18 ms·

The Ocean is Broken (2013)

284 points by drone 13y ago

ColinWright 13y ago
You may care to read the discussions from previous submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken
malandrew 13y ago
I really wish this story had had more pictures. It's a shame that all this is happening and no one seems to be really documenting it with photos and video and these images aren't being shown with these stories.
- lettergram 13y ago
  Apparently, there is nothing to see anways
  - pm90 13y ago
    What a tragedy :(
- chucknelson 13y ago
  Same here - I was expecting to see at least a picture of the tsunami debris they mention.
CalRobert 13y ago
I sometimes wonder if shopping for groceries is as frustrating for most people. I like Nutella, but when I see Palm Oil as the second ingredient I picture dead orangutans. I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal and think of the enormous amounts of diverted water and fertilizer runoff that goes in to producing feed. I enjoy fish, but thinking of this makes me sick to my stomach. I enjoy many beverages that come in plastic bottles, but that plastic, even if recycled, comes at substantial cost. Even veggies are largely wrapped in plastic anymore. Even though it's a small thing compared to everything else in life Keurig machines fill me with rage. And yet, I am guilty too. I love to travel, and this generally means flying since I live on an island. Therefore I contribute to ocean acidification, climate change, and of course the industrial processes that go into making planes. When people ask why I prefer not to buy fish and I say it's because of concern over the world's fisheries (I'd rather not dive in a global jellyfish swarm) they look at me like I'm from another planet. Who gives a crap, after all? One person's actions will not stop the destruction of our only planet. sigh
- deleted 13y ago
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  - checker 13y ago
    I think it's a mistake to consider our homeworld disposable, regardless of what worlds we may eventually live on.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - _broody 13y ago
    That sort of naive techno-utopian response isn't helpful at all in the face of reality. We lack the ability to stop the degradation of our current environment. That doesn't bring high hopes that we could undertake the exponentially more difficult task of building a new and better one in another planet, not before we run out of time.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      Is that true? The Great Lakes are cleaner now than they were in recent history (I guess if you consider zebra muscles, lampreys and the ongoing dangers of Asian carp that is less true). From the standpoint of industrial contamination things are certainly improving. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests (that is, given cooperation the number of fish in the ocean can be increased alongside increased extraction). There are all sorts of situations where the problem is that we aren't doing something we know would work.
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        Limited regions, mostly in advanced countries, where both environmental controls and offshoring of highly polluting activities has taken place, are cleaner. Many aren't. Within the US you have hog farms in the Carolinas, CAFOs in Kansas, the Mississippi river basin, Gulf of Mexico, and the great rivers of the developing world: the Nile, Amazon, Ganges, Yellow, Yangtze, and Indus, are in much worse shape. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests They're not doing a whole lot for fish stocks however. And that's the rather bigger problem.
Nux 13y ago
The ocean will recover after we're gone. Or after we've managed to put an end to poverty and educate everyone, though this seems an extremely distant dream.
diogenescynic 13y ago
>"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing." This makes me sick. So sad to see such waste and disregard for the ecosystem.
- drone 13y ago
  Indeed, and not to mention, depending on the by-catch, the stuff they're throwing away more be more valuable than what they're targeting, pound for pound, in different markets. That is to say, just because you're fishing for tuna and pulled up aji doesn't mean you've wasted your time. There is a great market for aji, and to be honest, you'd pay more for it in a sushi restaurant in my town than you would 90% of the meat in a yellow fin. By-catch is becoming a big deal as a general restaurant issue on the gulf coast.[0] A lot of people have been pushing bycatch as delicacies in local restaurants. Just last week, a chef prepared us several courses of bycatch as sashimi or aged, depending on the fish - including scorpionfish and blue runner. I definitely would not have had a better lunch if he brought out tuna and snapper. (And wouldn't have ordered them, either.) [0] - http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/971-the-total-catch http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/97...
lettergram 13y ago
Well this is the main reason I prefer to buy farm raised fish. It might not do much to help the eco system, or my health, but I feel at least the fish I am eating was raised with the purpose of being eaten. Further, I find it rather gross that fishermen essentially "throw away" everything they don't want.
- cwal37 13y ago
  It does help. In terms of output farmed fish are far and away the most efficient of livestock. It's been a few years, but if I recall correctly farmed tilapia produce 1kg per 1.1kg of feed. That's incredible compared to beef or even chicken. Also, encouraging well run fish farming operations takes pressure off of the wild stocks. In terms of eating meat, you're doing it right.
  - rprospero 13y ago
    A few years ago, I was at the local natural food market and I overheard the manager explaining to a customer that the store did not and would not ever carry farm raised fish. He explained how farmed fish lived in horrible conditions and that the only moral and sustainable option is to only buy free range fish which were caught from the ocean, where fish were part of their proper ecosystem. From an intellectual, sustainability standpoint, I suspect that you are right and that farmed fish is the way to go. However, this is why I've completely factored guilt and morality out of my environmental decisions - No matter what I do, one of the employees at the natural food store will tell me that I'm killing the planet.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  Sadly, that's not free of problems either. At least with open-net farming, the disease and sea lice can cause decreases in wild populations as well. Some of the mortality rates are really depressing. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=6d3af277-d143-4115-adf9-25a2825e342a http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...
