51–60 of 101 posts
From the use of Coke bottles filled with explosive filler from WWII unexplored ordinance(UXO).
While that is pretty bad, the worst thing I saw was bleach used to scare out tropical fish from coral reefs.
Seeing the dead white reefs is heart breaking.
When I think the human race cannot sink any lower, then I am brought back to reality.
Well, at least in the European waters fish are recovering beyond expectation.
In a world where 8 people have more money than the bottom 3 BILLION people combined. You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? This has nothing to do with the rich. This is the tragedy of the commons - other fishers are allowed to use dynamite to fish extremely effectively, so the only way for you to make a living wage is to do the same.
I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures. Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example. This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed. If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else wi…
Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.
You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.
Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.
- the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018? - Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger? - Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)? - or the estimates that certain oceans will be fishless before 2050? - or catching fish like sardines, and instead of eating it directly, to feed it to farmed fish like salmon, at a huge cost and waste
All of that for a food that has the highest concentrations of toxins that humans consume, to the point that its no longer recommended to pregnant women.
The toxicity of fish is due to bioaccumulation (big fish eats small fish, eats smaller fish etc.), and fish has in many cases the same or even more cholesterol than meat.
Plus omega 3 have been shown to not be recommendable to the general population, I think its time we stop eating it its completely unsustainable.
Seriously, what kind of planet are we leaving to our kids?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? This has nothing to do with the rich. This is the tragedy of the commons - other fishers are allowed to use dynamite to fish extremely effectively, so the only way for you to make a living wage is to do the same.
I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures. Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example. This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed. If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else wi…
We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.
In a world where 8 people have more money than the bottom 3 BILLION people combined. You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
Generally, you exchange wealth for goods made from natural resources. If half the wealth is tied up in 8 people who could not possibly spend it, what do you think would happen to the earth's natural resources if it were suddenly dumped on the bottom 3 billion? It would be a huge boon to the economy at first, until we burnt through every resource.
Its by far time for we to leave the fishes of the hook. Dynamite fishing is bad but its just the tip of the iceberg in what concerns the global impact of fishing. What about: - the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018? - Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger? - Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)? - or the estimates that certain oceans will b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
England might have been lucky enough (blessed with rain and all). Southern France and Greece, not so much, and will probably never recover pre-roman empire forests.
If there's not enough rain to sustain a forest, then even should they have been left untouched in antiquity they wouldn't be there anymore now either right?
If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.
I take it David Attenborough didn’t cover this in Blue Earth II?
Since he brought attention to astics in the oceans there’s been a consensus to solve this issue.
Dynamite fishing is also very destructive, and if it were documented people would be focused on ways to stop it.