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.
I ordinarily avoid "me too" posts, but I'd really like to emphasize joeguilmette's request: do you have specific pointers to any sources for discussions among yachters of concern over the state of the oceans, and of their abandoning boats, marinas, etc.?
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.
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.
I can't think of anything at the grocery store that doesn't have some sort of negative implication. Heck, just driving to the grocery store burns fuel and supports the automotive industry. Biking to the grocery store burns food (of which all food has negative implications) and supports the bicycle industry.
You can work yourself into knots over it; there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. So, IMO, you either give up the battle entirely, or you can stop killing yourself over it but still make intelligent choices. For example, I eat fish because I believe fish farming could be a better choice for the future than cattle farming, and I eat chicken because the feed-to-meat ratio is better than beef.
As not only animals but meat-eating animals, it's just a fact of life that our/your existence costs something, means some sort of sacrifice for another organisim. You can try to reduce your impact, but you can't not have an impact.
Also, a little bit of my personal philosophy here- one way we could reduce our impact is by doing as little as possible, never moving about and burning more calories than absolutely necessary. Never performing strenuous activity that results in regenerative & anabolic processes, which require extra nutrients. But the way I see it, just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality", I feel like I am doing a disservice if I chose the first option, saving so little "externality" and spending my life miserable. For have I not then utterly wasted the costs I imposed on the world?
Leave me alone! I'm just an ordinary man / who loves strawberries / I love to grab the green fuzziness / in my gathered fingertips / and dip the seedy point in sour cream / and brown sugar / and into my waiting lips.
Mmmm, that's a sweet kiss worth / repeating all night, / just an ordinary man / loving his strawberries. /
And I don't want to have to think / who picked them with / what brown illegal alien fingers, / back bent under the California sun / that used to belong to his forefathers anyway.
I don't want know that the price of cream is American decadence / that the rest of the world would never dream of spending. / Or that sugar is giving me an insulin rush, / or that strawberries are sprayed with EDB / causing me cancer.
I don't want to know these things, so don't bother me. / I'm just an ordinary man who loves strawberries / that come to me past striking cashiers at Safeway / that come to me in green plastic baskets / that will not decompose / but fill the air with toxic fumes as they're incinerated at the city dump / polluting Hawaii's air and ocean.
Plastic containers, a petroleum biproduct / that the Arabs are processing / to enable the rich to buy the homes of movie stars in
Beverly Hills / to buy whole hotels in Miami, or LA, or New York / while the rest of their people / in poverty pray / bowing their heads to the ancient ground.
While all of the oil flows out of the deserts / to America / to grease the great machine / that grows the strawberries that I love / sent by diesel trucks to the coast / and by jet to Hawaii / where I can sit in my bed / and enjoy the pleasures of an ordinary man / kissing that sweet kiss / all night long / without a care in the world.
Nutella is "a member of the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), Ferrero only uses palm oil which is extracted from controlled plantations in Malaysia."
As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves. We rely on our planet for our existence and the current state of our planet hangs on a fine balance of its constituent elements.
If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely die or at least most of us would.
Some of us think that sooner or later, humans would be able to colonize other places in Universe and then our survival would not wholly rely on Earth. That is certainly possible. But how far into the future would that be possible and whether we would be able to survive another hundred years of drastic pollution of Earth is anyone's guess.
Far be it from me to tell anyone else what their conscience should be but to me it's not that we can be zero impact. Nothing living on this planet is zero impact. Sharks eat fish that eat krill that eat etc... The key is to be as sustainable as possible. We can eat fish but need to work to educate the uneducated about only supporting the responsible fishermen. When you quit and walk away from buying fish all together you lose your voice into the industry. People listen to the money and refusing to spend money will just leave the industry listening to those who do buy fish but don't care how it's caught. If you like fish but hate this kind of behavior then we need to make an effort to only buy sustainably caught/farmed fish. A very good resource is: http://www.seafoodwatch.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx
You sound like you already have done some reading about this, if so I wasn't trying to be condescending, I just try and get the info out as much as possible.
It won't make you feel better, but sadly the extinction of species is as much a part of nature as the death of an individual organism, with nearly all species that have ever existed having gone extinct. Given that, I think the small kindnesses you are showing towards your fellow biosphere inhabitants are about all you can do. IMHO.
