

Is there any hope for our overfished oceans? - hardik
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/08/02/100802crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all

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electromagnetic
A good first step would be to completely abolish fishing subsidies. Fish is
priced abnormally low in stores because a portion of our income taxes go to
pay for the fish a second time over.

Similar happens with Corn, however corn is a multi-functional food product.
Humans eat it as corn, as bread, as oil, as sugars; then humans can also eat
the cows, chickens, pigs and lambs that can also be corn fed, but we can also
drink the cow's milk, use it as butter or cheese and we can use the chickens
eggs, or we can use leather from cows or pigs, feathers from chickens and wool
from a sheep.

What we as humans can get from corn is a list with thousands of items.
However, what we as humans can get from fish is only a couple of items - food
and from certain fish usable oils.

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pinko
> A good first step would be to completely abolish fishing subsidies.

Especially if you couple it with some form of jobs or welfare for fishermen,
so as to _decouple_ the political issues from the goal at hand (saving our
fisheries).

But if you refuse to do that, you willingly bolt the battle to save our
fisheries with other political issues that can and should be debated
independently.

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hga
I think you need to be careful distinguishing the issue of overfishing apex
predators like the Atlantic bluefin tuna and the Newfoundland Cod, where we
suspect they can go effectively (or at least commercially) extinct because
other species go to the apex and keep their numbers down, from the implication
this might decrease the total animal biomass of an area.

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tomjen3
Sure, at some point it will become cheaper to grow the fish in fish farms, at
which point we aren't going to be fishing in the oceans anymore.

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smiler
Except what do fish eat? Other fish / sea life - so then we basically need to
breed an ocean full of sea life in a farm in order to eat the fish - yes it
can be managed better, but not sure that will mean it becomes cheaper.

I don't think it's that simple

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eru
We can probably achieve higher densities. On land farming is also more
efficient than hunting.

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vsthesquares
Catch shares and more room for local governance (cf. Ostrom) should go a long
way.

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sliverstorm
tl;dr - No.

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gojomo
That's an inaccurately bleak summary.

While the author is discouraged about the fate of the bluefin tuna, and her
final note is one of worry, her last three paragraphs are mostly about things
that _could_ work:

 _And yet this is never where the new fish stories, or stories about the fish
stories, wind up. Just when things seem bleakest, hope—dolphinlike—swims into
the picture. David Helvarg concludes his memoir-cum-ecological-disaster
narrative “Saved by the Sea” by declaring that, owing to a new attitude in
Washington, things seem “to be looking up for the ocean.” Similarly, Roberts
closes his chronicle of more than a millennium of overfishing by asserting,
“We can restore the life and habits of the sea because it is in everyone’s
interest that we do so.”

The way to keep fishing, according to Roberts, lies in not fishing—or, at
least, in not fishing everywhere. He proposes that huge swaths of the sea be
set aside as so-called “marine protected areas,” or M.P.A.s, where most
commercial activity would be prohibited. In “Four Fish,” Paul Greenberg argues
that the salvation of wild fish lies in farmed ones, though not in the kind
you’ll find on ice at Stop & Shop. (Today, most farmed fish are fed on wild-
caught fish, a practice that only exacerbates the problem.) Greenberg is a
believer in what’s sometimes called “smart aquaculture,” and thinks we should
be eating species like Pangasius hypophthalmus, commonly known as tra. Tra
happily feed on human waste and were originally kept in Southeast Asia to
dispose of the contents of outhouses. Michael Weber, the author of “From
Abundance to Scarcity,” is encouraged by the introduction of new regulatory
mechanisms such as “individual transferable quotas,” or I.T.Q.s. The idea
behind I.T.Q.s is that if fishermen are granted a marketable stake in the
catch they will have a greater economic interest in preserving it.

M.P.A.s, smart aquaculture, and I.T.Q.s—these are all worthy proposals that,
if instituted on a large enough scale, would probably make a difference. As
Roberts notes, it is in “everyone’s interest” to take the steps needed to
prevent an ocean-wide slide into slime. But it is also in everyone’s interest
to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Still, it is being fished to the edge of
extinction, which is why a hopeful ending is not always the most convincing
one._

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roc
The world can barely agree to ban whaling and most of it doesn't have a taste
for whale. Good luck with tuna.

The relevant agencies that would have to sign off on the sea preserves are the
same ones that green-lit all the overfishing to date and show absolutely no
sign of even acknowledging _why_ we've moved on to fishing things like the
patagonian toothfish (itself now overfished).

