10 ms·

One of the more depressing things to read, is how back in the early days of America, one could just reach into the river/sea and grab a fish. E.g. lobsters we

One of the more depressing things to read, is how back in the early days of America, one could just reach into the river/sea and grab a fish. E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer[0]. And there's photographic evidence of overfishing too. [1] is a nice NPR piece about how the largest catch of the year at a particular spot in Florida has been dwindling. [0] - http://www.gma.org/lobsters/allaboutlobsters/lobsterhistory.html http://www.gma.org/lobsters/allaboutlobsters/lobsterhistory.... [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

imjk 8y ago
While that’s a very enlightening fact. I’m not sure how I would feel about jumping in a river and just getting swarmed by schools of fish or swimming in an ocean teeming with lobster. Still I agree that modern industrial fishing is having grave impacts on our environment and ecosystems.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's pretty sad that people are so used to lifeless rivers and oceans so they are scared of the idea.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  The river does not solely exist so you can swim in it and feel safe.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  Most animals are programmed to evade annoying swimmers.
xapata 8y ago
I heard an article on the radio measuring the proteins in trees. Apparently much of it in the Pacific Northwest forests comes from salmon carcasses that bears fetch from the stream and discard. I have no idea how they'd determine the source. Maybe I was paying attention to the road when they explained. So if the fish disappear, maybe the forest does, too.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  " I have no idea how they'd determine the source" Probably isotopes. It's always isotopes.
- tzahola 8y ago
  Ummm, trees incorporating protein from animals? I'm not sure that's how it works... Nitrogen at best, but not protein...
  - lawlessone 8y ago
    you are right http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=407 http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_...
mncharity 8y ago
Given that change blindness, I wonder if an interesting component of teaching history could be to emphasize 'things you would find jaw-droppingly different if you were dropped back in time'? Precise arrangements for where/when to meet ("at 10:10, on the corner of mumble and mumble") - because no cell phones. Boston Python, having an unusually large turnout... so someone needed to pull up an extra chair to the conference room table (instead of 150+waitlist) - because so fewer programmers. "Computer" is a job title. Chatting with the elevator operator. Going into downtown office buildings (no staff in the lobby), up and into an office, and wandering around looking for someone to ask where to find the person you're looking for (instead of presenting government-issued papers to be photographed by a security guard in the lobby in order to attend a meetup). As maybe a view of the future: Boston SIGCHI meetups (hosted at Amazon) have lately required signing an NDA to attend. No food or money for dinner in NYC? Head to the clam banks to get both. Manhattan is so noisy you have to yell to be heard by the person next to you... because of the immense flocks of extinct and unGoogleable Christmas Tree Birds (they looked like candle flames decorating trees). Real open-flame candles on Christmas trees. Theft by servants and employees as a commonplace aspect of the relationship. A British officer writing in shocked disbelief, 'the American officer... he, he _talked_ with his men... he asked them what they thought! he really did!'. Egyptian farming villages going on strike, to bring down Ottoman official wrath on intemperate local elites. And on and on. Anyone have favorites?
- jaggederest 8y ago
