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Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

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Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#141

Post by kulahan »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #58
AlwaysRock wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."

To be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.

Yeah, but the reefs aren't the goal. They're probably mostly not blowing up reef, but occasionally do it it - hence why so many bombs clears so little reef. If it was massively reducing reef coverage, you'd expect to see the method die off once too much reef is gone.

Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#142

Post by eloisius »

zmgsabst wrote: post #67
Avicebron wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFA, they say they it's not poverty, the explosives and boats involved mean that it's not the desperate doing this. It's greed, the sooner we can be less paternalistic about this kind of stuff the sooner we can start addressing these kind of problems. It's like India or china being major polluters, they need to be held accountable just like the west holds/held itself accountable.

I enjoy when HN engages in overt racism like this — eg, denying peer agency and morality to SE Asians, due to the posters feeling above those “lessers”. Paternalistic racism might as well be a central tenet of certain political movements — whose entire ideology is that certain humans are not fully equal as thinking moral agents in the world. The new “scientific racism”.

I think you read a lot into my comment that’s not there. I replied to someone who wrote “ Desperation is no excuse.”

Developed countries are rich after centuries of extracting natural resources, to the point that Europe is nearly deforested, American rivers in the rust belt used to catch on fire from chemical pollution, and we destroyed a pacific atoll with over 20 nuclear bombs.

A little rich for us to suddenly care about the coral so much that we can lecture developing countries about it. In this case, it doesn’t seem these are the acts of desperate people, but the arrogance of someone who will probably never face hardship beyond “ramen profitability” saying desperation is no excuse is astounding.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#143

Post by ColdStream »

tescreal wrote: post #137

How did we get to loonie tunes levels of absurdity? I understand dragnet fishing is destructive, but who first decided that dynamite was a good fishing method?

It is easy thus people will do it. Convenience is the single most potent drug we have ever invented.

Man kind - If we can, we will.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#144

Post by bigstrat2003 »

bamboozled wrote: post #124
BoxOfRain wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, who actually has a mental model of what 20,779 square kilometres or 8,023 square miles (the area of Wales expressed as a number) actually looks like? Doesn't matter if you're using imperial or metric, it's not very intuitive beyond the human scale. If you're trying to communicate 'this much rainforest disappeared' or 'look how large this landmass-sized Antarctic iceberg is' to a wide audience a well-known…

What is good about metric is that once you have a good feel for different lengths of mm, cm,meters and kilometres you don’t need to worry about things like “10 Super Bowl stadiums”. You can easily extrapolate what 27km2 means, it doesn’t have to “look like” anything.

That really isn't true. You in particular may be good at such extrapolation, but people as a rule are not. They need a concrete example to relate back to.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#145

Post by ColdStream »

wraptile wrote: post #51

I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be. What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time. However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is…

I'm not surprised that even decades later they have not recovered. It is like old growth forests on the land, once you clear them it can take centuries to recover.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#146

Post by aaron695 »

wraptile wrote: post #51

I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be. What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time. However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is…

[dead]

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#147

Post by no_carrier »

wraptile wrote: post #51

I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be. What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time. However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is…

Thais will quite commonly bomb fish their neighbour's dam as often as they feel like it. I'm not convinced that they're also not doing it in the ocean, too. It may be happening away from the main diving sites.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#148

Post by markdown »

SEJeff wrote: post #138
markdown wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.

Care to explain for those of us unaware?

The island of New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It hosts roughly 7% of all global species, with 60% of them being endemic. Peopled by Melanesians, it's one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, with over 1000 languages.

The east of the island became independent (from Australia) in 1975 and is now Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, the western half was handed over to Indonesian control following the end of Dutch rule, a status formalized through the controversial, UN-backed 1969 "Act of Free Choice" in which a tiny, handpicked group of local leaders voted under military duress to integrate with Indonesia.

Indonesia has been conducting a decades-long genocide of the people of West Papua. It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn. Slaughter the Papuan people, replace them with Javanese, then bulldoze their forests to grow palm oil.

For more, read the abstract (or the entire paper) here: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/for...

There's a timeline of the history of the "conflict" here: https://www.papuapartners.org/west-papua

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/west-papuan-separatis...

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#149

Post by markdown »

xp84 wrote: post #126
ungreased0675 wrote: post #77

It’s hard to believe this is real. Destroying a vibrant ecosystem for a one-time catch is so selfish and shortsighted it’s amazing to me that anyone would seriously consider doing it.

They're the same brand of morally-bankrupt pieces of shit who poach elephants all day long just to hack off the tusks to grind into some idiot's superstitious penis pills. Someday they'll all be gone and they'll just shrug and move onto the next appalling way of making a quick buck.

People don't poach elephants for penis pills. People poach elephants because poverty is prevalent and they are offered piles of money for tusks.

Expect more elephants to be slaughtered as a result of Elon Musks teardown of USAID.

Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

#150

Post by floam »

lmz wrote: post #135
markdown wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's hard to regulate fishing when your country is made up of endless islands, it's quite easy to regulate dynamite. So no, I don't think the number of islands is an excuse. In Fiji, for example, no fisherman could get dynamite if they wanted it. The only way to get that is if you run a (very heavily regulated) mine, or a quarry, and you'd have to account for every blast.

Does it have to be dynamite or are other, improvised explosives possible?

The article mentioned fertilizer - that’s not straightforward to control and precisely account for.
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