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I highly doubt that the Yup’ik fishermen are even contributors to global climate change, but we expect them to then completely stop fishing the waters they have

I highly doubt that the Yup’ik fishermen are even contributors to global climate change, but we expect them to then completely stop fishing the waters they have fished for decades because of change we're largely to blame for? From forced settlements to fishing bans, we're still forcing our will on indigenous people. Edit: the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
The modern regulatory state forces pretty much everyone to do all sorts of things. People are prevented from aging cheese less than 30 days, from having sex with people for money, forced to purchase unwanted health insurance, and penalized if they don't rent or purchase a home. A person can own a piece of land for decades, and suddenly wetland regulation or a community action board can prevent them from using that land. Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik?
- Terretta 12y ago
  > forced to purchase unwanted health insurance Very few are willing to live with the consequences of this which ought to be letting the person who didn't get health insurance die because they chose to not afford care. If you really believe you shouldn't force people to protect themselves, you should believe you shouldn't "force" them to recover when they're sick. Or, if you do believe they shouldn't be left to die, and that you shouldn't force them to purchase individual health insurance, a logical reconciliation of those two positions is universal health care. > Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik? I would agree with you here. Reading between the lines suggests the dwindling catches are causing them to adopt more aggressive fishing measures, a vicious cycle of bad consequences. Dialing back their new fishing to earlier methods isn't imposing a burden as much as thwarting total collapse from their own changes.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Indigenous cultures are kind of a special case because of the whole conquest and genocide thing. You can't say "if you don't like it go back to your home country" when it was taken from them. THe idea is that indigenous groups are supposed to self-govern as much as possible... but there's no way these tiny middle-of-nowhere towns can build up enough infrastructure to run their own federal government.
  - tbrownaw 12y ago
    You can't say "if you don't like it go back to your home country" when it was taken from them. You also can't say that if the place with the obnoxious rules is your home country. Which tends to be the majority of people. "If you don't like it leave" works equally well in both cases tho. ("Equally well" meaning "not very" of course...)
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    My ancestors are Sicilian, Greek, German and a bunch of other things. I've never met an ancestor who was born outside the US. Can you say to me, "if you don't like it go back to Sicily"? (Note that I speak no Italian outside the kitchen and I doubt Sicily would let me immigrate.)
    - ddorian43 12y ago
      dude i understand italian but not sicilian, so in your case it's much harder source: watch Gomorrah movie
  - crusso 12y ago
    Indigenous cultures are kind of a special case because of the whole conquest and genocide thing There isn't a homosapien alive whose ancestors' people weren't subjected to some sort of brutality. Either the rules should apply to everyone or they should apply to no one. Carving up perpetual special classes in any society will always serve to divide that society and promote dysfunction.
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      This is not about ancestors or special classes. A lot of people seem to be missing the fact that most indigenous tribes are sovereign nations with their own laws and government which have existed since long before the U.S.A. This is why we have casinos on tribal lands while they are banned elsewhere. The laws are different. Treaties with these people are the only reason the U.S.A. even exists, although they are regularly ignored. The fact is that it is disingenuous to pretend to have a nation governed by the rule of law while ignoring the rights of older sovereign nations which exist within your borders. Not all tribes have the same rights and status, but how we treat them is the best indicator of how legitimate our own legal structure can claim to be.
- EGreg 12y ago
  Because presumably they are outside our jurisdiction and we are treating them as an externality.
- wusher 12y ago
  > Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik? Maybe it would be better to ask why it is bad to impose those ( and many others not mentioned) burdens on everyone as opposed to asking why we aren't burdening everyone equally.
briandear 12y ago
"We're largely to blame for.." Are we? If humans cause climate change and industrialization began around 1850, then logically, there'd be an exponential and consistent increase of global temperatures. Al Gore himself said that, in five years, the polar ice cap would be ice-free.. and he said that 7 years ago. There hasn't been warming for almost 18 years, yet CO2 emissions (especially from China are still increasing.) The facts are very clear: CO2 increased, temperatures have not. Another fact: the climate changed long before humans were around to drive Escalades. The AGW movement is nothing more than an anti-capitalist false flag with a professed desire for wealth redistribution. Al Gore, for example loves the environmental movement so much because he became a multi-billionaire as it's Chicken Little. Those who still follow the religion of human-caused global warming are like a bunch of elderly Soviets nostalgic about Stalin's First Five Year Plan. Ottmar Edenhofer, a UN official with the IPCC said, "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole." In that same interview he made the case that "climate change" policy was more of an anti-globalization policy than actual environmental policy. Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore, who would presumably know more about environmentalism than almost anyone reading this, rejects the climate-anti-capitalism hysteria that has co-opted the "old" environmentalism of reducing pollution, whaling, overfishing, nuclear waste and other, more pure protections of our environment. Let the downvoting begin! I am always amazed that within such a smart bunch as HN readers, that there is still a large number that ignore critical scientific analysis and instead let political or ideological beliefs cloud their otherwise rational minds. It's almost religiously intense. Rarely do I see a balanced debate on the subject of human-caused climate change. It's like telling Christians that Jesus wasn't resurrected.
- adrianN 12y ago
  The climate is a very complicated system. Saying that there has to be a consistent exponential increase in temperature is a gross oversimplification. There are all kinds of buffers and feedback systems that govern global temperatures.
- Retric 12y ago
  For an exponential increase to show up temperature would need to linearly relate to CO2. However, temperature basically never linearly relates to anything. For the simplest example suppose you use light to heat a sphere in space. Double the light and you don't double the temperature because black body radiation is T^4. Doubling temperature takes 16 times the light. As to earth, simple models are laughably inaccurate because the equator and the poles have wildly different temperatures and heat is moved between them though the movement of air and ocean currents.
ggchappell 12y ago
There are a couple of problems with this kind of argument. First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? (Aside from the moral issue, that's explicitly unconstitutional in Alaska.) Note that I'm talking about the fishing limits here. You mentioned forced settlement, which is, of course, a reprehensible thing. It is also a case of enforcing the law differently for different ethnic groups. Second, we need to watch out for implicit assumptions that native americans are somehow different from the rest of us -- perhaps intellectually inferior, or morally superior, or committed to a traditional lifestyle. But really, these are just regular old people: just as smart and just as selfish as you and I, and just as uninterested in living the way their ancestors did in past centuries (short lifespans? famine every few years? no tech? no Cheetos?). And so they are also just as capable of short-sightedly wrecking the environment.
- fineIllregister 12y ago
  >First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? It's not about having different laws for different races. This is about different nations having different laws. The political relationship between the United States and the indigenous peoples of the Americas is much different than the relationship between the US and its citizens. It's more akin to asking if we want different laws for people in Canada and America. I think your second point is similarly misguided. It's not a matter of anyone being different, but whether the US has a more compelling claim to exercise sovereignty in this situation.
  - ggchappell 12y ago
    Ah, I see where you're coming from. I think there is some merit to that point of view. However, from a strictly legal standpoint, it seems to be a bit outdated. Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1924 by the Indian Citizenship Act.[1] Also, since we're dealing with Alaska here: Alaska Natives are dealt with under a different legal framework than that used with natives in the continental U.S. Because of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act[2], I believe that Alaska Natives are not considered citizens of tribal nations, but rather shareholders in territory-based corporations. TL;DR: It's complicated. :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlemen...
jackgavigan 12y ago
During Prohibition, there was an exemption for sacramental wine. Surely that's a precedent for exempting a particular group from specific laws on religious grounds?
japhyr 12y ago
they have fished for decades They've been fishing those waters for thousands of years. the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used. Their religious argument is actually an expression of common sense, and has more to do with the scientific method than it seems. Indigenous people hunted, fished, and gathered every year for generations. Through direct observation, they noticed many patterns. When you hunted the same area too consistently, fewer animals came back in the following seasons. So they came up with a belief system along the lines of, "If you hunt too much, you have offended the animals, and you must stop hunting for several seasons until they return." The scientific approach makes the same observation, and the same recommendations, from a different explanation. Dismissing the religious approach is easy when people don't understand how it was developed, and what role it has in guiding people's interaction with their entire environment.
- crusso 12y ago
  It's less common sense behavior than Cargo Cult behavior.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

The modern regulatory state forces pretty much everyone to do all sorts of things. People are prevented from aging cheese less than 30 days, from having sex with people for money, forced to purchase unwanted health insurance, and penalized if they don't rent or purchase a home. A person can own a piece of land for decades, and suddenly wetland regulation or a community action board can prevent them from using that land. Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik?