  My current point of concern is that I can go out and sit all evening without a mosquito bite. That was unheard of even 30 years ago when I was a kid. You'd be lucky if you didn't have one for every minute you spent outside. I think the insects are dying, and it's frightening. Second item would be watching the bison migrate on the plains. Literally horizon to horizon, a hundred thousand individuals or more in a group. More than ten bison for every person alive on the continent. Same with the passenger pigeons - the sky would go dark from dawn to dusk with the movement of 6 billion birds.
  - swsieber 8y ago
    To be fair, mosquitoes are the target of a fairly narrow, focused attack. That said, bees seem to be dwindling, so you have a point.
aaron695 8y ago
> E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer[0] I call total BS. Taking edible food, carting it and then plowing it into fields for edible food in 6 months time. Sounds like fantasy. Fish Fertilizer: A Native North American Practice? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/188/4183/26 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/188/4183/26 DOI: 10.1126/science.188.4183.26
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Lobsters weren't always "edible", not sure how it was viewed in Native American culture But if they're more than what you can eat and if using them as fertilizer works, why not
  - HankB99 8y ago
    Before refrigeration and large glass tanks the time between edibility and putrefaction was probably on the order of hours.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sametmax 8y ago
Equally terrible is the same comparison about bugs, but it's easier to make people flip because it happened in our lifetime (recent and so fast!): When I was young, I was driving a small bike. Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security. Nowadays, I'm still driving a bike, although a bigger one. But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year. Our garden is also quite silent, and I have to go to the country side to hear the bugs again. Given the massive role of fishes and bugs in our ecosystem, this is more than alarming. We already have a hard time making people aware of one single issue, such as global warming. But the reality of the scale of our fuck up is so beyond that, as we have a bleak role in: - global warming - killing most animals, including fished and bugs - then selectively breading the remaining life to serve our interest only, annihilating biodiversity and its balance - destruction of huge biomes by either exploiting it or polluting it - consuming resources at a rate that make even the most abundant of them seem scarce - polluting air and water to such a scale it's becoming a health issue Scientists are alarmed by one topic, saying we should do something before it's too late. However, take all those topics together and the big picture seems an impossible battle to win, which ironically we fight against ourself, that is leading us to the worst possible ending
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Awareness is relative. What you see in your formative years sets what's normal. Everything is relative to that. Older photos of abundance or massive piles of horseshoe crabs to be ground for fertiliser[0] are a strange alien world. People in their 20s are used to a lack of wildlife and consider it normal simply as that is what they grew up seeing, along with acres of monoculture in the "countryside". The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released. For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic. [0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertilizer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer Plentiful for that population, at that time. We're now 7+BILLION people and a lot of them are rich enough to demand fish, lobster and so on. Just in China we have millions of newly minted millionaires. Not to mention their middle class. Maine lobster is good? So get me some.
emodendroket 8y ago
Lobsters would just like wash up in big waves on the beach. Prisoners complained about having to eat lobsters too often. It's grim stuff.