BoppreH 13y ago
There was an "What If"[0] on xkcd about the ocean and ships' weight. The question itself was innocuous, but inside a parenthesis was this sentence: (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.) I'm afraid of the future. Very, very afraid. [0]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
- leobelle 13y ago
  And yet, are you still eating meat? Fish? What are you doing for your part?
  - geoka9 13y ago
    And probably driving a personal car, too. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-aci...
  - BoppreH 13y ago
    I don't buy fish and don't own a car. Edit: not that this is the extent of my actions, or even that I agree with this line of questioning.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - falcolas 13y ago
    Considering that every single thing we could eat would have an impact on the environment (typically negatively), it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.
    - ASpring 13y ago
      A fair point. Meat contributes far more of a negative impact on the environment than plants though. Consider the fact that it takes 8 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef[1]. That's absurdly wasteful in the quantities of beef that most American's eat weekly. [1]: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29892 http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
parasight 13y ago
Maybe it's worthwhile to spend more time and brains on saving our environment. At least until we are able to leave this planet. Which I don't see in the near future. We are able to walk on the moon, build atom bombs and heal deadly diseases. Are we smart enough to not destroy this planet?
- prawn 13y ago
  No. We are too greedy on the whole to avoid slowly destroying it. And even when we can leave this planet, we should still endeavour to keep Earth as well as we can.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  Maybe this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox.
TausAmmer 13y ago
It is changing, like everything, adopting to having less fish and animals. Interface is changing, it is becoming hostile with human life, more demanding and unforgiving, reflecting us in every step and way. "What can I do? I am only one person?", throws plastic wrapping against the wind.
hairama 13y ago
This is a great story--unfortunately, it's just that, a story. It's not surprising to me that there are people recklessly over-fishing, but without any numbers, no government can take action to stop it. On a tangential point, earth-life has survived five mass-extinction events, and a future one is almost certain. This doesn't negate the tragic, useless destruction of life, but the earth itself--and some form of life on it--will endure.
- pertinhower 13y ago
  Is this supposed to make me feel better? I'm real happy for the earth surviving and all, but I want to survive too, and I want people to survive. A philosophy of, "The earth will survive though we'll be gone—and maybe that will be justice," is ridiculous, because if we're gone, who will be left to celebrate the justice? Justice lies in the conscious mind, and if the conscious mind is gone, justice goes too.
  - pm90 13y ago
    It isn't supposed to make you feel better at all; just to make you aware of the fact that the Earth will probably survive even if you, me and all of our descendents don't.
    - MereInterest 13y ago
      Not in the slightest. It is the conscious mind that gives meaning to the world around it. There is no splendor in nature that is not in the eyes of those watching it. We have seen no evidence of any intelligence beyond our own. If we die, all meaning goes out of the world.
      - weirddog 13y ago
        Ironically, this is the same foolish anthropocentric sentiment that is preventing most people to care about the environment. Congrats, you're part of the problem.
jaegerpicker 13y ago
Reading stories like this are incredibly depressing. I love the ocean and aquatic ecosystems, always have. I grew up fishing and boating and still spend as much time as I can on those hobbies. I moved from Ohio to Maine in large part to be by the Ocean. I wish there was more that I could do to help affect real change. I volunteer, I try to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and I support a lot of different conservation groups but what I wish was that there was an open source like community to help with the science and education. I mean I would gladly help to contribute to some thing like that. For me that's worth more than chasing all the startup success in the world.
chrisgd 13y ago
I am really interested in companies like this: www.cleanseas.com.au that are trying to breed fish on their own. They still need to grow them in the ocean. Not sure of the cost to get there, but interesting none the less.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
The astounding decline of the ocean's fisheries is an incredibly important issue. But we all know that. What we all don't know is the solution. What we've got is a classic tragedy of the commons. It's made more difficult due to the international nature of oceanic fisheries - those little guys like to swim around, paying no heed to national boundaries. Plus there's all of that international ocean to police. Who's going to ensure that 3rd world fishermen aren't catching too much tuna, inadvertently killing too many dolphins, etc etc? Is it reasonable to expect the US to police the entirety of the Pacific Ocean's fish stock? We've seen this play before. And the only practical solution is not something which the leftists here are going to like. We have to privatize the oceans fisheries. It is imperative. It has to happen now. It has to happen yesterday. Fish stocks are collapsing. Fish stocks have collapsed. The fisheries have to be delineated by whatever means appropriate (species and/or location, depending upon the migratory/wandering patterns of each fish in question) and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The highest bidder will then have the right to determine how many fish each year/month are harvested, and by whom. The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned. This is simple stuff. It's been done before with other natural resources. We all need to get over our political differences and make it happen.
