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If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale. In order to catch this much fish, you're going to kill tons of other anim

If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale. In order to catch this much fish, you're going to kill tons of other animals, discard tons of nets and other fishing equipment, saying it's "sustainable" is probably a lie in most every sense.

stouset 5y ago
The uncomfortable reality is that there is almost no “sustainable” anything at our current population scale. Certainly not at anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I think this is a cop out that needlessly encourages people to not try to find sustainable solutions. Yes, the road to sustainability is hard and long, but a path does exist that achieves sustainability without population reduction. Discouraging people from seeking that path does nobody any good.
  - k__ 5y ago
    Or it's simply eco-facism. I think, we should move to sustainable solutions, but I don't believe in over population
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      What do you mean by "I don't believe in overpopulation?" Overpopulation is definitely a real thing in ecological systems, so I assume you mean either: 1) We are not currently in an overpopulated state. 2) We are extremely unlikely to reach an overpopulated state in the nearish future. One important thing to note is that overpopulation is not a fixed threshold, but one that is dependant on a number of ecological, environmental and technological factors that makes it extremely hard to completely accept 2).
      - k__ 5y ago
        I mean, I believe in the concept, but I think humanity is far from reaching that state. Which doesn't mean that I think we can't live above our means with the population we already have. I just think it's a question of optimizing production and not restricting population growth.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Does that path exist? I am not entirely convinced that you can have our current population living with our current standards -- especially if the standards spread from say that USA to the poorest nations, sustainably.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Not in our current economic structuring, but our current economic system places little to no value on sustainability. I wholey believe that we can replicate the aspects of our standard of living that have the biggest impacts on our quality of life. We can have nice clothes, we just need clothes that last a decade rather than a month or a year. We can travel, we just have to travel a bit slower using electric power. Education is a huge factor in our quality of life and can be done very sustainably. We can still have plenty of food, we just might not have year round cheap access to stuff that doesn't grow locally. So there is definitely a path to a very good aproximation of our standard of living that is sustainable for the entire planet. We just aren't currwntly on that path, or even really headed in that direction .
  - stouset 5y ago
    Can we improve things? Sure. Should we invest in improving things? Absolutely. Neither of those permits the kind of pervasive magical thinking people have where we can somehow raise even a fraction of our 7 billion people to anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle without further accelerating environmental collapse. Or even maintaining the number of people with such a lifestyle that we currently do. Our planet fundamentally lacks the resources for sustained consumption anywhere near the scale we're operating at, no matter how green we try to make things. Even just on a purely thermodynamic level we're running out of energy budget without overheating the planet[1]. And that's completely ignoring greenhouse gases. [1]: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      I think you'd be surprised as how sustainabily we could approximate the western standard of living if we had the will power to try as a whole society. There would certainly be sacrifices, but I suspect we would also gain significant quality if life improvements. What this requires is a change of mindset and I don't think attitudes like yours help. We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current exponential growth rate, but that growth may be slowing as population growth slows. It is also quite likely that extraplanetary energy sources could be available by then. I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        >I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument. Lack of resources are a common cause of war. Lack of resources was a problem for humanity for its entire existence and only in the last 100 years has it ceased to be a problem. I'd love it if people voluntarily decided to keep this abundance state going instead of doing the usual party everything away until it's gone behavior.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  I don't know. If you removed all the worst parts of the supply chain of a cell phone - the slave labor, the conflict minerals - it would cost like what, four times more? Boohoo. But nearly everything else about it, like the IAP sold on it, or the music you listen to or the books you read, is already essentially sustainable. And people spend literally hours on their phone, globally, consuming and spending in totally sustainable entertainment, and not just in the West. For the consumer, sustainability in the West really is about food, and specifically, it really is about meat. There's no amount of equivocation that will change that. And affecting it - by simply not buying meat - really is as easy and as effective as it appears.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    Maybe if you only ever bought a single phone and never discarded it, creating more e-waste that would not have a big impact on the environment. But if everyone buys one or two new phones a year then you have a mountain of waste. Of course you don't see it because it's a mountain that forms in some far away land where people are so poor they have to scavenge in the detritus of your electronics and can't afford to eat any meat anyway.