Terretta 12y ago
> forced to purchase unwanted health insurance Very few are willing to live with the consequences of this which ought to be letting the person who didn't get health insurance die because they chose to not afford care. If you really believe you shouldn't force people to protect themselves, you should believe you shouldn't "force" them to recover when they're sick. Or, if you do believe they shouldn't be left to die, and that you shouldn't force them to purchase individual health insurance, a logical reconciliation of those two positions is universal health care. > Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik? I would agree with you here. Reading between the lines suggests the dwindling catches are causing them to adopt more aggressive fishing measures, a vicious cycle of bad consequences. Dialing back their new fishing to earlier methods isn't imposing a burden as much as thwarting total collapse from their own changes.
Pxtl 12y ago
Indigenous cultures are kind of a special case because of the whole conquest and genocide thing. You can't say "if you don't like it go back to your home country" when it was taken from them. THe idea is that indigenous groups are supposed to self-govern as much as possible... but there's no way these tiny middle-of-nowhere towns can build up enough infrastructure to run their own federal government.
- tbrownaw 12y ago
  You can't say "if you don't like it go back to your home country" when it was taken from them. You also can't say that if the place with the obnoxious rules is your home country. Which tends to be the majority of people. "If you don't like it leave" works equally well in both cases tho. ("Equally well" meaning "not very" of course...)
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  My ancestors are Sicilian, Greek, German and a bunch of other things. I've never met an ancestor who was born outside the US. Can you say to me, "if you don't like it go back to Sicily"? (Note that I speak no Italian outside the kitchen and I doubt Sicily would let me immigrate.)
  - ddorian43 12y ago
    dude i understand italian but not sicilian, so in your case it's much harder source: watch Gomorrah movie
- crusso 12y ago
  Indigenous cultures are kind of a special case because of the whole conquest and genocide thing There isn't a homosapien alive whose ancestors' people weren't subjected to some sort of brutality. Either the rules should apply to everyone or they should apply to no one. Carving up perpetual special classes in any society will always serve to divide that society and promote dysfunction.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    This is not about ancestors or special classes. A lot of people seem to be missing the fact that most indigenous tribes are sovereign nations with their own laws and government which have existed since long before the U.S.A. This is why we have casinos on tribal lands while they are banned elsewhere. The laws are different. Treaties with these people are the only reason the U.S.A. even exists, although they are regularly ignored. The fact is that it is disingenuous to pretend to have a nation governed by the rule of law while ignoring the rights of older sovereign nations which exist within your borders. Not all tribes have the same rights and status, but how we treat them is the best indicator of how legitimate our own legal structure can claim to be.
EGreg 12y ago
Because presumably they are outside our jurisdiction and we are treating them as an externality.
wusher 12y ago
> Why is it bad to impose similar burdens on the Yup'ik? Maybe it would be better to ask why it is bad to impose those ( and many others not mentioned) burdens on everyone as opposed to asking why we aren't burdening everyone equally.