- drone 13y ago
  Countries can prevent markets from being utilized to off-load those fish. It's not entirely preventable, but it can be made difficult enough to not be profitable. The sad, unfortunate, fact is that some countries' (Japan, China, for two examples, EDIT: but certainly some citizens from nearly all countries) citizens care far less about the sustainability of their fishing, and more about having what they desire, when they desire. Should the price go up due to under-population? They're OK with that too. There are already systems in-place for tracking sustainable fish, and ensuring that each fish was sustainably harvested (my gulf wild is one such: http://mygulfwild.com/ http://mygulfwild.com/), but until the consumers in most markets demand them, they won't take off. For our family, we have a simple rule: we don't buy fish (based on species) that aren't as a rule sustainably harvested. Dead-stop. We don't buy them at restaurants either. Dead-stop. We prefer fish we catch ourselves, over all other fish, and secondly fish that are harvested and sold through markets which monitor for illegal behavior, where we know the operators of the market. I rarely eat fish from a restaurant where the chef doesn't know the chain from which that fish was supplied. Around here, there are enough good fish places and markets that a chef can't argue they couldn't know.
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Well we can start by taking pictures of it instead of just writing walls of text about it hoping the average person will read about it and care. Here's what pisses me off. Guy writes about how devastated the ocean is, doesn't take a single picture. The only photo in the whole article is him and his boat.
- almosnow 13y ago
  I noticed the same. Come on man, billions of pieces of trash? How about snapping a few pictures to bring more fire to the discussion? Nah...
- prawn 13y ago
  A writer interviewed the boatie. It was likely published in print first where space is at a premium and/or only supported by the advertising at hand (they don't just add extra pages). Then online editors or lackies put up the story. News at that level and with that heritage is not at the level where they think like many of the rest of us on the net - e.g., add a gallery, etc. Even the Great Pacific garbage patch page on Wikipedia has no photos - the cross-section of people out there able to take photos and people likely to be editing Wikipedia don't seem to cross. You can see some on Google Images though I suspect that many are general garbage-in-water photos: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+patch&safe=off&espv=210&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+pat...
  - mikeash 13y ago
    A picture of the garbage patch would look like any other picture of the open ocean. Many of these problems are not visible to the naked eye.
stretchwithme 13y ago
Tragedy of the commons is where the price paid for a resource is merely the extraction cost. The cost of replacing the resource or losing it entirely is ignored. Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything. Either way, we are going to have to pay more than just the extraction cost if we expect a resource to continue. We are going to have to pay more for fish. Privately owned fishing rights forces action to prevent collapse. Without something like it, the collapse of the resource will surely force a higher price. Just not now, when it actually could help prevent the collapse.
- pekk 13y ago
  You have mischaracterized the tragedy of the commons. These premises form an intellectualized rationale for crony capitalism, but your suggestion doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons. Suppose that you hand over Yellowstone to some big company (say, Wal-mart) for a song, because they are politically connected. Now Yellowstone is not part of the commons, so there is no tragedy of the commons, right? No, you have only obscured the problem, but the problem remains. Because Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good. If it makes the most money for them to sell Yellowstone piece by piece to ranchers and fast food franchises, or install a lot of fake geysers as if it were the Bellagio, they will do that for their profit, but that doesn't eliminate the negative externalities. Starting with how the land was handed over to someone connected, which is how this kind of intervention you suggest is frequently corrupted. Just because you own something doesn't mean that you won't spoil it, let alone that you won't spoil things for other people with a legitimate interest if it happens to profit you. More ownership is not a silver bullet.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I think stretchwithme is actually fairly accurate in his portrayal of the tragedy of the commons. The key is the externalities must be internalized. The problem arises where "privatization" is floated as the answer to a resource overconsumption situation, but where the property boundaries of what is privatized don't encompass the entire set of externalities. You nail this in your criticism of the hypothetical WalMart sale of Yellowstone: "Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good." If that's the case, then what was privatized isn't the full set of externalities. And that's where Hardin's tidy solution starts getting messy. If you're familiar with his works, you'll also note that a second essay of his addresses another challenge: "lifeboat ethics". While privatizing a commons (properly) can address the economic inefficiencies of privatized gains and socialized costs (banking, anyone), what it cannot do is fundamentally increase the carrying capacity of a resource beyond its absolute limits. Yes, it's possibly that privatization might lead to technical optimization, but some limits remain. And ultimately, the ability to provide for people (and ecosystems) has bounds. There's also the challenge of properly valuing a resource over time, and that's a place where any market solution seems fundamentally limited, at least as presently implemented.