    - yissp 5y ago
      I think a big part of this is the lack of repairability and long-term software support, though. There's no good reason we need to be replacing our phones (and a lot of other electronics) as often as most of us currently do.
    - triceratops 5y ago
      But if phones cost 4x what they do now, as GP suggests, people would replace their phone far less frequently.
      - an_opabinia 5y ago
        Yes. The root cause of unsustainability is still something horrible - the abuse of labor - but not literally the same as environmental goals. This is a case where intersectionality really shines. You really can align goals because ending labor abuse is good for the environment. Likewise, with meat, the root cause of unsustainability is the animal abuse that enables cheap meat. I'm definitely not blaming the consumer here. Of course you could make sustainable meat, it would just cost 10-400x more (Eating Animals is a great, broad take on this you could read).
Enginerrrd 5y ago
>If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale This statement is silly. There is A scale at which fishing is sustainable. The issue is that we are likely well over that.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  This is like saying your amazing lock-free architecture is scalable, as long as you define scalable to mean "at most one thread."
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Huh? Just because something is scalable, doesn't mean it is scalable indefinitely. There very clearly exists a scale at which fishing is sustainable and a scale at which it is not. You can argue what the tipping point is, but you can't argue with that fundemental premise.
    - whoisburbansky 5y ago
      I phrased this quite poorly; my quibble isn't with the concept of scaling or that it's possible to fish sustainably at some defined scale. I was getting at the idea that most people's definition of doing something _at scale_ is going to be well above the tipping point, in the same way that processing data _at scale_ usually invokes rows of server racks, and not a single thread on a dinky laptop.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        "Scalability" means that you can adjust the scale at which you are operating. The definition of "At scale" just means operating at whatever is a sufficient scale to solve the problem at hand. If you only need one dinky laptop to solve the problem, you can operate at scale with a dinky laptop. So "fishing at scale" is fishing at a scale that statisfies the demand for fish. Since demand for fish will drop as sustainabile fishing regulations increase costs, there is absolutely a way to fish at scale sustainably.
shkkmo 5y ago
I think that there is some confusion as to what you are trying to say. 1) There is no way to catch the amount of fish we catch in a sustainable manner. (No sustainability at our current scale.) 2) There is no way to catch any amount of fish sustainably. (No sustainability at any scale.) I think people are intrepreting you as saying #2 when you are really saying #1. The answer would appear to be that if that we need to reduce the scale at which fiahing operates. This means sustainability requirents that increase the costs to fishermen so that overall demand cam be curbed to a sustainable level.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  As far as I understand it, Seaspiracy claims that 2) is the case and we should all stop eating fish entirely.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    I think Seaspiracies argument is that current "sustainable fishing" efforts are not actually sustainable and are designed to appear to solve the problem while avoiding regulations that would actually enforce sustainable fishing (and hence massively disrupt the industry.) If that is their argument, the push to stop eating fish would be justified only in the current environment where there is no ecologically sustainable source. Maybe I being too generous, but "fishing can never be sustainable" appears to be blatantly false so I feel we have to look for the "strongest plausible interpretation".
  - tashoecraft 5y ago
    I interpreted it as unless the fishing are doing is entirely local (the example in the movie being the African fisherman) it can be sustainable, but really and type of fish most of us buy is definitely not sustainable no matter what organization says. That sustainable fishiers fudge the numbers to work and farming produces it’s own set of problems
  - avereveard 5y ago
    Which is silly since one can make a completely isolated self perpetuating fish farm given enough money, heck even building it disconnected from the sea is a possibility with today technology.
isleyaardvark 5y ago
If marine biologists are to be believed, Seaspiracy is not a reliable source of information.
jiofih 5y ago
You must have missed the part saying that most fish sticks use farmed fish.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Fishing at scale? Pun not intended (I presume).

stouset 5y ago

The uncomfortable reality is that there is almost no “sustainable” anything at our current population scale. Certainly not at anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle.

