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Once upon a time rivers were clear and full of fish. There was no need for anyone to get in a boat and head out to sea to catch fish. Essentially the fish 'came
by Theodores 8y ago
Once upon a time rivers were clear and full of fish. There was no need for anyone to get in a boat and head out to sea to catch fish. Essentially the fish 'came to us' (not that they saw it that way).
With the advent of farming the rivers became full of the soil washed off the land and were no longer clear. Fishing now needed a boat.
At first this fishing was easy, however we ate the big fish and made various fisheries a thing of the past, case in point being the Newfoundland Grand Banks, once famous for cod but no longer.
So what do people eat now instead of 'cod and chips'? This amuses me as there is no problem for them. They get some other fish shaped object - 'battered' - and make judgements of how tasty or otherwise it is. Maybe this fish comes from another hemisphere, perhaps it has some unusual name, maybe it tastes 'different'. Marketing conquers all though, this mystery fish caught somewhere off Antarctica will have a fancy name as if it is some deluxe, exotic variety. It is as if the 'chef' went out of his way to offer something more exciting than 'humdrum cod' specifically for them, charging them more for this 'nouvelle cousine' in the process. No discussion of what happened to the cod will be mentioned although the despicable newspaper that will be read with the 'faux cod and chips' will talk about the evils of the E.U. and the Spanish fishermen invading 'our' shores.
Soon these fools will be eating the scummiest bottom-feeding detritus that can be scooped from the ocean's depths. They will do it if not every day but as the mood takes them until the day they die. Discussion will be made on how well the faux-cod is cooked and how lovely it was. The thinking won't go much further than their bellies and bowels.
Meanwhile, driving in their cars and going on their cheap holidays, these consumers, whom the world's economy depends on, will be pumping untold tonnes of carbon dioxide into the oceans, acidifying them to make life in the seas quite intolerable for our friends with gills. The cruise boats they holiday on and the container ships that bring them their cheap junk from China will also make so much noise in the oceans that any fish with ears will not be able to hear anything but the sound of diesel internal combustion engines.
There is no penalty for complicity in this madness. However, the cost of stepping outside of it is quite high. If you don't eat your fish or your beef or your mechanically removed horsemeat then there is not a place at the table for you. Unless you have got a good excuse. But nobody says they are 'allergic to beef' or 'allergic to fish'. You can only be allergic to peanuts. Much like how folks in the mafia have to have slaughtered someone to get a space at the table, so it is with meat and fish, to be accepted by your peers you have to partake in the ecocide.
There are those that are vegetarian and wanting to live life differently. But these people are somewhat drowned out by the vegan crowd, many of whom have entirely different motivations. This new vegan crowd are more likely to have an eating disorder that has nothing to do with saving the planet. Plus they can't get five minutes into a conversation without wanting to tell all that they are vegan. Their fanaticism plus the cost of their fake-meat products, e.g. that organic almond milk flown in from California, is no example for others to follow.
We will see if the meek inherit the earth, maybe the fatties scoffing all the fish are going to be going extinct shortly after they have scoffed the last plastic-infested jellyfish they can find in the oceans.
- bbarn 8y agoWhat you've just described is less an argument for vegetarianism and more an argument for population control. If the fish come to you, and you're incapable of overfishing them, your whole fantasy stops. That said, you're right in that vegetarianism is just not sustainable in this size a population - but not just for elitist vegan snobs. If we all ate mostly vegetables, and got our proteins from other sources, we'd be facing a scarcity of land to grow crops as well as sources of fertilizer. The math just doesn't work at scale, and that's why purely vegetarian nations are generally that way: because they are poor, not enlightened. They also aren't usually particularly healthy. Ironically the healthiest cultures (if you'll permit the generalization) are those eating mostly fish-based diets like the Pacific and Mediterranean.
- Theodores 8y agoWhere I work we used to have a lot of life in the river, now there are just place names and left over bits of infrastructure from those former times when there were fish. Unless you do your own bit of local (or global) history seeking then you cannot imagine times to have been different. Hence I shared what I know about how rivers used to be. That was mere observation, as is my commentary on how people just move on from whatever they have just made extinct to some other fish without batting an eyelid. Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'. Anyway, as for these 'poor vegetarian nations', you mean India!!! India wasn't poor and did not have famines until the British arrived with their guns. Before then India made and exported many things, fabrics being a speciality. The likes of the East India Company closed that down. A lot of enlightened thinking has came out of India. And it still does. Now if you are going to live in Scandinavia then you are going to have a tough time of it being vegetarian. Those long winter months don't help you grow your oranges. As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below. Despite the significant numbers of humans on the planet there is plenty of arable land, albeit mostly owned by the 1%. We no longer need cows to pull the ploughs, the Dutch invented the harness for the horses bred by the British to do that. But we no longer need any beasts of burden, we can make tractors and power them with things like sunlight if we wanted to, cutting big oil out of the agri-business. There is no need to be defeatist and to 'compromise'. Or to insist on eating fish just because some Japanese bloke lived to 112 possibly because he ate fish every day.