3 ms·
> whales . . . sustainable That's maybe 100,000 people doing the hunting. Not a world-wide hunt to support the needs of maybe 50 million people in the develop
by JJMcJ 4y ago
> whales . . . sustainable
That's maybe 100,000 people doing the hunting.
Not a world-wide hunt to support the needs of maybe 50 million people in the developed world as in 1850.
Whaling continued into the 20th Century in a big way and grew more intense in the hunting methods as time progressed, e.g. harpoon guns instead of rowing around in small boats.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThe word "potentially" was in the original, along with an example using a small sustenance-existence low-technology hunter population. "Sustainable" inherently means utilisation within the rate of replacement. See, e.g., Herman Daly, Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development: Selected Essays of Herman Daly. https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=03FD75FCC8A6F6B40625790C2FA1D55F https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=03FD75FCC8A6F6B40625790... In particular, Daly notes that when extraction rates exceed replacement, adding additional capital does not increase harvest. This situation has been realised in multiple fishing and marine-hunting activities, with catastrophic population collapse of fish, whale, seal, otter, and dophin populations in multiple instances. Which is to say that your comment is in agreement with the one it responded to, though it highlights where nonsustainable practices emerge, and their consequences: nonsustainability. I'm not finding any readily-available estimates of pre-columbian arctic native populations, though the present Inuit population is about 150,000. I'd suspect that the earlier populations would be lower.