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The End of Fish in the Next 40 Years?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-end-of-fish-in-one-chart/2012/05/19/gIQAgcIBbU_blog.html
The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind.
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It's utterly self-destructive and defies belief.....
Here in B.C. The ground fish and midwater trawl fisheries are managed to strict quotas and have mandatory full time independent observer coverage.
In the longline fishery we use full time video camera monitoring. All marketable fish must be landed and accounted for. Non marketable species are counted and released.
The video monitoring systems that have been developed in our fishery are now being used in other fisheries around the world. Hopefully it will help to clean up some fishing practices if even in a small way at first.
As the population of a given area grows, the need for resources also grow. That's basic math. We deal with it by organizing into city-state, then nation, and finally empire in an attempt to expand our territory. When we run up against a limit to that because other people claim their own land and can't be conquered, or there is no more land to acquire, then we start turning the land we have into more productive areas using irrigation and fertilizer. When we reach the end of that cycle, the next stage kicks in.
We start consuming all resources, not just the replaceable or desirable ones. Instead of the oldest and biggest and best tasting fish, every fish is taken as the need for food intensifies. When the fish are gone, we move down the food chain and start harvesting the plants and plankton and once abundant resources that were supposed to support the rest. Animals and farms become elaborate systems of churning out protein as more efficient methods are used. When the easy oil is pumped dry we tear the top off mountains to get the coal and stick pipes down a mile of water to get that final spout going.
So supply keeps up with demand, and the population is happy, and the people in charge who profit from the system are happy, and the experts are ignored. Our resources have been intensified. Until the next stage.
We don't run completely out of resources before the collapse because elaborate, efficient systems operating at peak capacity and barely keeping up with demand are unstable. One bad year, one small change, one accidental event eventually is one too many and everything implodes like a house of cards while the leaders say, "Nobody could have predicted..." Nature is self correcting to a point, but doesn't care about individual lives.
The thing is, you can't stop it because of who we are as a species. Collectively, we're a bit insane. We deal with warnings about needed collective action by ignoring the warnings. We have the option of simply refusing to believe and it's easier than making a sacrifice. So it's going to happen. Empires and civilizations collapse all the time in history. All we can do is try to make sure it's not violent, or sudden. The inconvenient truth eventually will become the unavoidable reality.
Soylent Green was definitely an example of intensification of resources taken to extreme. Like the tragic case of Easter Island, we can finally turn our ourselves, literally and figuratively.
if we care about our kids and grandkids, we will change.
i imagine my grandkids walking around in hazmat suits and breathing from oxygen tanks.
So everyone can agree the huge human population and our way of consuming is not sustainable on a world level. So what do you do about it? Tell the third world they're not allowed to live like the better off people? Tell the people already enjoying the benefits of a civilization build on cheap energy and abundant resources to suck it up and get rid of all those comforts? How far does that get us, knowing human nature?
So education isn't going to work. People will say "They should do something about that" but what should they do and how to do it? How do you enforce limiting population growth without breaking every human right in the book, because China taught us the only effective way is force.
What do we have here? Learned helplessness, a move towards self fulfilling prophecy, talk of humans as though what? we're not human? What are we?
Is that what some of us really want? I get the impression that some people dislike the human race and want it to end. Hopefully I'm wrong about that BUT
I want to be part of the solution not the guy saying 'I told you this would happen'.
It is not correct assume that high prices equal overfishing.
High prices are the result of high demand. Sometimes supply is low due to weather. Or due to restrictive quotas.
In the winter and spring we get as much as $8 lb for chinook (king) salmon due to the low supply.
In the summer the same fish may only be $3.50 .
This summer the returns to Oregon and California are forecast to be record breaking. So it is a good year to eat King salmon.
My understanding is that the EU imposes strict quotas on most or all fishing activity in their waters.
Also, we have had real problems with greenpeace disrupting our markets for dogfish in Germany. Many consumers won't tolerate grocery chains that sell fish caught in unsustainable fisheries. In order to sell our product into these type of markets the fishery needed to be certified by an independent agency.
Things are getting very strict here in north America as well.
For example. In the longline fishery in Alaska and B.C., we are required to use bird avoidance devices to keep seabirds away from the gear while setting. It's like a line with streamers hanging down that trails behind the boat which keeps the birds from diving on the bait.
The aim was to protect some species of albatross that are endangered.
We are surveiled and photographed by aircraft. If we are caught setting gear without the device in use we get a day in court and maybe a heavy fine. In Alaska, if as many as two of these birds are killed, the entire fishery was to be shut down.
Fishery management is only as good as the science. Mistakes are still being made daily but it is not a free for all out there.
The point is that not all fish is being harvested unsustainably.
People who want to eat fish still have choices of species that are abundant, and sustainable.
I live in NY. Pretty much the only times we have any major hikes in fish prices is when something is being over fished.
We have sold large chinook salmon into N.Y. for generations. They make lox out of it or used to anyway. Probably using farmed atlantics now. Yuck.
I nominate Bekenze for Best Thread Topic Badge.
Check this out
So if we want population growth to stabilise, we have to share knowledge capital and financial capital. Also stop toppling elected socialist governments and imposing neo-liberal conditions for financial aid. And best of all, make it illegal to sell products made by workforces in conditions which would not be legal in our own country e.g. Foxconn in China, diamond trade in Africa. Which might hopefully lead to the governments of poor countries having to look after their own levels of demand rather than acting as serf states to rich countries.
Also decriminalise drugs, lift trade tariffs, allow countries under a certain level of GDP to ignore intellectual property rights for software, educational materials and especially generic manufactured medicines.
Hi, Prairie Ghost, welcome to NB.