spikels 13y ago
If the ocean is really broken and all the fish are gone, how come the amount of fish caught has not declined dramatically? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production This story is anecdotal. Actual data would be better.
- moultano 13y ago
  This is the fallacy that led to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery. Regulators assumed that cod catches would start to drop long before the number of cod dropped to unsustainable numbers. This didn't happen. The number of cod caught remained stable until it collapsed. What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping. The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.
  - api 13y ago
    A similar scenario is likely with fossil fuels re: declining EROEI. There is always more oil, but as we use up the easy oil the harder oil takes more and more energy to get. This is hidden though, as the process will just scale and scale and use more and more energy to get the same amount of oil. ... until it can't do that anymore and production collapses. This will happen when overall system EROEI drops below some unknown threshold, probably 5-10X. In any iterated debate between an economist and a physicist the economist will be right N-1 times and the physicist will be right once.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      There is always more oil I know what you mean by that. And yet I've got a problem with the phrase. What it suggests is "there's is always more oil ... available for useful extraction". And that isn't the case. Yes, there's more in the ground, but (as your EROEI argument says) there is a decidedly limited amount of feasibly extractable oil, and once that limit is reached, there is no more useful oil in the ground. The key being "useful". I like your "iterated debate" quip.
protomyth 13y ago
What would go into building a vessel designed to remove all the junk from the ocean? How would it capture and process the waste?
- andrewfong 13y ago
  There was (and maybe still is) a project to build an open-source low-power autonomous robot to clean up oil spills. https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/ https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/ Not sure if still active. Presumably, you could build something to pick up trash in general. Bigger issue though is the trawling -- junk or no junk, trawling is incredibly devastating to the ecosystem.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I was curious about a ship designed to clean up the wreckage after a tsunami or the pacific garbage.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
madaxe_again 13y ago
I just spent three weeks at sea in the Andaman, and... it's grim out there. The sea is virtually lifeless. Small pockets of sea-life survive on reefs in national parks, but as you look up from the water, you see trawlers scattered across the horizon - soundly within the nautical boundaries of the national parks. They operate day and night, as the article says, and the size and brightness of the arrays of floodlights they deploy to attract squid and other nocturnal creatures is astounding. The crew I was with have been sailing all over the planet for the past several decades, and unanimously reported that they'd seen a steep decline in the variety, quantity and quality of all sea life, particularly in the past five years. Places which once thrived with dolphins are now devoid of them, others which were rich with seals and birds are barren rocks at the same time of year, and propspeed (anti-marine-growth coating for propellers) is increasingly pointless with the amount of near-surface debris. In addition, they noted that sea temperatures were way out of whack, weather was "odd" everywhere they've been in the last few years (pretty much everywhere on the planet), and worryingly, that even recent charts and depth soundings were often significantly wrong, due to the seabed shifting in storms. All of this is common talk among the yachting crowd, and they're worried - people are selling boats and moving back ashore after decades of "marine life", and brand new marinas are rotting absent of tenants. It's not the economic crisis that's forcing these folks out, as they mostly either subsist or are independently wealthy, and they're all pretty clear about it being due to their fears for the future viability of faring the oceans.
- deleted 13y ago
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- joeguilmette 13y ago
  do you know of any online resources where i can read more about this yacht talk? i scuba dive quite a bit, and as a human, this is relevant to my interests.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I went to the barrier reef in 2001, and already saw damage there. I thought, "This is a hobby for part of my lifetime, but probably not for any meaningful part of my kids" If we can get our act together, life in the ocean will respond. I'm just not sure we can do that.
katowulf 13y ago
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world (or the ocean). Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” May Ms. Mead be with us always.
ra88it 13y ago
This prompted me to do some googling and I found this: http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/ http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/ Does anybody here have knowledge about this organization?
ackydoodles 13y ago
I agree that we need to sound the alarm. December 2013, North Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and the Eastern Caribbean: nearly devoid of sea birds and fish; plastic garbage common. January 2014, Coastal Everglades of Florida: silent. No birdsong. None. February 2014, Florida Bay and the Keys: enough lobster pots that you could walk from Cape Sable to Key West without getting your shoes wet. This is absolutely not a sustainable fishery--this is an unmitigated rape of the planet for the almighty dollar, even inside the supposedly protected waters of the marine sanctuary.
kpennell 13y ago
"Sailing" on Google Trends. Going down (generally) over the last 10 years. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing

284 points by drone 13y ago

You may care to read the discussions from previous submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken

malandrew 13y ago

I really wish this story had had more pictures. It's a shame that all this is happening and no one seems to be really documenting it with photos and video and these images aren't being shown with these stories.

lettergram 13y ago
Apparently, there is nothing to see anways
- pm90 13y ago
  What a tragedy :(
chucknelson 13y ago
Same here - I was expecting to see at least a picture of the tsunami debris they mention.

CalRobert 13y ago

I sometimes wonder if shopping for groceries is as frustrating for most people. I like Nutella, but when I see Palm Oil as the second ingredient I picture dead orangutans. I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal and think of the enormous amounts of diverted water and fertilizer runoff that goes in to producing feed. I enjoy fish, but thinking of this makes me sick to my stomach. I enjoy many beverages that come in plastic bottles, but that plastic, even if recycled, comes at substantial cost. Even veggies are largely wrapped in plastic anymore. Even though it's a small thing compared to everything else in life Keurig machines fill me with rage. And yet, I am guilty too. I love to travel, and this generally means flying since I live on an island. Therefore I contribute to ocean acidification, climate change, and of course the industrial processes that go into making planes. When people ask why I prefer not to buy fish and I say it's because of concern over the world's fisheries (I'd rather not dive in a global jellyfish swarm) they look at me like I'm from another planet. Who gives a crap, after all? One person's actions will not stop the destruction of our only planet. sigh

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- checker 13y ago
  I think it's a mistake to consider our homeworld disposable, regardless of what worlds we may eventually live on.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- _broody 13y ago
  That sort of naive techno-utopian response isn't helpful at all in the face of reality. We lack the ability to stop the degradation of our current environment. That doesn't bring high hopes that we could undertake the exponentially more difficult task of building a new and better one in another planet, not before we run out of time.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Is that true? The Great Lakes are cleaner now than they were in recent history (I guess if you consider zebra muscles, lampreys and the ongoing dangers of Asian carp that is less true). From the standpoint of industrial contamination things are certainly improving. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests (that is, given cooperation the number of fish in the ocean can be increased alongside increased extraction). There are all sorts of situations where the problem is that we aren't doing something we know would work.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Limited regions, mostly in advanced countries, where both environmental controls and offshoring of highly polluting activities has taken place, are cleaner. Many aren't. Within the US you have hog farms in the Carolinas, CAFOs in Kansas, the Mississippi river basin, Gulf of Mexico, and the great rivers of the developing world: the Nile, Amazon, Ganges, Yellow, Yangtze, and Indus, are in much worse shape. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests They're not doing a whole lot for fish stocks however. And that's the rather bigger problem.

Nux 13y ago

The ocean will recover after we're gone. Or after we've managed to put an end to poverty and educate everyone, though this seems an extremely distant dream.

diogenescynic 13y ago

>"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing." This makes me sick. So sad to see such waste and disregard for the ecosystem.

drone 13y ago
Indeed, and not to mention, depending on the by-catch, the stuff they're throwing away more be more valuable than what they're targeting, pound for pound, in different markets. That is to say, just because you're fishing for tuna and pulled up aji doesn't mean you've wasted your time. There is a great market for aji, and to be honest, you'd pay more for it in a sushi restaurant in my town than you would 90% of the meat in a yellow fin. By-catch is becoming a big deal as a general restaurant issue on the gulf coast.[0] A lot of people have been pushing bycatch as delicacies in local restaurants. Just last week, a chef prepared us several courses of bycatch as sashimi or aged, depending on the fish - including scorpionfish and blue runner. I definitely would not have had a better lunch if he brought out tuna and snapper. (And wouldn't have ordered them, either.) [0] - http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/971-the-total-catch http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/97...

lettergram 13y ago

Well this is the main reason I prefer to buy farm raised fish. It might not do much to help the eco system, or my health, but I feel at least the fish I am eating was raised with the purpose of being eaten. Further, I find it rather gross that fishermen essentially "throw away" everything they don't want.

cwal37 13y ago
It does help. In terms of output farmed fish are far and away the most efficient of livestock. It's been a few years, but if I recall correctly farmed tilapia produce 1kg per 1.1kg of feed. That's incredible compared to beef or even chicken. Also, encouraging well run fish farming operations takes pressure off of the wild stocks. In terms of eating meat, you're doing it right.
- rprospero 13y ago
  A few years ago, I was at the local natural food market and I overheard the manager explaining to a customer that the store did not and would not ever carry farm raised fish. He explained how farmed fish lived in horrible conditions and that the only moral and sustainable option is to only buy free range fish which were caught from the ocean, where fish were part of their proper ecosystem. From an intellectual, sustainability standpoint, I suspect that you are right and that farmed fish is the way to go. However, this is why I've completely factored guilt and morality out of my environmental decisions - No matter what I do, one of the employees at the natural food store will tell me that I'm killing the planet.
scott_karana 13y ago
Sadly, that's not free of problems either. At least with open-net farming, the disease and sea lice can cause decreases in wild populations as well. Some of the mortality rates are really depressing. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=6d3af277-d143-4115-adf9-25a2825e342a http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...

