151–160 of 246 posts
If 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.
Well we can start by taking pictures of it instead of just writing walls of text about it hoping the average person will read about it and care. Here's what pisses me off. Guy writes about how devastated the ocean is, doesn't take a single picture. The only photo in the whole article is him and his boat.
Even the Great Pacific garbage patch page on Wikipedia has no photos - the cross-section of people out there able to take photos and people likely to be editing Wikipedia don't seem to cross.
You can see some on Google Images though I suspect that many are general garbage-in-water photos: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=great+pacific+garbage+pat...
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That's a particular kind of scope insensitivity on your part, though: although we're inflicting suffering and death... so is the rest of nature, greater in most cases by enough signifiant figures that our effect gets lost in the noise. For every individual animal suffering at the hands of a human, millions die of starvation and disease in exactly their "adaptive habitat"--when they're not slowly chewed to death by pr…
A lion doesn't know any better than to eat a gazelle. You do.
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…
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. We rely on our planet for our existence and the current state of our planet hangs on a fine balance of its constituent elements. If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely d…
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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.
> Most experts say that DHA and EPA -- from fish and fish oil -- have better established health benefits than ALA. DHA and EPA are found together only in fatty fish and algae. DHA can also be found on its own in algae, while flaxseed and plant sources of omega-3s provide ALA -- a precursor to EPA and DHA, and a source of energy. [1]
Fish are healthy and good for us. One of the primary causes of overfishing is caused by our unhealthy fascination for tuna. There are many sustainable sources of fish which are available (such as trout); our society's desire for one that is so inefficient in bulking up does not mean you should give up on fish entirely as a result.
[1] http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/omega-3-fatty-acids-fact-...
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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 contai…
1) Grab a jar with a lid. 2) Get the store down the street to measure the weight of the empty jar 3) Fill the jar with roasted coffee beans, note the new weight, and pay for the difference 4) grind the beans and make some coffee in a French press.
Is this so crazy? Of course, the coffee is hopefully shade grown (most isn't) so there's that, but even so. Why is something as simple as "using a glass jar or bottle more than once" so crazy? Why is it if I go to Latin America soda bottles are collected, washed, and reused, but in the US and elsewhere they make a brand new plastic bottle every time, at best downcycling the plastic?
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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.
A fair point. Meat contributes far more of a negative impact on the environment than plants though. Consider the fact that it takes 8 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef[1]. That's absurdly wasteful in the quantities of beef that most American's eat weekly. [1]: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
Also, it's worth remembering that we get a lot more than just meat out of your average cow. We get medicines, leather, meat, fertilizer, gelatin, and pet feed. In fact, the ~40% of the cow which is left after butchering is rendered down into a streams of protein and fat for secondary uses, resulting in zero waste of the animal.
There are simply a lot of things you use day to day which come from those cows and those 8 lbs of grain...
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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 '…
Tragedy of the commons is where the price paid for a resource is merely the extraction cost. The cost of replacing the resource or losing it entirely is ignored. Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything. Either way, we are going to have to pay m…
You have mischaracterized the tragedy of the commons. These premises form an intellectualized rationale for crony capitalism, but your suggestion doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons. Suppose that you hand over Yellowstone to some big company (say, Wal-mart) for a song, because they are politically connected. Now Yellowstone is not part of the commons, so there is no tragedy of the commons, right? No, you have on…
You can allow it to be owned.
You can regulate its use, which is how the San Francisco Bay is managed.
Or you can do neither, which is how the San Francisco Bay used to be managed. Back when it was being filled in to create private property.
The last is clearly not good. One of the other options must be used or you can say good bye to a finite resource.
The Soviets employed the second option for everything, so that clearly doesn't work globally.
You mention national parks. There was a time when these parks were government owned but companies were allowed to extract resources for a song. In fact, that's still going on. So government ownership doesn't prevent crony capitalism.
As far as getting things for a song, again that is crony capitalism, which is totally a product of how we elect our leaders. That is a separate problem that won't be fixed by preventing private ownership of a resource.
You may still ruin a resource that you own, but if you paid a fair price for it, you are destroying your own net worth in the process. When people loot an owned or regulated resource, they suffer no such direct loss.