shkkmo 5y ago
I think this is a cop out that needlessly encourages people to not try to find sustainable solutions. Yes, the road to sustainability is hard and long, but a path does exist that achieves sustainability without population reduction. Discouraging people from seeking that path does nobody any good.
- k__ 5y ago
  Or it's simply eco-facism. I think, we should move to sustainable solutions, but I don't believe in over population
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    What do you mean by "I don't believe in overpopulation?" Overpopulation is definitely a real thing in ecological systems, so I assume you mean either: 1) We are not currently in an overpopulated state. 2) We are extremely unlikely to reach an overpopulated state in the nearish future. One important thing to note is that overpopulation is not a fixed threshold, but one that is dependant on a number of ecological, environmental and technological factors that makes it extremely hard to completely accept 2).
    - k__ 5y ago
      I mean, I believe in the concept, but I think humanity is far from reaching that state. Which doesn't mean that I think we can't live above our means with the population we already have. I just think it's a question of optimizing production and not restricting population growth.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Does that path exist? I am not entirely convinced that you can have our current population living with our current standards -- especially if the standards spread from say that USA to the poorest nations, sustainably.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Not in our current economic structuring, but our current economic system places little to no value on sustainability. I wholey believe that we can replicate the aspects of our standard of living that have the biggest impacts on our quality of life. We can have nice clothes, we just need clothes that last a decade rather than a month or a year. We can travel, we just have to travel a bit slower using electric power. Education is a huge factor in our quality of life and can be done very sustainably. We can still have plenty of food, we just might not have year round cheap access to stuff that doesn't grow locally. So there is definitely a path to a very good aproximation of our standard of living that is sustainable for the entire planet. We just aren't currwntly on that path, or even really headed in that direction .
- stouset 5y ago
  Can we improve things? Sure. Should we invest in improving things? Absolutely. Neither of those permits the kind of pervasive magical thinking people have where we can somehow raise even a fraction of our 7 billion people to anything approximating a typical Western lifestyle without further accelerating environmental collapse. Or even maintaining the number of people with such a lifestyle that we currently do. Our planet fundamentally lacks the resources for sustained consumption anywhere near the scale we're operating at, no matter how green we try to make things. Even just on a purely thermodynamic level we're running out of energy budget without overheating the planet[1]. And that's completely ignoring greenhouse gases. [1]: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    I think you'd be surprised as how sustainabily we could approximate the western standard of living if we had the will power to try as a whole society. There would certainly be sacrifices, but I suspect we would also gain significant quality if life improvements. What this requires is a change of mindset and I don't think attitudes like yours help. We are hundreds of years from that thermodynamic limit at our current exponential growth rate, but that growth may be slowing as population growth slows. It is also quite likely that extraplanetary energy sources could be available by then. I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      >I'm sort of unclear where you are goin with your argument? Are you arguing we need to kill of people or economically retard developing countries energy use? Neither of those seem reasonable stances so I am left wondering what you see as the path forward and what value you see in advancing your argument. Lack of resources are a common cause of war. Lack of resources was a problem for humanity for its entire existence and only in the last 100 years has it ceased to be a problem. I'd love it if people voluntarily decided to keep this abundance state going instead of doing the usual party everything away until it's gone behavior.
an_opabinia 5y ago
I don't know. If you removed all the worst parts of the supply chain of a cell phone - the slave labor, the conflict minerals - it would cost like what, four times more? Boohoo. But nearly everything else about it, like the IAP sold on it, or the music you listen to or the books you read, is already essentially sustainable. And people spend literally hours on their phone, globally, consuming and spending in totally sustainable entertainment, and not just in the West. For the consumer, sustainability in the West really is about food, and specifically, it really is about meat. There's no amount of equivocation that will change that. And affecting it - by simply not buying meat - really is as easy and as effective as it appears.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  Maybe if you only ever bought a single phone and never discarded it, creating more e-waste that would not have a big impact on the environment. But if everyone buys one or two new phones a year then you have a mountain of waste. Of course you don't see it because it's a mountain that forms in some far away land where people are so poor they have to scavenge in the detritus of your electronics and can't afford to eat any meat anyway.
  - yissp 5y ago
    I think a big part of this is the lack of repairability and long-term software support, though. There's no good reason we need to be replacing our phones (and a lot of other electronics) as often as most of us currently do.
  - triceratops 5y ago
    But if phones cost 4x what they do now, as GP suggests, people would replace their phone far less frequently.
    - an_opabinia 5y ago
      Yes. The root cause of unsustainability is still something horrible - the abuse of labor - but not literally the same as environmental goals. This is a case where intersectionality really shines. You really can align goals because ending labor abuse is good for the environment. Likewise, with meat, the root cause of unsustainability is the animal abuse that enables cheap meat. I'm definitely not blaming the consumer here. Of course you could make sustainable meat, it would just cost 10-400x more (Eating Animals is a great, broad take on this you could read).