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.)
Note that it's not all bad news on the overfishing front. There are certainly bleak trends, but people, companies, organizations, and governments are responding to the incentives that are becoming increasingly apparent (though we should certainly encourage improved responses!) Ex. "U.S. seafood catch was at a 17-year high last year, thanks to policies to rebuild domestic fisheries."[0] Looks like the numbers dropped a bit off that high in 2012[1], and I'm not aware of 2013 data yet, but I'm interested to see what continues to happen.
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.
Somehow the world managed to bring many whales back from the brink of extension without throwing up their hands and claiming "tragedy of the commons" or privatizing the ocean.
It's not easy, but recognizing this as a global problem and doing the international consensus building needed to solve this problem should be a priority. The solution will probably need to be a mix of commercial work (properly certified fish farms perhaps), public relations/marketing (i.e. convince people this is important), and funded governmental work (i.e. ban importation of fish not collected in a sustainable fashion).
Governments have shown several successes (of various degrees) in the last 50 years with various endangered species and resources. From whales and ivory, to bald eagles to clean air. Throwing them out of the mix for solutions seems as short sited as not leveraging market dynamics to solve it.
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/), 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.
> If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.
This is not actually privatization; it is just outsourcing regulatory authority. Under real privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources they own.
The theory is that they won't, since it would harm their long-term ability to create value. The reality is that individual humans only need so much money, so decision-makers are often perfectly willing to sacrifice long-term value as long as they, themselves, collect enough personal money in the short term.
> 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.
How does that help non-crop fish? They don't have direct economic value to the private fishing company.
What happens when the private fishery comes to the conclusion that it is a lost cause, so their best interest is to fish as fast as possible?
And shortly thereafter, this will transform into a debate about the horrors of farm bred fish, and the wonders of free range salmon. How their tiny pens stop them from being fully self-actualized prior to entering our bellies, and the awful quantities of antibiotics, waste feed, and disease that destroy the purity of their rainbow-like scales. We'll have PETA slicing fishery nets, and then weeping before Pike's Place as they decry the mingling of escaped fishery specimens with wild game. And lord knows, we'll have the same people, crying in the aisle of their supermarket as they look upon man's greatest mistake, a can of farm raised tuna, and the crushing weight of the world's despair comes rolling over them.
I'm fairly left and I'm not opposed to privatization at all. But...
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.
Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.
As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...
Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.
If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.
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.
>"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeguilmette|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bananacurve|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
You can work yourself into knots over it; there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. So, IMO, you either give up the battle entirely, or you can stop killing yourself over it but still make intelligent choices. For example, I eat fish because I believe fish farming could be a better choice for the future than cattle farming, and I eat chicken because the feed-to-meat ratio is better than beef.
As not only animals but meat-eating animals, it's just a fact of life that our/your existence costs something, means some sort of sacrifice for another organisim. You can try to reduce your impact, but you can't not have an impact.
Also, a little bit of my personal philosophy here- one way we could reduce our impact is by doing as little as possible, never moving about and burning more calories than absolutely necessary. Never performing strenuous activity that results in regenerative & anabolic processes, which require extra nutrients. But the way I see it, just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality", I feel like I am doing a disservice if I chose the first option, saving so little "externality" and spending my life miserable. For have I not then utterly wasted the costs I imposed on the world?
[+] [-] chaosphere2112|12 years ago|reply
Mmmm, that's a sweet kiss worth / repeating all night, / just an ordinary man / loving his strawberries. / And I don't want to have to think / who picked them with / what brown illegal alien fingers, / back bent under the California sun / that used to belong to his forefathers anyway.
I don't want know that the price of cream is American decadence / that the rest of the world would never dream of spending. / Or that sugar is giving me an insulin rush, / or that strawberries are sprayed with EDB / causing me cancer.
I don't want to know these things, so don't bother me. / I'm just an ordinary man who loves strawberries / that come to me past striking cashiers at Safeway / that come to me in green plastic baskets / that will not decompose / but fill the air with toxic fumes as they're incinerated at the city dump / polluting Hawaii's air and ocean.
