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The Ocean is Broken (2013)

theherald.com.au

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Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#121

Post by sleepyhead »

leobelle wrote: post #21
CalRobert wrote: post #4

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…

http://www.nutellausa.com/faqs.htm 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.

No palm oil is sustainable. I have lived in Malaysia and can tell you that most the five hour drive from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore is spent looking at palm oil plantations. Malaysia is in fact with Indonesia by far the worst offender when it comes to deforestation. Also both countries are highly corrupt. Land grabbing is the norm and politicians and businessmen gain from the losses of the people in villages and the animals in the jungles that once were there.

So please don't say guilt free.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#122

Post by sliverstorm »

secstate wrote: post #108
sliverstorm wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

Fish farms are some of the worst pollutants in the ocean. Remote stretches of Patagonia are becoming cess pools of salmon shit as a result of salmon farming. Don't get me wrong, there are sustainable ways to farm fish and other seafood, but most are a complete ecological disaster. Even something as seemingly harmless as mussel farming has detrimental impacts on the local ocean ecology, as surprise, surprise mussels p…

Yup. To elaborate more fully, I buy wild-caught fish because of how unsustainably many fish farms are run right now. I buy particular varieties of fish based on what species are most sustainably fished. I buy fish to support the fish industry ("vote with your wallet") in hopes that people will see the demand and continue to pursue & improve fish farming in the future.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#123

Post by dredmorbius »

maxerickson wrote: post #38
_broody wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of naive techno-utopian response isn't helpful at all in the face of reality. We lack the ability to stop the degradation of our current environment. That doesn't bring high hopes that we could undertake the exponentially more difficult task of building a new and better one in another planet, not before we run out of time.

Is that true? The Great Lakes are cleaner now than they were in recent history (I guess if you consider zebra muscles, lampreys and the ongoing dangers of Asian carp that is less true). From the standpoint of industrial contamination things are certainly improving. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests (that is, given cooperation the number of fish in the ocean can be increased alongside incre…

Limited regions, mostly in advanced countries, where both environmental controls and offshoring of highly polluting activities has taken place, are cleaner.

Many aren't.

Within the US you have hog farms in the Carolinas, CAFOs in Kansas, the Mississippi river basin, Gulf of Mexico, and the great rivers of the developing world: the Nile, Amazon, Ganges, Yellow, Yangtze, and Indus, are in much worse shape.

Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests

They're not doing a whole lot for fish stocks however. And that's the rather bigger problem.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#124

Post by dredmorbius »

api wrote: post #118
dredmorbius wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always more oil I know what you mean by that. And yet I've got a problem with the phrase. What it suggests is "there's is always more oil ... available for useful extraction". And that isn't the case. Yes, there's more in the ground, but (as your EROEI argument says) there is a decidedly limited amount of feasibly extractable oil, and once that limit is reached, there is no more useful oil in the ground . Th…

That's exactly what I mean... energetically profitable oil.

I know. It's ... trying to marshal the argument in the most effective way possible.

A friend pointed me at a 1978 address Milton Friedman made on energy policy. It ... boils my blood (I'm not a Friedman fan): http://fixyt.com/watch?v=hj1974Ek4nw

It starts out relatively well: Friedman is quoting W.S. Jevons. And then he repeatedly simply asserts "he's wrong". And equivocates Jevons being mistaken in other predictions (which are pretty vaguely unspecified) with being wrong on this one. Etc., etc. I've been watching and reading a bit more of Friedman recently, and what I'm realizing is that 1) his biggest tools aren't factual ones but rhetorical ones, and that 2) he really likes making his debating opponent look dumb, even when the opponent is expressing views, however poorly, that Friedman himself supports. Makes me find him all the more non-credible in general.

Nailing down the language of peak oil seems somewhat useful. So I wasn't picking on you so much as trying to clarify (mostly to myself) what in the "there'll always be more oil" phrase bothers me.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#125

Post by dredmorbius »

madaxe_again wrote: post #69

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…

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.?