imjk 8y ago

While that’s a very enlightening fact. I’m not sure how I would feel about jumping in a river and just getting swarmed by schools of fish or swimming in an ocean teeming with lobster. Still I agree that modern industrial fishing is having grave impacts on our environment and ecosystems.

maxxxxx 8y ago
It's pretty sad that people are so used to lifeless rivers and oceans so they are scared of the idea.
saagarjha 8y ago
The river does not solely exist so you can swim in it and feel safe.
singularity2001 8y ago
Most animals are programmed to evade annoying swimmers.

xapata 8y ago

I heard an article on the radio measuring the proteins in trees. Apparently much of it in the Pacific Northwest forests comes from salmon carcasses that bears fetch from the stream and discard. I have no idea how they'd determine the source. Maybe I was paying attention to the road when they explained. So if the fish disappear, maybe the forest does, too.

jonhendry18 8y ago
" I have no idea how they'd determine the source" Probably isotopes. It's always isotopes.
tzahola 8y ago
Ummm, trees incorporating protein from animals? I'm not sure that's how it works... Nitrogen at best, but not protein...
- lawlessone 8y ago
  you are right http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=407 http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_...

mncharity 8y ago

Given that change blindness, I wonder if an interesting component of teaching history could be to emphasize 'things you would find jaw-droppingly different if you were dropped back in time'? Precise arrangements for where/when to meet ("at 10:10, on the corner of mumble and mumble") - because no cell phones. Boston Python, having an unusually large turnout... so someone needed to pull up an extra chair to the conference room table (instead of 150+waitlist) - because so fewer programmers. "Computer" is a job title. Chatting with the elevator operator. Going into downtown office buildings (no staff in the lobby), up and into an office, and wandering around looking for someone to ask where to find the person you're looking for (instead of presenting government-issued papers to be photographed by a security guard in the lobby in order to attend a meetup). As maybe a view of the future: Boston SIGCHI meetups (hosted at Amazon) have lately required signing an NDA to attend. No food or money for dinner in NYC? Head to the clam banks to get both. Manhattan is so noisy you have to yell to be heard by the person next to you... because of the immense flocks of extinct and unGoogleable Christmas Tree Birds (they looked like candle flames decorating trees). Real open-flame candles on Christmas trees. Theft by servants and employees as a commonplace aspect of the relationship. A British officer writing in shocked disbelief, 'the American officer... he, he _talked_ with his men... he asked them what they thought! he really did!'. Egyptian farming villages going on strike, to bring down Ottoman official wrath on intemperate local elites. And on and on. Anyone have favorites?

jaggederest 8y ago
My current point of concern is that I can go out and sit all evening without a mosquito bite. That was unheard of even 30 years ago when I was a kid. You'd be lucky if you didn't have one for every minute you spent outside. I think the insects are dying, and it's frightening. Second item would be watching the bison migrate on the plains. Literally horizon to horizon, a hundred thousand individuals or more in a group. More than ten bison for every person alive on the continent. Same with the passenger pigeons - the sky would go dark from dawn to dusk with the movement of 6 billion birds.
- swsieber 8y ago
  To be fair, mosquitoes are the target of a fairly narrow, focused attack. That said, bees seem to be dwindling, so you have a point.

aaron695 8y ago

> E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer[0] I call total BS. Taking edible food, carting it and then plowing it into fields for edible food in 6 months time. Sounds like fantasy. Fish Fertilizer: A Native North American Practice? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/188/4183/26 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/188/4183/26 DOI: 10.1126/science.188.4183.26

raverbashing 8y ago
Lobsters weren't always "edible", not sure how it was viewed in Native American culture But if they're more than what you can eat and if using them as fertilizer works, why not
- HankB99 8y ago
  Before refrigeration and large glass tanks the time between edibility and putrefaction was probably on the order of hours.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sametmax 8y ago

Equally terrible is the same comparison about bugs, but it's easier to make people flip because it happened in our lifetime (recent and so fast!): When I was young, I was driving a small bike. Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security. Nowadays, I'm still driving a bike, although a bigger one. But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year. Our garden is also quite silent, and I have to go to the country side to hear the bugs again. Given the massive role of fishes and bugs in our ecosystem, this is more than alarming. We already have a hard time making people aware of one single issue, such as global warming. But the reality of the scale of our fuck up is so beyond that, as we have a bleak role in: - global warming - killing most animals, including fished and bugs - then selectively breading the remaining life to serve our interest only, annihilating biodiversity and its balance - destruction of huge biomes by either exploiting it or polluting it - consuming resources at a rate that make even the most abundant of them seem scarce - polluting air and water to such a scale it's becoming a health issue Scientists are alarmed by one topic, saying we should do something before it's too late. However, take all those topics together and the big picture seems an impossible battle to win, which ironically we fight against ourself, that is leading us to the worst possible ending

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Awareness is relative. What you see in your formative years sets what's normal. Everything is relative to that. Older photos of abundance or massive piles of horseshoe crabs to be ground for fertiliser[0] are a strange alien world. People in their 20s are used to a lack of wildlife and consider it normal simply as that is what they grew up seeing, along with acres of monoculture in the "countryside". The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released. For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic. [0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertilizer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>>E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer Plentiful for that population, at that time. We're now 7+BILLION people and a lot of them are rich enough to demand fish, lobster and so on. Just in China we have millions of newly minted millionaires. Not to mention their middle class. Maine lobster is good? So get me some.

emodendroket 8y ago

Lobsters would just like wash up in big waves on the beach. Prisoners complained about having to eat lobsters too often. It's grim stuff.