briandear 12y ago

"We're largely to blame for.." Are we? If humans cause climate change and industrialization began around 1850, then logically, there'd be an exponential and consistent increase of global temperatures. Al Gore himself said that, in five years, the polar ice cap would be ice-free.. and he said that 7 years ago. There hasn't been warming for almost 18 years, yet CO2 emissions (especially from China are still increasing.) The facts are very clear: CO2 increased, temperatures have not. Another fact: the climate changed long before humans were around to drive Escalades. The AGW movement is nothing more than an anti-capitalist false flag with a professed desire for wealth redistribution. Al Gore, for example loves the environmental movement so much because he became a multi-billionaire as it's Chicken Little. Those who still follow the religion of human-caused global warming are like a bunch of elderly Soviets nostalgic about Stalin's First Five Year Plan. Ottmar Edenhofer, a UN official with the IPCC said, "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole." In that same interview he made the case that "climate change" policy was more of an anti-globalization policy than actual environmental policy. Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore, who would presumably know more about environmentalism than almost anyone reading this, rejects the climate-anti-capitalism hysteria that has co-opted the "old" environmentalism of reducing pollution, whaling, overfishing, nuclear waste and other, more pure protections of our environment. Let the downvoting begin! I am always amazed that within such a smart bunch as HN readers, that there is still a large number that ignore critical scientific analysis and instead let political or ideological beliefs cloud their otherwise rational minds. It's almost religiously intense. Rarely do I see a balanced debate on the subject of human-caused climate change. It's like telling Christians that Jesus wasn't resurrected.

adrianN 12y ago
The climate is a very complicated system. Saying that there has to be a consistent exponential increase in temperature is a gross oversimplification. There are all kinds of buffers and feedback systems that govern global temperatures.
Retric 12y ago
For an exponential increase to show up temperature would need to linearly relate to CO2. However, temperature basically never linearly relates to anything. For the simplest example suppose you use light to heat a sphere in space. Double the light and you don't double the temperature because black body radiation is T^4. Doubling temperature takes 16 times the light. As to earth, simple models are laughably inaccurate because the equator and the poles have wildly different temperatures and heat is moved between them though the movement of air and ocean currents.

ggchappell 12y ago

There are a couple of problems with this kind of argument. First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? (Aside from the moral issue, that's explicitly unconstitutional in Alaska.) Note that I'm talking about the fishing limits here. You mentioned forced settlement, which is, of course, a reprehensible thing. It is also a case of enforcing the law differently for different ethnic groups. Second, we need to watch out for implicit assumptions that native americans are somehow different from the rest of us -- perhaps intellectually inferior, or morally superior, or committed to a traditional lifestyle. But really, these are just regular old people: just as smart and just as selfish as you and I, and just as uninterested in living the way their ancestors did in past centuries (short lifespans? famine every few years? no tech? no Cheetos?). And so they are also just as capable of short-sightedly wrecking the environment.

fineIllregister 12y ago
>First, do we really want to have different laws for different races? It's not about having different laws for different races. This is about different nations having different laws. The political relationship between the United States and the indigenous peoples of the Americas is much different than the relationship between the US and its citizens. It's more akin to asking if we want different laws for people in Canada and America. I think your second point is similarly misguided. It's not a matter of anyone being different, but whether the US has a more compelling claim to exercise sovereignty in this situation.
- ggchappell 12y ago
  Ah, I see where you're coming from. I think there is some merit to that point of view. However, from a strictly legal standpoint, it seems to be a bit outdated. Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1924 by the Indian Citizenship Act.[1] Also, since we're dealing with Alaska here: Alaska Natives are dealt with under a different legal framework than that used with natives in the continental U.S. Because of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act[2], I believe that Alaska Natives are not considered citizens of tribal nations, but rather shareholders in territory-based corporations. TL;DR: It's complicated. :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlemen...

jackgavigan 12y ago

During Prohibition, there was an exemption for sacramental wine. Surely that's a precedent for exempting a particular group from specific laws on religious grounds?

japhyr 12y ago

they have fished for decades They've been fishing those waters for thousands of years. the religious argument does seem a stretch to me, and wouldn't be necessary if common sense was used. Their religious argument is actually an expression of common sense, and has more to do with the scientific method than it seems. Indigenous people hunted, fished, and gathered every year for generations. Through direct observation, they noticed many patterns. When you hunted the same area too consistently, fewer animals came back in the following seasons. So they came up with a belief system along the lines of, "If you hunt too much, you have offended the animals, and you must stop hunting for several seasons until they return." The scientific approach makes the same observation, and the same recommendations, from a different explanation. Dismissing the religious approach is easy when people don't understand how it was developed, and what role it has in guiding people's interaction with their entire environment.

crusso 12y ago
It's less common sense behavior than Cargo Cult behavior.