don't kill people?
Did you read the article?
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.Aspx
Just because fish is farmed doesn't make it healthy. A high density pen will have high concentrations of everything.
These would then serve as "reservoirs" of marine life.
While the prohibitions aren't as clear cut as what you said, they are definitely in that spirit http://montereybay.noaa.gov/intro/mp/regs.html#prohibitions
The last few years the salmon season was halted in California. Between low water for spawning and lots of fishing the catches were going down and few fish were returning to spawn. Now they have recovered somewhat and California is getting a better idea of what the population can support. Meanwhile it gets very expensive to eat fish.
Its for this reason I doubt that fish stocks will go completely extinct. Unlike land stocks where it 'cost' zero to wait for game to go by, fish require that you be in a boat to go get them. That costs money. If the return becomes so uncertain that you don't know if you will make or lose money on the outing, rational actors will stop playing.
Most of the mass extinction / exhaustion theories I've read are based on predicting a systemic collapse rather than the last fish of a particular type is removed manually. What is not clear is whether or not these systemic collapses actually occur. Localized food chains have some great examples (like coral reefs dying due to trawling and then losing the entire ecosystem sort of like the rain forest becoming farmland) but the deep sea stocks are much more difficult to kill off in that way.
Ahi ⊆ Tuna : Ahi is a kind of Tuna
EDIT: subspecies -> two species
"More than 80% of the fish has disappeared from your oceans. Your children, when they are your age, will not be able to see wild fish. The oceans will be completely empty in 30 years. Unless..... YOU stop eating fish now AND please vote for political parties that will stop subsidizing the fishing industry." http://www.thebestofrawfood.com/Raw-Food-blog.html#Stop-Eati...
Myself, I personally would just ban fish farms globally. They are polluting, don't provide healthy fish for consumption and require smaller wild caught fish to maintain.
I might add: I'd also place a ban on all Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations as unhealthy, cruel, environmentally unfriendly (requiring cleared land growing GMOs for feeds) and perhaps unnecessary. Although, some are better than others such as those that feed sprouted grasses rather than grains.
Animals should live in their natural habitats. First and foremost we should adapt to them and serve them, not them to us. Domestication can only go so far, and ironically as we overly domesticate animals, so we ourselves become domesticated and consumed without even knowing it.
I think feeding the population now has become a form of population control anyhow. Did you see the latest French study on GMO? Irradiated and pesticide laden food takes its toll not only humans but animals and bees (colony collapse disorder) too. I'd suggest moving to biodynamic farming methods gradually. Such food is more nutritious anyhow. For your interest, I can stop my appetite dead in its tracks with a zinc supplement, (that's soil depletion for you.)
You're either in favor of limiting human population by some means, or are engaging in some hugely wishful thinking.
Also, good luck banning them globally. We don't have a world government just yet.
Lastly, refusing to eat any fish seems somewhat silly, unless you are willing to give up meat entirely. Our various other farmed meat sources really aren't that much better, and there are responsible fish options available. Just do some research.
World government worries me as it would threaten Israel (let alone everything else it deems bad) because it would become a scapegoat and distraction from its own evils. So I just ban certain fish in my own mind.
Come again?
Biodynamics is a spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.
... oh boy.