Enginerrrd 5y ago

>If Seaspiracy is to be believed, there's no such this as sustainable fishing at scale This statement is silly. There is A scale at which fishing is sustainable. The issue is that we are likely well over that.

whoisburbansky 5y ago
This is like saying your amazing lock-free architecture is scalable, as long as you define scalable to mean "at most one thread."
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Huh? Just because something is scalable, doesn't mean it is scalable indefinitely. There very clearly exists a scale at which fishing is sustainable and a scale at which it is not. You can argue what the tipping point is, but you can't argue with that fundemental premise.
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    I phrased this quite poorly; my quibble isn't with the concept of scaling or that it's possible to fish sustainably at some defined scale. I was getting at the idea that most people's definition of doing something _at scale_ is going to be well above the tipping point, in the same way that processing data _at scale_ usually invokes rows of server racks, and not a single thread on a dinky laptop.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      "Scalability" means that you can adjust the scale at which you are operating. The definition of "At scale" just means operating at whatever is a sufficient scale to solve the problem at hand. If you only need one dinky laptop to solve the problem, you can operate at scale with a dinky laptop. So "fishing at scale" is fishing at a scale that statisfies the demand for fish. Since demand for fish will drop as sustainabile fishing regulations increase costs, there is absolutely a way to fish at scale sustainably.

shkkmo 5y ago

I think that there is some confusion as to what you are trying to say. 1) There is no way to catch the amount of fish we catch in a sustainable manner. (No sustainability at our current scale.) 2) There is no way to catch any amount of fish sustainably. (No sustainability at any scale.) I think people are intrepreting you as saying #2 when you are really saying #1. The answer would appear to be that if that we need to reduce the scale at which fiahing operates. This means sustainability requirents that increase the costs to fishermen so that overall demand cam be curbed to a sustainable level.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
As far as I understand it, Seaspiracy claims that 2) is the case and we should all stop eating fish entirely.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I think Seaspiracies argument is that current "sustainable fishing" efforts are not actually sustainable and are designed to appear to solve the problem while avoiding regulations that would actually enforce sustainable fishing (and hence massively disrupt the industry.) If that is their argument, the push to stop eating fish would be justified only in the current environment where there is no ecologically sustainable source. Maybe I being too generous, but "fishing can never be sustainable" appears to be blatantly false so I feel we have to look for the "strongest plausible interpretation".
- tashoecraft 5y ago
  I interpreted it as unless the fishing are doing is entirely local (the example in the movie being the African fisherman) it can be sustainable, but really and type of fish most of us buy is definitely not sustainable no matter what organization says. That sustainable fishiers fudge the numbers to work and farming produces it’s own set of problems
- avereveard 5y ago
  Which is silly since one can make a completely isolated self perpetuating fish farm given enough money, heck even building it disconnected from the sea is a possibility with today technology.

isleyaardvark 5y ago

If marine biologists are to be believed, Seaspiracy is not a reliable source of information.

jiofih 5y ago

You must have missed the part saying that most fish sticks use farmed fish.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Fishing at scale? Pun not intended (I presume).