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Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

bbc.co.uk

71–80 of 143 posts

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#71

Even if only 1% of Seaspiracy is true, or if the numbers are off by 99%, the fact remains that we can live perfectly healthily without animal based foodstuff. The only moral and simplest solution is for privileged Westerners to go vegan.

Morality is relative; please don't inflict yours on others. Animal consumption can be made sustainable. The main offenders are beef, lamb, and mutton, and their associated dairy[1]. Cutting just those out would put us back in the ballpark of responsible agriculture. Between pork, poultry, fish & other aquatics, and insects, there's room for sustainable meat farming. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impac…

So why would you inflict your morality on others just because they belong to another species? With the impact of consumption by privileged people hitting the poorest and most vulnerable people the hardest, why would you inflict harm on those people by using morals that don’t help?

There’s always a “can be” for everything. The question is whether you’re willing to take personal responsibility in doing something while you can or not.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#72
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish raised in a fish farm is reasonably sustainable, especially those raised in lakes.

It's not so simple - farmed fish produce a lot of waste in a very small area, which pollutes the water. There are also serious welfare issues with fish farming - for example, horrible mechanical and chemical treatments of salmon to remove lice, high use of antibiotics, terrible life expectancy of feeder-fish (which are introduced to eat lice off of salmon), poor environmental conditions for the fish (largely because…

I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and should add that some of these problems are potentially solvable, even if the solutions themselves have trade-offs.

For example, aquaculture can be moved offshore to large farm, mobile farm vessels, so the pollution is spread about instead of being concentrated at a small section of coastline. These vessels are new though, and an accident or freak weather even could result in millions of farmed fish being released to the wild - farmed fish are not the same, genetically, as wild fish, so the effects on wild stocks from that many escapes could be significant.

Another new solution is closed-containment aquaculture, where the fish are placed inside a sealed sphere in the ocean. This approach allows all waste to be collected at the bottom of the vessel, and then turned into fertiliser. There are welfare concerns around increased stocking densities, and shutting hundreds of thousands of fish off from the outside world.

Another solution that is (inexplicably, IMO) seeing huge investment are land-based, RAS (Recirculating aquaculture system) farms. These too can collect all fish waste, and it's touted as a way to prevent disease. There are concerns here too though - using arable land for fish farming doesn't seem like a very good idea, RAS farmers use horribly high stocking densities (they must, to be profitable), and there have been several incidents where disease has been inadvertently introduced from the outside (in such close quarters, the effects are of course disastrous).

OK, so that still all sounds pretty gloomy - realistically the only way for things to get much better is through regulation. But better welfare increases farming costs, and like anything, there is always going to be a race to the bottom (e.g. if Norway increases costs too much for farmers, more move to Chile etc).

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#73
post #43
post #27

Cowspiracy, seaspiracy, social dilemma... Are examples of `guiltsploitation` genre of entertainment. I'm less concerned on whether their "storytelling" is being fair or an oversimplification, and more concerned on whether it leads to constructive atitudes by those influenced by them. Given the lengths they seem to go at shocking people I see little depth in their work at actually wanting the enact constructive change…

Do you have a suggestion on top of your critic? What would be the proper way to enact constructive change on behaviors?

https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/02/10/we-have-never-been-ase...

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#74
post #29
post #15

Are we destroying the biggest ecosystem on the planet or are we not? That's the only question that matters everything else is just nitpicking.

Exactly. Answer is yes. But some still make money from it and have lobbyists running in circles around politicians. So prolly not much will happen. In the mean while: just eat plants directly.

This doesn't really fly unfortunately. Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact, that is what you see/hear everywhere. But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1]. The amount of vegan/vegetarian food necessary to actually get the same amount of nutrients are on a different planet and simple math shows that it wouldn't even work if we used the entire planet. What I'm getting at is that is that it isn't all black and white and what we need is something sustainable that works and that it isn't really an easily solved problem.

[1] https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/finance/media-bites-4-dec-amazon...

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#75

It's quite easy to see a pattern. Same pattern appeared for Cowspiracy [0] and a similar one for The Game Changers [1]. The same pattern can be seen with regards to pandemic warnings before this one. There's a very strong tendency to do business-as-usual and it's my non-optimistic belief that we will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. These events are white swans (just like the p…

> These events are white swans

These are more "Black Elephants" imho:

A Black Elephant, notes Vinay Gupta, ‘is an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a Black Swan when it finally happens. Usually the experts who had predicted the event – from the economic crisis to pandemic flu—go from being marginalized to being lionized when the problem finally rears its head’ (Gupta, 2009).

https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#76
I wasn't able to finish the documentary. Not only it seemed to be poorly researched, I have hard time with the fact that a twentysome year old is pretending to be an expert on a very complex subject, explaining what is wrong with this world and what needs to be one. That has really put me off.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#77
post #16

Both cowspiracy and seaspiracy, received a lot of critics and fact check by prominence professors. "oversimplifies a complex issue", so why don't try to explain it to us? Instead of criticizing and discrediting real issues that we're going to face in a few years. Ah, they're quoting multiple times professor X and study Y without links or reference... I'm not a Netflix fan/users, but I saw those documentaries and I re…

> so why don't try to explain it to us? Maybe they do and nobody is listening? The crux with complicate topics is that oversimplification can lead to wrong conclusions. So experts are always eager to avoid the point that leads to the wrong direction and are careful with their explanations. The question is whether cowspiracy and seaspiracy turned in the wrong direction or whether the critics are just to cautious.

At least have it explained in a complicated manner then. Otherwise it's just preventing information sharing.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#78
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem I have with climate change. I am a very rational, science oriented person (actively promoting science, atheist, PhD in physics, actively hating homeopathy pseudo-science, you name it). I wanted to understand: - why there is a problem with climete chnage - how we know there is one - my winter was cold, where is the warming (exaggerating that of course) - etc. I am not an expert, nor want to become…

This is, in essence, the crux of the problem. With your level of education it shouldn't be at all difficult to find a resource that answers your questions. Instead you've sought out two comic strips and two extremely ideological sources. The basics of climate change can be taught standing on one foot. Carbon dioxide absorbs IR radiation, while oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to it. There was an equilibrium betwee…

Part of the problem is some climate change deniers openly accept that having more CO2 will heat the earth but also say that having more CO2 in the air will "green" the Earth. This is true in a sense - plants need CO2 - but it doesn't account for the horrible side effects of rapidly shifting the planets atmosphere.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#79

It's quite easy to see a pattern. Same pattern appeared for Cowspiracy [0] and a similar one for The Game Changers [1]. The same pattern can be seen with regards to pandemic warnings before this one. There's a very strong tendency to do business-as-usual and it's my non-optimistic belief that we will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. These events are white swans (just like the p…

> These events are white swans These are more "Black Elephants" imho: A Black Elephant, notes Vinay Gupta, ‘is an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a Black Swan when it finally happens. Usually the experts who had predicted the event – from the economic crisis to pandemic flu—go from being marginalized to being lionized when the problem finally rears…

Yeah, I guess. I assumed black means completely invisible and unpredictable (do not know what will happen and when), white means we know it can happen but just don't know when exactly will it happen.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#80
post #7

"Others have argued it oversimplifies a complex issue - many communities depend on fishing for their livelihoods and for food, and are in fact practising sustainable catching methods." I guess this pretty much answers the question whether seaspiracy film is correct or not. People are trying to justify as if industry care about sustainable catching methods? Really? And there is common practise "The Solution to Polluti…

I wonder if in 10-20 years we will be writing "Remember Vaccine Industry?"
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