Plastic containers, a petroleum biproduct / that the Arabs are processing / to enable the rich to buy the homes of movie stars in Beverly Hills / to buy whole hotels in Miami, or LA, or New York / while the rest of their people / in poverty pray / bowing their heads to the ancient ground.
While all of the oil flows out of the deserts / to America / to grease the great machine / that grows the strawberries that I love / sent by diesel trucks to the coast / and by jet to Hawaii / where I can sit in my bed / and enjoy the pleasures of an ordinary man / kissing that sweet kiss / all night long / without a care in the world.
- Eric Chock / http://www.bambooridge.com/bluesun.aspx?bid=259
Hand transcribed, so there's a bit of error in there.
Edit -- Formatting.
[+] [-] leobelle|12 years ago|reply
Nutella is "a member of the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), Ferrero only uses palm oil which is extracted from controlled plantations in Malaysia."
So you can enjoy your Nutella guilt free.
[+] [-] fromdoon|12 years ago|reply
If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely die or at least most of us would.
Some of us think that sooner or later, humans would be able to colonize other places in Universe and then our survival would not wholly rely on Earth. That is certainly possible. But how far into the future would that be possible and whether we would be able to survive another hundred years of drastic pollution of Earth is anyone's guess.
[+] [-] jaegerpicker|12 years ago|reply
You sound like you already have done some reading about this, if so I wasn't trying to be condescending, I just try and get the info out as much as possible.
[+] [-] aktbc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|12 years ago|reply
Live life, mother nature isn't going to flood the earth and destroy everything if you don't accept the saviour into your heart.
[+] [-] Luc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snake_plissken|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamwong246|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BoppreH|12 years ago|reply
[0]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|12 years ago|reply
[0]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/23/c... [1]http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/Assets/commercial/fus/fus12/FUS_...
[+] [-] leobelle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] manachar|12 years ago|reply
Somehow the world managed to bring many whales back from the brink of extension without throwing up their hands and claiming "tragedy of the commons" or privatizing the ocean.
It's not easy, but recognizing this as a global problem and doing the international consensus building needed to solve this problem should be a priority. The solution will probably need to be a mix of commercial work (properly certified fish farms perhaps), public relations/marketing (i.e. convince people this is important), and funded governmental work (i.e. ban importation of fish not collected in a sustainable fashion).
Governments have shown several successes (of various degrees) in the last 50 years with various endangered species and resources. From whales and ivory, to bald eagles to clean air. Throwing them out of the mix for solutions seems as short sited as not leveraging market dynamics to solve it.
[+] [-] drone|12 years ago|reply
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/), 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.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|12 years ago|reply
This is not actually privatization; it is just outsourcing regulatory authority. Under real privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources they own.
The theory is that they won't, since it would harm their long-term ability to create value. The reality is that individual humans only need so much money, so decision-makers are often perfectly willing to sacrifice long-term value as long as they, themselves, collect enough personal money in the short term.
[+] [-] darkarmani|12 years ago|reply
How does that help non-crop fish? They don't have direct economic value to the private fishing company.
What happens when the private fishery comes to the conclusion that it is a lost cause, so their best interest is to fish as fast as possible?
[+] [-] araes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
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.
Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.
As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...
Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.
If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.
[+] [-] stretchwithme|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|12 years ago|reply
This makes me sick. So sad to see such waste and disregard for the ecosystem.
[+] [-] jaegerpicker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parasight|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ColinWright|12 years ago|reply
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ocean+broken
[+] [-] hairama|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lettergram|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwal37|12 years ago|reply
Also, encouraging well run fish farming operations takes pressure off of the wild stocks. In terms of eating meat, you're doing it right.
[+] [-] scott_karana|12 years ago|reply
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
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+pat...
[+] [-] almosnow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chucknelson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TausAmmer|12 years ago|reply
"What can I do? I am only one person?", throws plastic wrapping against the wind.
[+] [-] katowulf|12 years ago|reply
May Ms. Mead be with us always.
[+] [-] ackydoodles|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ra88it|12 years ago|reply
http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/
Does anybody here have knowledge about this organization?
[+] [-] Nux|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisgd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpennell|12 years ago|reply
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sailing