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We humans ought to leave the oceans alone and stop fishing altogether.
by ada1981 5y ago
We humans ought to leave the oceans alone and stop fishing altogether.
- teakettle42 5y agoYou know that’s not going to happen, so I’m curious what your comment was intended to elicit. Follow-up questions like mine?
- bigDinosaur 5y agoIs there a reason it could not happen, or do you just think it won't? I wouldn't be so sure in say, ~100 years, that we'll be doing much significant ocean fishing.
- teakettle42 5y agoI didn’t say it couldn’t, I said it wouldn’t. Why would everyone voluntarily stop eating seafood?
- Nursie 5y agoThey won't, but perhaps they should, because we are decimating sea life and destroying undersea ecosystems. You're right though, people won't. People won't even stop hunting and eating known-endangered animals.
- kuhewa 5y agoWe are destroying ecosystems on land as well. Everything is connected and there is no free lunch — the answer isn't to completely stop doing one or the other only to greatly increase impacts on the other parts of the biosphere, it is to produce food with sustainable, science based management, which is absolutely possible in the ocean.
- Nursie 5y agoBut that might not include anything recognisable as "fishing" or harvesting wild populations. As was said to you eleswhere - much of the world does have a choice of where to get their calories. Taking from the sea until it has nothing left to give is a profit-driven exercise in the main, not one of caloric necessity.
- kuhewa 5y ago> But that might not include anything recognisable as "fishing" or harvesting wild populations That's just not true. About half of scientifically assessed fish stocks at or above target levels, thus sustainably harvested, or they are successfully rebuilding from previous overexploitation i.e. fisheries management is working. One can easily consume seafood without engaging in "Taking from the sea until it has nothing left to give". Doing so reduces the land footprint of your diet, and for some seafood like whitefish, small pelagics or cultured bivalves, you will probably decrease your carbon footprint, even relative to a vegan diet.
- bigDinosaur 5y agoWhy would everyone voluntarily stop hunting? People don't go out and run ocean trawlers every day for their meals, they buy it at the supermarket, and for most the source is irrelevant.
- labster 5y agoTrawling to trolling is only a Levenshtein distance of two.
- bigDinosaur 5y agoNot sure what your point is. Are you saying I'm trolling because I'm saying that consumers will mostly be fine with farmed (and possibly 'lab grown') alternatives in the future? The sources used for our food have changed dramatically over time, no reason for that to not happen again.
- kuhewa 5y agoBut there are highly abundant stocks of wild fish that can be harvested sustainably en masse, like pollock, it's really hard for scalefish aquaculture to entirely outcompete the simplicity of that — allowing nature to feed your fish and control all the necessary variables. I don't think we'll see capture fisheries totally disappear.
- jacobolus 5y agoTrolling is a fishing term. The sense of 'internet troll' is based on a fishing metaphor. Trawling and trolling are slightly different fishing techniques. Both are ways to catch fish from a moving boat, but trawling involves dragging a net, while trolling means trailing a baited line.
- bigDinosaur 5y agoHuh, the more one learns.
- dustymcp 5y ago
- imnotlost 5y agoMore than half of seafood is now produced from farmed fish so my guess is that it is possible. The fish farming industry has a wide range of serious problems but maybe it could save ocean wildlife? https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture
- pvaldes 5y agoThey are comparing apples with oranges in that chart. Cultured algae, molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms, and cultured fish versus... wild fish. So they are removing wild molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms and wild algae from one side of the equation in an article that focus in the message that that part has decreased. Lying with statistics. If we compare wild fish against farmed fish only, the result would be really different. And there is pirate fishing also. Some companies under-report a percentage of their captures routinely, to hide that they fish more than are allowed to. Not so easy to do in sea farms when you can't produce more than the space assigned to you.
- kuhewa 5y agoI'm pretty sure the wild capture fisheries data includes shellfish etc. FAOs numbers for total fisheries production matches aquaculture + capture fisheries that says 'wild fish'. Often fish is used in a very loose sense in fisheries.
- aaron695 5y ago
- ada1981 5y agoIn the same way we humans will likely never stop raping children or keeping slaves, sure. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop. What a lovely family we have.
- daguava 5y agoI'm curious why you even left this post - you know you won't change anything. You know nobody will agree with you. What's left?
- brigandish 5y agoI agree. Have you noticed that there are people who don't eat fish out there? There's quite a few, as an ideal it's something most would surely agree with, to differing degrees of enthusiasm.
- pvaldes 5y agoSomebody not liking fish is perfectly OK in my book. Everybody being forced to stop eating fish because a few don't like and lobby against it, is totalitarianism, and in the practice is genocide. We should be fully aware that many millions of humans depend on sea food to survive. 'Let them eat candy instead' is not a realistic solution.
- brigandish 5y agoThere's six hundred million vegetarians in India alone, that's not a few. Still, even if we ignore that, why should anyone not be allowed to lobby against the eating of fish? Speech is free, is it not? To close down such speech would surely be totalitarian. I also wonder, since you used the word genocide, what word would you use to describe the amount of death wrought on fish? Or the farming of them? Would being brought up solely to be eaten and never to roam free come under your use of totalitarian? > 'Let them eat candy instead' is not a realistic solution. Have you thought about letting people eat all kinds of non-meat foods? I enjoyed tempeh on savoury rice tonight. This morning was pumpkin soup with a mixed bean salad. Lunch was very light, just toast with almond butter. All very tasty, healthy, and high in fibre, protein and macro-nutrients. Regardless, in most instances, vegetable farming produces much higher yields - and thus calories - per unit of farmland than farming animals ever could. It's a more realistic solution than expanding animal farming.
- 5y ago
- pvaldes 5y ago> We humans ought to leave the oceans alone and stop fishing altogether. Fishing better? Yes for sure. Stop fishing? Nope. This is not an reality grounded option.
- kuhewa 5y agoWhy? That just means we would be fucking up the land more. No joke, if we don't eat fish we are eating something that requires land to grow, and agrarian land usually comes from destroying biodiverse ecosystems.
- PretzelPirate 5y agoWe already grow enough plant matter on land to feed to entire world population, we just feed most of it to animals instead. If we stop fishing, we don’t need to use more land to grow more food, we just need to shift consumption towards plants and away from inefficient options like cows.
- pvaldes 5y ago> If we stop fishing, we don’t need to use more land to grow more food > we just need to shift consumption towards plants Both terms are contradictory. Why are we still discussing basic reality facts? Plants need land to grow. Lots of it.
- ada1981 5y agoAs has been pointed out, the majority of land is used to grow plants to feed animals - also not needed for consumption. Not sure re discussing basic facts, but happy to help you get a handle on reality.
- kuhewa 5y agoIn some idealized world where everyone acts collectively toward the goal of minimising animal production, sure, but that's not actually how it works. If the supply of fish is constrained, demand for terrestrial animal protein and related land use increases. For arguments sake though, let's grant that all terrestrial food production becomes plant based: adding some well managed fishing would then reduce the land footprint required to produce the calories we need. Some of the ecosystems that have been razed into biodiversity deserts to produce crops won't be needed for agriculture, and can return to wilderness.
- 5y ago