BoppreH 13y ago

There was an "What If"[0] on xkcd about the ocean and ships' weight. The question itself was innocuous, but inside a parenthesis was this sentence: (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s shipping fleet—leads to an odd conclusion: Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.) I'm afraid of the future. Very, very afraid. [0]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

leobelle 13y ago
And yet, are you still eating meat? Fish? What are you doing for your part?
- geoka9 13y ago
  And probably driving a personal car, too. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-aci...
- BoppreH 13y ago
  I don't buy fish and don't own a car. Edit: not that this is the extent of my actions, or even that I agree with this line of questioning.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- falcolas 13y ago
  Considering that every single thing we could eat would have an impact on the environment (typically negatively), it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.
  - ASpring 13y ago
    A fair point. Meat contributes far more of a negative impact on the environment than plants though. Consider the fact that it takes 8 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef[1]. That's absurdly wasteful in the quantities of beef that most American's eat weekly. [1]: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29892 http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...

parasight 13y ago

Maybe it's worthwhile to spend more time and brains on saving our environment. At least until we are able to leave this planet. Which I don't see in the near future. We are able to walk on the moon, build atom bombs and heal deadly diseases. Are we smart enough to not destroy this planet?

prawn 13y ago
No. We are too greedy on the whole to avoid slowly destroying it. And even when we can leave this planet, we should still endeavour to keep Earth as well as we can.
Florin_Andrei 13y ago
Maybe this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox.

TausAmmer 13y ago

It is changing, like everything, adopting to having less fish and animals. Interface is changing, it is becoming hostile with human life, more demanding and unforgiving, reflecting us in every step and way. "What can I do? I am only one person?", throws plastic wrapping against the wind.

hairama 13y ago

This is a great story--unfortunately, it's just that, a story. It's not surprising to me that there are people recklessly over-fishing, but without any numbers, no government can take action to stop it. On a tangential point, earth-life has survived five mass-extinction events, and a future one is almost certain. This doesn't negate the tragic, useless destruction of life, but the earth itself--and some form of life on it--will endure.

pertinhower 13y ago
Is this supposed to make me feel better? I'm real happy for the earth surviving and all, but I want to survive too, and I want people to survive. A philosophy of, "The earth will survive though we'll be gone—and maybe that will be justice," is ridiculous, because if we're gone, who will be left to celebrate the justice? Justice lies in the conscious mind, and if the conscious mind is gone, justice goes too.
- pm90 13y ago
  It isn't supposed to make you feel better at all; just to make you aware of the fact that the Earth will probably survive even if you, me and all of our descendents don't.
  - MereInterest 13y ago
    Not in the slightest. It is the conscious mind that gives meaning to the world around it. There is no splendor in nature that is not in the eyes of those watching it. We have seen no evidence of any intelligence beyond our own. If we die, all meaning goes out of the world.
    - weirddog 13y ago
      Ironically, this is the same foolish anthropocentric sentiment that is preventing most people to care about the environment. Congrats, you're part of the problem.

jaegerpicker 13y ago

Reading stories like this are incredibly depressing. I love the ocean and aquatic ecosystems, always have. I grew up fishing and boating and still spend as much time as I can on those hobbies. I moved from Ohio to Maine in large part to be by the Ocean. I wish there was more that I could do to help affect real change. I volunteer, I try to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and I support a lot of different conservation groups but what I wish was that there was an open source like community to help with the science and education. I mean I would gladly help to contribute to some thing like that. For me that's worth more than chasing all the startup success in the world.

chrisgd 13y ago

I am really interested in companies like this: www.cleanseas.com.au that are trying to breed fish on their own. They still need to grow them in the ocean. Not sure of the cost to get there, but interesting none the less.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

