This prompted me to do some googling and I found this:
http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/
Does anybody here have knowledge about this organization?
The Ocean is Broken (2013)
91–100 of 246 posts
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#92If 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…
A similar scenario is likely with fossil fuels re: declining EROEI. There is always more oil, but as we use up the easy oil the harder oil takes more and more energy to get. This is hidden though, as the process will just scale and scale and use more and more energy to get the same amount of oil.
... until it can't do that anymore and production collapses. This will happen when overall system EROEI drops below some unknown threshold, probably 5-10X.
In any iterated debate between an economist and a physicist the economist will be right N-1 times and the physicist will be right once.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#93I 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…
I agree with your sentiment about those Keurig machines. What a vile invention.
Even the inventor has come out as saying that they're a bad idea and that he wouldn't do it now; he designed it as a boutique/niche product, never anticipating the problem of waste at scale. I've had several people offer them to me as gifts in the last few years and although they do make a delicious cup of coffee and I love coffee, I just can't stomach the waste involved. Not just the cups and so on - reusable containers are becoming available - but all the hardware and energy devoted to producing single small servings. Just maddening. There was an excellent article on the subject published last year: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/waste-the-dark-side-of...
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Have you worked out how much time of species existence, statistically, a single person not eating fish can save? Would you expect it to be more than a fraction of a second?
I'm not sure I understand what your argument is. All I can do is change my behavior. I can't change the behavior of hundreds of other people as much as I would want to. If your argument is that individual effort isn't worth the benefit, I'm not sure what to tell you other than this again seems nothing more than an apologist rationalization to defend existing destructive behavior.
It's easier to rationalize your existing behavior than it is to change it. But instead of changing it, maybe just make the cognitive effort to recognize the wrongness. This requires no behavioral change, just an attitude change. If you do this, after enough time behavioral change comes easier. In other words detach reasoning about the ethics of the behavior from the work involved in optimizing your life.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#95I 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…
The answer to the question of what to eat: Soylent.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The anguish of the parent comes from the fact that the common industrialized lifestyle is not sustainable (he refers to ocean acidification aka net carbon dioxide surplus). If our lifestyle was sustainable, I don't think he'd feel any anguish, but you'll have to ask him to be sure. re. nonsense, paragraph per paragraph: 1) biking is more energetically efficient than walking. 2) eating any kind of meat daily is not su…
Riding a bicycle is very energy efficient, but it still has externalities. Which was part of my point, everything does, even the most efficient choices. I presumed my parent was not primarily concerned with sustainability due to bits like dead orangutans and I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal . Sympathy and orangutans are not really part of the sustainability picture, which is a separate and large issu…
it still has externalities
Some levels of externalities are sustainable. Some are not. The larger problem with humans is the combination of total population and average per-capita resource consumption (to say nothing of the vastly higher consumption in industrialized nations).
The steel and rubber in a bike are probably the biggest concerns (as well as the paving in roads), but in comparison with an automobile, it's vastly lower, and in comparison with the ranges and cargo capacity of walking, they're hugely higher. I've travelled 200 miles in a day by bike, and commuted over 40 miles daily for over a year at one point. One person on a bike can move a payload of many hundreds of pounds, possibly a ton or more (across level ground).
Food production at present is manifestly unsustainable. Every one calorie of food you eat in the US takes 10 in fossil-fuel energy to produce (in Europe it's about 5). Other inputs, particularly nitrogen (from fossil fuels) and phosphorus (limited global supplies) are crucial limiting factors, as are topsoil and water.
Richard Manning's "The Oil We Eat" is a fascinating exploration of this aspect of human existence: http://www.wesjones.com/oilweeat.htm
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#97There 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…
And yet, are you still eating meat? Fish? What are you doing for your part?
Comments like this are unhelpful; instead of answering the GPs argument, you're seeking to invalidating by painting the GP as a hypocrite, without any evidence or indeed relevance. This is particularly inappropriate considering that the OP was not castigating other people.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#98I 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…
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Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. Actually, no, there are, collectively . Humans have existed, give or take, for a couple million years. In modern form for about 80,000, and with present levels of cognition, for around 10,000. For most of that time, humans most certainly did affect local ecosystems (and sometimes in significant fashion), but had relatively little impact on t…
I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact, as I judged that to be what my parent was really thinking about. Of killing an animal for food, or even a plant. Of cutting down a tree to build a house, or trapping and killing a rat in that house. Of lumbering forests, because it's not right, not fair to the forest and its inhabitants (not because it's unsustainable)
It doesn't matter if it's sustainable or not, that does not fix this question. What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate? To the tree you just felled? Why do you get to live, while the plant/animal must die?
It's a question I struggled with for a while in the past.
Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how financially-incentivized systematic removal of the habitats of species after species after species can be considered anything but unsustainable.
People who are concerned about sustainability decry the collapse of fisheries & fish stocks, or the environmental impact of industrialized chicken farming. People who are concerned about ethics decry the destruction of pandas, orangutans, tigers, and gorillas. None of these are good, but we don't eat pandas, so which examples of habitat destruction are used is informative.
Species extinction speaks to fundamental underlying changes to the ecosystems in which those species live.
Yes, telegenic megafauna capture hearts, but really, as apex predators or other apex species, they're the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak (and my isn't that an unsustainable metaphor...). But the waste being laid to oceans: 80% depletion of fish stocks, mass strandings of numerous cetaceans, algae and jellyfish blooms, starfish wasting diseases, and the sudden disappearances of birds, seals, and sea lions, all suggest something is going very, very wrong.
And those systems are crucial for life on Earth -- human and otherwise.