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#126

Post by snarfy »

CalRobert wrote: post #4

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…

The problem is too many people, not the stuff the people consume.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#127

Post by drone »

diogenescynic wrote: post #7

>"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.

Indeed, and not to mention, depending on the by-catch, the stuff they're throwing away more be more valuable than what they're targeting, pound for pound, in different markets.

That is to say, just because you're fishing for tuna and pulled up aji doesn't mean you've wasted your time. There is a great market for aji, and to be honest, you'd pay more for it in a sushi restaurant in my town than you would 90% of the meat in a yellow fin.

By-catch is becoming a big deal as a general restaurant issue on the gulf coast.[0] A lot of people have been pushing bycatch as delicacies in local restaurants. Just last week, a chef prepared us several courses of bycatch as sashimi or aged, depending on the fish - including scorpionfish and blue runner. I definitely would not have had a better lunch if he brought out tuna and snapper. (And wouldn't have ordered them, either.)

[0] - http://www.edibleaustin.com/index.php/food-2/cookingfresh/97...

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#128

Post by maxerickson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #123
maxerickson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? The Great Lakes are cleaner now than they were in recent history (I guess if you consider zebra muscles, lampreys and the ongoing dangers of Asian carp that is less true). From the standpoint of industrial contamination things are certainly improving. Licensing programs have succeeded in increasing fish harvests (that is, given cooperation the number of fish in the ocean can be increased alongside incre…

Limited regions, mostly in advanced countries, where both environmental controls and offshoring of highly polluting activities has taken place, are cleaner. Many aren't. Within the US you have hog farms in the Carolinas, CAFOs in Kansas, the Mississippi river basin, Gulf of Mexico, and the great rivers of the developing world: the Nile, Amazon, Ganges, Yellow, Yangtze, and Indus, are in much worse shape. Licensing pr…

No, I'm talking about fisheries management practices that do increase stocks. Overfishing is being reduced and harvests are increasing:

http://www.oceanconservancy.org/our-work/fisheries/

The very likely explanation is stocks are increasing in response to the better management.

I agree that it will be difficult to get people in the U.S. to push China to take a more expensive approach to industry. I think calling it 'offshoring' is awfully simplistic (U.S. is agricultural exporter and for energy only imports oil).

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#129

Post by dredmorbius »

sliverstorm wrote: post #99
dredmorbius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact ... What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate?

You've made a number of posts emphasizing that you're not addressing sustainability. In which case: I don't think you're focusing on a particularly relevant part of the discussion.

I see the construction of "having an impact" as a largely irrelevant distraction.

Death is part of the cycle of life. We know that.

Yes, species go extinct. We know that. However the rates vary considerably, and we're at a long-term peak.

As I just wrote in another comment: While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.

For various reasons (and Greene's a neuroscientist who looks as the psychology of moral decisionmaking), we do put an emphasis on people and things who are close to us, both physically and in resemblance (it's easy to feel affection for a tiger or panda than a blobfish or blue-green algae). But in terms of individual choice and having an impact: there's fairly little individuals can do on their own to affect the aggregate outcome.

What you can do -- and some transition / collapse people believe this strongly -- is to take steps to help assure your own individual or tribal (immediate family / community) survival by seeking out viably sustainable areas and lifestyles. The dilemma of personal choice, impact, and action is, I suspect, fairly nonproductive. It imposes a high level of guilt and anxiety without providing much in the way of actual useful productive output. If there's a viable collective outcome it's very likely going to come from some form of collective (or imposed) action.

On the choice thing, I'm finding the RSA Animate presentation I've just been watching "RSA Animate - The Paradox of Choice", by Renata Salecl (http://fixyt.com/watch?v=1bqMY82xzWo) to be illuminating. Choice is, in many ways, oversold. Literally.

Re: The Ocean is Broken (2013)

#130

Post by dredmorbius »

sliverstorm wrote: post #102
dredmorbius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does everyone think I'm talking about sustainability, even when I say "I'm not talking about sustainability"?

1. You're failing to articulate what you are talking about.

2. Sustainability is what matters.

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