The astounding decline of the ocean's fisheries is an incredibly important issue. But we all know that. What we all don't know is the solution. What we've got is a classic tragedy of the commons. It's made more difficult due to the international nature of oceanic fisheries - those little guys like to swim around, paying no heed to national boundaries. Plus there's all of that international ocean to police. Who's going to ensure that 3rd world fishermen aren't catching too much tuna, inadvertently killing too many dolphins, etc etc? Is it reasonable to expect the US to police the entirety of the Pacific Ocean's fish stock? We've seen this play before. And the only practical solution is not something which the leftists here are going to like. We have to privatize the oceans fisheries. It is imperative. It has to happen now. It has to happen yesterday. Fish stocks are collapsing. Fish stocks have collapsed. The fisheries have to be delineated by whatever means appropriate (species and/or location, depending upon the migratory/wandering patterns of each fish in question) and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The highest bidder will then have the right to determine how many fish each year/month are harvested, and by whom. The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned. This is simple stuff. It's been done before with other natural resources. We all need to get over our political differences and make it happen.

drone 13y ago
Countries can prevent markets from being utilized to off-load those fish. It's not entirely preventable, but it can be made difficult enough to not be profitable. The sad, unfortunate, fact is that some countries' (Japan, China, for two examples, EDIT: but certainly some citizens from nearly all countries) citizens care far less about the sustainability of their fishing, and more about having what they desire, when they desire. Should the price go up due to under-population? They're OK with that too. There are already systems in-place for tracking sustainable fish, and ensuring that each fish was sustainably harvested (my gulf wild is one such: http://mygulfwild.com/ http://mygulfwild.com/), but until the consumers in most markets demand them, they won't take off. For our family, we have a simple rule: we don't buy fish (based on species) that aren't as a rule sustainably harvested. Dead-stop. We don't buy them at restaurants either. Dead-stop. We prefer fish we catch ourselves, over all other fish, and secondly fish that are harvested and sold through markets which monitor for illegal behavior, where we know the operators of the market. I rarely eat fish from a restaurant where the chef doesn't know the chain from which that fish was supplied. Around here, there are enough good fish places and markets that a chef can't argue they couldn't know.

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago

Well we can start by taking pictures of it instead of just writing walls of text about it hoping the average person will read about it and care. Here's what pisses me off. Guy writes about how devastated the ocean is, doesn't take a single picture. The only photo in the whole article is him and his boat.

almosnow 13y ago
I noticed the same. Come on man, billions of pieces of trash? How about snapping a few pictures to bring more fire to the discussion? Nah...
prawn 13y ago
A writer interviewed the boatie. It was likely published in print first where space is at a premium and/or only supported by the advertising at hand (they don't just add extra pages). Then online editors or lackies put up the story. News at that level and with that heritage is not at the level where they think like many of the rest of us on the net - e.g., add a gallery, etc. Even the Great Pacific garbage patch page on Wikipedia has no photos - the cross-section of people out there able to take photos and people likely to be editing Wikipedia don't seem to cross. You can see some on Google Images though I suspect that many are general garbage-in-water photos: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+patch&safe=off&espv=210&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+pat...
- mikeash 13y ago
  A picture of the garbage patch would look like any other picture of the open ocean. Many of these problems are not visible to the naked eye.

stretchwithme 13y ago

Tragedy of the commons is where the price paid for a resource is merely the extraction cost. The cost of replacing the resource or losing it entirely is ignored. Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything. Either way, we are going to have to pay more than just the extraction cost if we expect a resource to continue. We are going to have to pay more for fish. Privately owned fishing rights forces action to prevent collapse. Without something like it, the collapse of the resource will surely force a higher price. Just not now, when it actually could help prevent the collapse.

pekk 13y ago
You have mischaracterized the tragedy of the commons. These premises form an intellectualized rationale for crony capitalism, but your suggestion doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons. Suppose that you hand over Yellowstone to some big company (say, Wal-mart) for a song, because they are politically connected. Now Yellowstone is not part of the commons, so there is no tragedy of the commons, right? No, you have only obscured the problem, but the problem remains. Because Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good. If it makes the most money for them to sell Yellowstone piece by piece to ranchers and fast food franchises, or install a lot of fake geysers as if it were the Bellagio, they will do that for their profit, but that doesn't eliminate the negative externalities. Starting with how the land was handed over to someone connected, which is how this kind of intervention you suggest is frequently corrupted. Just because you own something doesn't mean that you won't spoil it, let alone that you won't spoil things for other people with a legitimate interest if it happens to profit you. More ownership is not a silver bullet.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I think stretchwithme is actually fairly accurate in his portrayal of the tragedy of the commons. The key is the externalities must be internalized. The problem arises where "privatization" is floated as the answer to a resource overconsumption situation, but where the property boundaries of what is privatized don't encompass the entire set of externalities. You nail this in your criticism of the hypothetical WalMart sale of Yellowstone: "Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good." If that's the case, then what was privatized isn't the full set of externalities. And that's where Hardin's tidy solution starts getting messy. If you're familiar with his works, you'll also note that a second essay of his addresses another challenge: "lifeboat ethics". While privatizing a commons (properly) can address the economic inefficiencies of privatized gains and socialized costs (banking, anyone), what it cannot do is fundamentally increase the carrying capacity of a resource beyond its absolute limits. Yes, it's possibly that privatization might lead to technical optimization, but some limits remain. And ultimately, the ability to provide for people (and ecosystems) has bounds. There's also the challenge of properly valuing a resource over time, and that's a place where any market solution seems fundamentally limited, at least as presently implemented.

