What would go into building a vessel designed to remove all the junk from the ocean? How would it capture and process the waste?
The Ocean is Broken (2013)
61–70 of 246 posts
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, are you still eating meat? Fish? What are you doing for your part?
Considering that every single thing we could eat would have an impact on the environment (typically negatively), it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.
> it's not as simple as abstaining from eating a particular substance.
Not eating fish is a pretty simple way to help prevent unsustainable fish depopulation. I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would argue this point. Anyone other than individuals who want to rationalize their current destructive habits.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#63The 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 goin…
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.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#64Well 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.
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.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?...
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#65This 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…
Is this supposed to make me feel better? I'm real happy for the earth surviving and all, but I want to survive too, and I want people to survive. A philosophy of, "The earth will survive though we'll be gone—and maybe that will be justice," is ridiculous, because if we're gone, who will be left to celebrate the justice? Justice lies in the conscious mind, and if the conscious mind is gone, justice goes too.
It isn't supposed to make you feel better at all; just to make you aware of the fact that the Earth will probably survive even if you, me and all of our descendents don't.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#66Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#67The 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 goin…
> We have to privatize the oceans fisheries.
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.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." See, this is something I don't get about most people. Does nobody else feel sympathy for individual animals ? We're inflicting immeasurable amounts of suffering and death and nothing will ever make that less of a tragedy.
While I do indeed feel sympathy, mother nature does not. The animal kingdom is brutal at best. To think we are the only ones inflicting suffering and death is kind of ignoring the larger picture. Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.
Our capacity for empathy is one of the things that supposedly separates us from those we dominate over. I think there's some worth in cultivating the thing that makes us different, and it shouldn't necessarily stop at human-human interaction.
In some ways, empathy's extension to non-humans is the only social tool we have to start caring and prioritizing the maintenance of the living systems around us. Because it's sure as heck not going to be a pragmatic decision like "we need to keep these animals/plants around because they keep us alive" :) People don't respond to that shit.
imho we must create a societal narrative that /cares/ about other living things, or else we're honestly kinda fucked. If nothing else, think of cultivating our ability to empathize with animals as socially hacking our own brains so as not to succumb to the the J-curve crash that is expected of every other species on our trajectory.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#69I 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.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#70If the ocean is really broken and all the fish are gone, how come the amount of fish caught has not declined dramatically? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fish_production This story is anecdotal. Actual data would be better.
This is the fallacy that led to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery. Regulators assumed that cod catches would start to drop long before the number of cod dropped to unsustainable numbers. This didn't happen. The number of cod caught remained stable until it collapsed.
What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping.
The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.