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Those are all good ideas, I agree, and I commend anyone with the dedication to pursue them. But even just not eating fish and setting a positive example to your

Those are all good ideas, I agree, and I commend anyone with the dedication to pursue them. But even just not eating fish and setting a positive example to your friends and colleagues etc is still worth doing. I became vegan because of the example of a friend and several of my friends, while not vegan, have been eating less meat & fish as a consequence of my example and are more conscious in the choice of the meat & fish they do eat. I'd love to see the animal agriculture industries forced to pay for their externalities but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. But in the meantime a lot of positive change has come just from people being made more aware of where what they eat comes from and what it costs to get it there. Non-dairy milks have become so popular, for example, that they've put a huge dent in the dairy industry's profits.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Not denying that changing your habits and setting an example for your friends has some impact. I'm only trying to frame it in the relation to the problem. Its marginal first order effects are negligible. This concept was hard for me to accept emotionally too, in the space of energy use - whether or not I reduce my usage of electricity and gas has near-zero immediate impact on anything except my wallet. Such is the problem of scale. The irony is, that the very same thing that's individually almost meaningless, is also the solution once everyone follows it. And there's a point in the middle somewhere, when the idea becomes popular - like vegetarianism today - and suddenly its impact becomes much greater than before. It gets noticed by the market, it starts flowing through feedback loops and begins affecting everything else. One person in a million refusing to eat fish is meaningless. One in a thousand starts to sound like a business opportunity, and business begets more business. The trick is, how to get from here to there. Basically, how to start and sustain a movement. I guess my whole point here is: if you care about a social problem then do your individual thing (here: stop eating fish). But don't stop there, try to do more. Try to speed up the change instead of just changing yourself and hoping others will follow. If we know anything about society, we know this: there are two primary motivators for changing behavior - things that impact one's sense of identity/ego, and things that impact one's wallet. Popularizing fish abstinence is an ego-based solution. Taxing the fishing industry is the economics-based one. We should pursue both.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Not denying that changing your habits and setting an example for your friends has some impact. I'm only trying to frame it in the relation to the problem. Its marginal first order effects are negligible. This concept was hard for me to accept emotionally too, in the space of energy use - whether or not I reduce my usage of electricity and gas has near-zero immediate impact on anything except my wallet. Such is the problem of scale. The irony is, that the very same thing that's individually almost meaningless, is also the solution once everyone follows it. And there's a point in the middle somewhere, when the idea becomes popular - like vegetarianism today - and suddenly its impact becomes much greater than before. It gets noticed by the market, it starts flowing through feedback loops and begins affecting everything else. One person in a million refusing to eat fish is meaningless. One in a thousand starts to sound like a business opportunity, and business begets more business. The trick is, how to get from here to there. Basically, how to start and sustain a movement. I guess my whole point here is: if you care about a social problem then do your individual thing (here: stop eating fish). But don't stop there, try to do more. Try to speed up the change instead of just changing yourself and hoping others will follow. If we know anything about society, we know this: there are two primary motivators for changing behavior - things that impact one's sense of identity/ego, and things that impact one's wallet. Popularizing fish abstinence is an ego-based solution. Taxing the fishing industry is the economics-based one. We should pursue both.