spikels 13y ago

If the ocean is really broken and all the fish are gone, how come the amount of fish caught has not declined dramatically? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production This story is anecdotal. Actual data would be better.

moultano 13y ago
This is the fallacy that led to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery. Regulators assumed that cod catches would start to drop long before the number of cod dropped to unsustainable numbers. This didn't happen. The number of cod caught remained stable until it collapsed. What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping. The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.
- api 13y ago
  A similar scenario is likely with fossil fuels re: declining EROEI. There is always more oil, but as we use up the easy oil the harder oil takes more and more energy to get. This is hidden though, as the process will just scale and scale and use more and more energy to get the same amount of oil. ... until it can't do that anymore and production collapses. This will happen when overall system EROEI drops below some unknown threshold, probably 5-10X. In any iterated debate between an economist and a physicist the economist will be right N-1 times and the physicist will be right once.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    There is always more oil I know what you mean by that. And yet I've got a problem with the phrase. What it suggests is "there's is always more oil ... available for useful extraction". And that isn't the case. Yes, there's more in the ground, but (as your EROEI argument says) there is a decidedly limited amount of feasibly extractable oil, and once that limit is reached, there is no more useful oil in the ground. The key being "useful". I like your "iterated debate" quip.

protomyth 13y ago

What would go into building a vessel designed to remove all the junk from the ocean? How would it capture and process the waste?

andrewfong 13y ago
There was (and maybe still is) a project to build an open-source low-power autonomous robot to clean up oil spills. https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/ https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/ Not sure if still active. Presumably, you could build something to pick up trash in general. Bigger issue though is the trawling -- junk or no junk, trawling is incredibly devastating to the ecosystem.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I was curious about a ship designed to clean up the wreckage after a tsunami or the pacific garbage.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

madaxe_again 13y ago

I just spent three weeks at sea in the Andaman, and... it's grim out there. The sea is virtually lifeless. Small pockets of sea-life survive on reefs in national parks, but as you look up from the water, you see trawlers scattered across the horizon - soundly within the nautical boundaries of the national parks. They operate day and night, as the article says, and the size and brightness of the arrays of floodlights they deploy to attract squid and other nocturnal creatures is astounding. The crew I was with have been sailing all over the planet for the past several decades, and unanimously reported that they'd seen a steep decline in the variety, quantity and quality of all sea life, particularly in the past five years. Places which once thrived with dolphins are now devoid of them, others which were rich with seals and birds are barren rocks at the same time of year, and propspeed (anti-marine-growth coating for propellers) is increasingly pointless with the amount of near-surface debris. In addition, they noted that sea temperatures were way out of whack, weather was "odd" everywhere they've been in the last few years (pretty much everywhere on the planet), and worryingly, that even recent charts and depth soundings were often significantly wrong, due to the seabed shifting in storms. All of this is common talk among the yachting crowd, and they're worried - people are selling boats and moving back ashore after decades of "marine life", and brand new marinas are rotting absent of tenants. It's not the economic crisis that's forcing these folks out, as they mostly either subsist or are independently wealthy, and they're all pretty clear about it being due to their fears for the future viability of faring the oceans.

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joeguilmette 13y ago
do you know of any online resources where i can read more about this yacht talk? i scuba dive quite a bit, and as a human, this is relevant to my interests.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I went to the barrier reef in 2001, and already saw damage there. I thought, "This is a hobby for part of my lifetime, but probably not for any meaningful part of my kids" If we can get our act together, life in the ocean will respond. I'm just not sure we can do that.

katowulf 13y ago

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world (or the ocean). Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” May Ms. Mead be with us always.

ra88it 13y ago

This prompted me to do some googling and I found this: http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/ http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/ Does anybody here have knowledge about this organization?

ackydoodles 13y ago

I agree that we need to sound the alarm. December 2013, North Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and the Eastern Caribbean: nearly devoid of sea birds and fish; plastic garbage common. January 2014, Coastal Everglades of Florida: silent. No birdsong. None. February 2014, Florida Bay and the Keys: enough lobster pots that you could walk from Cape Sable to Key West without getting your shoes wet. This is absolutely not a sustainable fishery--this is an unmitigated rape of the planet for the almighty dollar, even inside the supposedly protected waters of the marine sanctuary.

kpennell 13y ago

"Sailing" on Google Trends. Going down (generally) over the last 10 years. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing