The US should cap exports of wild fish. The US actually doesn't eat that much seafood, and most of the seafood captured along the Pacific is sent to China and other importers.
We're destroying our local ecosystems for a quick buck, and a cap on exports would be the quickest fix. In the long term we should turn more to fish farms.
Without meaning to judge, the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens.
Fisheries would be one example, agriculture which a sibling comment mentioned, another. But it's also pollution, labour laws, access to housing.
It's tricky because the US is literally the most powerful economy ever, so it must be doing something right, equally it seems other countries care more about their citizens. Not China or North Korea ofc but Europe or Canada etc.
I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Arabia’s oil it will eventually stop being a sustainable source for the economy. Alaskan fisheries collapsing, rivers that support water hungry crops in the desert running dry might be first indicators of many that things are collapsing.
Eh, only within the current context of society and technology.
For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.
>> Huh, its almost like infinite growth is impossible in our context of the natural world.
> Eh, only within the current context of society and technology.
> For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
You can't magick away the problem with sci-fi fantasies. Those technologies don't actually exist and (with a fairly high probability) may never exist.
And in any case, a bigger finite does not an infinite make.
> We already have the technology. Just not the economy to take advantage of it. Solar panels, satellites and factories are nothing new to us.
We don't have the technology to pave the planet in solar panels, because we don't have the technology to make it cost effective. Also the solution to the "problem" of "most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted" is to literally destroy the environment in an industrialization project.
Solving the "problem" of "...the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet," is also limited by that cost effectiveness problem AND the problem of we don't have the technology to do anything with energy collected by satellites, especially ones half-way around the solar system. Then there's the issue of putting up a few trillion solar power satellites still would allow the sun to "uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet."
Well yeah, obviously _infinite_ growth is not possible given the laws of physics.
But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels.
For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet.
We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
While you're not technically wrong, the idea of net-zero sources of energy does not address what happens when you start concentrating "free energy" in new places. Fish farms are ecologically monstrosities in most places they exist. Electricity is only one input, fresh water is another, and we haven't figured out where to get that much fresh water for free yet.
In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
I think they meant the political climate in USA where corporate profits is the top of every political agenda, that helps all companies and not just Alaskan fisheries. If the government listened more to workers then USA probably wouldn't be as dominant as it is.
On the other hand, the servers at restaurants in SF make more than most software engineers in Western Europe now. So probably good to focus a little more on economic growth.
I don't think so necessarily, the US is still a huge, solid market market. If anything, I think it could be even richer and more powerful if more its populace were lifted from poverty.
> the US as a whole seems happy to overexploit itself at the expense of its citizens.
At the expense of *most* of its citizens. I know people who make a shocking amount of money fishing in Alaska every summer. The problem with the US is that it always prioritizes a few of its citizens getting rich, to the diffuse and often intangible detriment of the rest of us.
I worked in Alaska (fishing trawler). Most the people there are not making a "shocking" amount of money. It's basically minimum wage plus overtime (granted a shit ton of it) for people working in processing or the lowest positions onboard the vessel.
A good representation of the people I found were Native Alaskans, immigrants, or felons who were attracted to the job because it was one of the damn few available to them. It was brutal work to eke out a basic existence.
Well, I didn't claim that, and in any case, what you're saying reinforces my point. All that money is accruing to a small number of people, because of our government's love of privatizing shared natural resources.
In the Netherlands the fishing industry has basically evaporated to less than 1% of GDP. But the loss of jobs has been amply compensated in other sectors.
Our labor market is probably robust enough for the time being that the felons and immigrants will find other work.
Not sure about the natives. Their way of life was wrecked by western influence and fishing even on a modern vessel is about the closest thing they have to continuing their way of life while making some income near their home. I have no idea what they would shift to if they moved.
In any case USA's highly regulated Bering Sea fishing industry is shared with Russia. Even if we eliminated/downsized our fishing it'd have to be done in concert with Russia to get the desired outcome, otherwise we'd just be handing the lions share of our catch to Russian fisherman.
fishermen constantly accuses everyone and anything "stealing my fish" ?.. it is a ridiculous spectacle that repeats regularly, even as catches go from a boat load to a cargo container ship full. That means other companies, other animals, other countries .. always "them" ?
I think the size and heterogeneity of the US is under-appreciated.
Canada is a 1/10th the population of the US. Europeans are more likely to identify as Germans, Italians, etc. and see to their national interests before those of the EU as a whole.
The US is the 3rd most populous country after China, India - ahead of Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil... And the 4th largest by landmass after Russia, Canada, and China.
The US is top 10 in PPP gdp per capita, and almost all of the states that are higher up are either tiny oil and gas states (eg Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait) or small states that focus on financial services for much larger areas (Luxembourg and Ireland for the EU, Singapore for the indopacific).
Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE.
#1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.
The US economy is more focused on finance and fossil fuel extraction than Ireland, which easily beats the US in terms of PPP per capita.
Remove resource extraction and financial services from all economies and the list does look different, but the US’s position is still far from #1. Also, PPP comparisons between countries are rather suspect as costs for housing, food, etc vary widely across the US. There’s plenty of ways to run these numbers but the results are surprisingly arbitrary.
Per capita figures do include full-time residents, even migrant workers. They do not capture international commuters (most relevant for Luxembourg, which gets something like half its workforce from neighbors).
We prioritize economic growth over the wellbeing of our citizens. The prevailing thought for decades was that more growth = more prosperity for everyone, but that facade has slowly melted away over the past ~40 years as more and more of that prosperity is funneled down to a small ultra-wealthy subset of the population.
Consider the fact that when the US was colonized, the native population was small and had a significant technological disadvantages - also true to some extent for central/South America. That gave the colonists a whole continent for virtually free, whereas in their territories of origin they would have had to compete with large incumbent populations that had similar technology, from weapons to the administrative organs of states.
If youg et a huge resource boost you will surely find ways to profit, just as if you received a billion $ to play with. But getting thins for free - especially land - also means you can afford to care less about externalities, because you don't have as many neighbors or you are not jammed as closely together. And so it's easy and natural for people in that situation to prioritize resource extraction and profit maximization. California's gold rush is a relatively recent example of the same phenomenon.
My pet theory is that when you do this on a continental scale, you end up with a culture that defaults to thinking of economic inputs as infinite, and even if they're not, to maximizing output for as long as possible and then moving on. It's slash-and-burn agriculture's mentality (with a side dose of captive labor) but on an industrial-technological scale.
Fast-forward to the present, and there's an awareness that the civilizational free lunch is over, resources and livable territory are finite, and pollution has a nasty habit of ending up somewhere, but where it's still profitable to do business with the attitude described above. A lot of the bitterness in contemporary politics is due to the economic calculus being increasingly obvious thanks to widespread availability of scientific data and network infrastructure.
Incumbents and wannabes whose economic interests/preferences tend toward extraction of resources or rents cannot publicly admit the validity of data about the downsides of their economic activity, because then they would also have to admit that they simply don't care and prefer making money in the short term to any sort of sustainability in the long term. Though numerous, they are too few in number to sustain such a position in face of broad opposition, so they maintain a set of policy arguments (and a polity) based around different but more emollient axioms. The more questionable or untenable those axioms, the more fervently they must be upheld, to maintain the support of their polity.
In the US, the hardline extraction position has a significant overlap with Chrisitan Nationalism, a belief strongly held by ~10% of the population and accepted/supported by another ~20%. The CN position, when you get down to it, is that mankind was meant to exert total dominion over the Earth by divine fiat, and that in the not-too distant future the divine power will return and re-establish itself on earth following a period of apocalyptic upheaval.
You’ve got something there. I grew up in a semi-rural Texas subdivision (housing development), and witnessed it fulfill a saying: “a subdivision is good for about 30 years: the first 10 as custom new homes, the second 10 as starter homes, and the last 10 as decent rentals.”
Those neighborhoods don’t get renewed - their cheaply-built houses just get passed down the economic ladder, while the previous residents buy bigger, nicer houses further out in a new subdivision.
The Dominionist worldview is, as you said, quite common in my home region, and I was told in church youth group that environmentalism was basically paganism.
I nearly turned down my JHU admission because there was no on-campus parking and freshmen were strongly discouraged from having cars - I couldn’t fathom life without a car. One of the first people I met at freshman orientation was a guy from NYC who not only didn’t have a driver’s license, much less a car, neither did his parents! We managed to throughly culture shock each other, as he’d never met an Evangelical or a Texan before, and couldn’t understand why I was so apprehensive about not having access to a car.
Resource constraints can have appalling results (I live near Nuremberg, so I’m well aware), but no sense of them (what I and many middle-class and up Texans grew up with) carries its own dangers to oneself and one’s world.
>You’ve got something there. I grew up in a semi-rural Texas subdivision (housing development), and witnessed it fulfill a saying: “a subdivision is good for about 30 years: the first 10 as custom new homes, the second 10 as starter homes, and the last 10 as decent rentals.”
Well this rather neatly explains New Orleans East as well.
If you actually looked at actions, you would see that Canada exploits its people vastly more than they exploit any of the resources that exist here. Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink.
If you were to look at the details, I do not doubt that it would be the same in Europe. Please don't think that any of the 'developed' countries are holier-than-US.
>Very cursory example is the price of gas, for a country with the 3rd highest reserves in the world, and the addition of a carbon tax, while inflation is at record highs, when the Canadian footprint is negligible in comparison to the amount of trees here working as a carbon sink.
1. "Addition of a carbon" tax is highly misleading because it was enacted almost half a decade ago, and while there was an increase in carbon taxes during an inflationary period, that was scheduled years before.[1]
2. Dropping carbon (or similar) taxes to fight inflation is terrible policy. It's untargeted, benefits rich people more (the more gas you use the more you benefit), and encourages more consumption by lowering prices. If you want to provide relief, targeted subsidies work far better.
3. Carbon in the atmosphere is fungible so whether there are trees or not in your country is irrelevant. If your country is pumping 20 tons (or whatever) of carbon into the air, that's still 20 tons of carbon that's heating the atmosphere, or 20 tons that a developing country can no longer emit.
4. Forests are "carbon sinks" in the sense that if you keep them around you'll keep a lot of co2 from entering the atmosphere, but mature forests don't suck much carbon out of the atmosphere (on net).
I worked summers in Homer, Alaska at the cannery (four decades ago, before it burned down).
Herring season was interesting since all the herring roe went, apparently, to Japan. A Japanese inspector would arrive and test the herring that the cannery had stored in large brine vats, stacked around the facility. Only when he said it was "ripe" would we begin processing (separating) the roe from the herring.
The non-egg part of the processing was, I was told, to become crab bait or cat food.
Around these parts (Maritimes S.E. Canada) they call herring "herr rn" it helps if you don't open your mouth when you try to say it.
They also have a giant vacuum cleaner type thing four stories tall as loud as two jet airplanes. People casually walk the small village as the "herr rn sucker" deafens everyone.
Was this just harvesting roe and then turning the herring into bait/cat food? Or am I misunderstanding. Did the roe on kelp fishery even exist at that time?
It seems very few of my friends kept fishing in Alaska as we got older. I suspect that is normal, but a few friends still go up to work summers. Sometimes I wish I had gone up to do it.
Yeah, that is true. The herring that was left after the roe was removed was not in great shape (having soaked in brine so long). Certainly edible by crabs though.
China could do a much better job at regulating their fishing industry though...
In the West we eat Tilapia, but we probably should learn to eat Carp. Unfortunately as a family of fish, it gets a bad rap for a few reasons (Americans don't like bones, Carp has a low-class association, Carp can be "muddy" if not raised and prepared right).
We grew up eating carp out of the Mississippi river. Certainly not great, but easy enough to put in a smoker. In fact, it's a relatively common dish in certain communities along the river, and you can find smoked carp in gas stations and grocery stores in the region.
Which region? I live a few hours from the Mississippi, but up north in northern IL, and it runs for quite a ways further north than even me.
I will have to pick up some smoked carp if I make it to said area. I've never seen it for sale. The only time I've seen Carp for sale period is in Asian supermarkets.
I am not super familiar with anything south of Dubuque, but Highway 35 between Prairie du Chien and ending with Lacrosse Wi is full of a number of small river towns that sell it (or at least did when I was growing up there). De Soto and Genoa are the two that had a lot of river catfish and carp, both smoked and sitting in grocer's fridge units.
Sure. That's why they farm raise them in Asia. European carp, anyways.
Asian species are a different story - some of them are filter feeders. Some other European species don't have bottom feeding mouth parts as well (Crucian, Prussian).
Lobster was considered a low class food because it goes bad extremely fast once dead, i.e. within 24 hours even if properly refrigerated, and so it'd only be fed to people like prisoners who had no other choice.
The popularity of lobster went up first when canning technology allowed boats to cook and package them up immediately after they were caught but they were still a cheap source of protein. It didn't become the delicacy it is today until after the great depression when the economics allowed fishermen to specialize in lobster fishing and keep them alive until they reached the customer.
That set of circumstances is difficult to repeat for other species
I don’t know but after going on vacation and eating some fresh lobster I think lobster is gross by itself. A nice Lobster Bisque prepared correctly is delicious but otherwise it’s just a giant muddy tasting sea bug. I’d prefer a Dungeness Crab over lobster any day.
Seeing fish farms in China next to factories, trash heaps, and rail lines, maybe would inspire more confidence if the fish were less robust than tilapia and carp that can survive in almost anything
This is not the solution it seems. Too often, aquaculture uses wild-caught fish as feed. Great way to reduce waste, not a great way to protect the marine environment. At the moment, there is not a lot fish on the market that you can eat with a clean conscience.
Edit: I was thinking saltwater fish, freshwater fish is a different story.
That's certainly true of Salmon, but not for Tilapia and Carp. Carp and Tilapia mostly feed on plant matter and insects - and so that's what the feed pellets are made of.
It's more complicated than that, because there is a substantial trade in fish export to China, where processing happens, followed by re-export back to the US.
2019 figures:
* U.S. commercial fishermen landed 9.3 billion pounds of seafood
* Americans consumed 6.3 billion pounds of seafood
Given imports are more processed than exports, a part of that difference is presumably waste & less desirable byproducts. So it seems fair to conclude that the US eats pretty close to the amount of seafood that it produces.
In $ terms (because of the value add of processing), US seafood imports are roughly 4x exports.
Haven't the Faroe Islands managed to develop a highly profitable and sustainable salmon aquaculture? Let's hope it's not too much to ask Alaskans to learn from what has been done successfully in other parts of the world.
Alfalfa is one of the most water efficient crops widely grown. Considerably more efficient than corn, rice, wheat, etc. And while California may export a lot of its alfalfa, it's the exception relative to the rest of the nation.
> Based on USDA data for 2021, only 3.9% of all U.S. hay produced and 6.4% of all alfalfa hay entered the export market.
Efficient by what metric? Calories? Weight? Profitability?
The problem is that due to the system of water rights and allocations, California is effectively subsidizing Saudi Arabia by selling water to local farmers at below market rates. Thus we have a water shortage which impacts everyone while benefiting only a tiny number of farmers.
> The problem is that due to the system of water rights and allocations, California is effectively subsidizing Saudi Arabia by selling water to local farmers at below market rates. Thus we have a water shortage which impacts everyone while benefiting only a tiny number of farmers.
The problem is that farmers are being blamed for poor city planning and management. Los Angeles, for example, lets tens of billions of gallons of fresh water flow into the ocean. [0]
The farmers are at least using the 40% share of the water they get and in return Californians get affordable food.
> According to the Pacific Institute, California's urban areas are letting between 770,000 and 3.9 million acre-feet of water spill away every year (depending on how dry or wet the year is).
A large portion of our fresh water needs to be allowed to flow into the ocean in order to sustain healthy riparian and littoral ecosystems. City governments and residents use relatively little water directly; almost all of it goes to agriculture and industry. Farmers are being blamed because they continue to waste water by failing to adopt more efficient practices such as drip irrigation, and by growing crops that aren't suited to the local climate. Growing alfalfa (and other fodder crops) for export does nothing to provide Californians with affordable food; in fact it does the opposite.
We need to move towards a free market solution where all water users pay market rates instead of subsidizing politically favored sectors. If that means that prices rise for certain water-intensive crops then so be it. That's preferable to a water shortage.
Alfalfa is the poster child for exactly the right crop for the western U.S. climate. Farmers aren't idiots, they know what crops produce the highest yields per gallon of water. The only reason there are water wasting crops like corn is through government subsidies. Alfalfa is not subsidized, yet you want to make that the focus. And California exporting ~20% of their alfalfa is a drop in the bucket relative to the agricultural industry as a whole, seems strange to fixate on that.
There isn't a water shortage. Cities are wasting their fresh water through mismanagement. They could syphon off 10% of the runoff to little to no environmental effect, but they don't because there is no political capital to be gained.
And water rights are attached to land, it isn't just "given", farmers need to buy, own and maintain the land to preserve their water rights. Which has more free market qualities than any proposal I've heard coming out of the California legislature.
> Deep-Rootedness—alfalfa roots are commonly 3-5 feet deep and can extend to 8-15 feet in some soils. Therefore this crop can utilize moisture residing deep in the profile when surface waters become scarce. It shares this property with crops such as orchards, vineyards, and sugarbeets and safflower, unlike crops such as onion, lettuce and corn, where it's easy to lose water past the root zone.
> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.
> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.
> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.
> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).
One complexity with this plan is that the vast majority of the seafood processing occurs overseas. We export fish to China to be processed, then ship it back.
If fishing was done on land and not miles off sea and underwater where the public can't see what's going on - I'm sure there would be much more care about how we fished and it wouldn't take a massive collapse in fish populations before something was done about it.
It seems no matter where in the world the same thing is happening in different ways and there seems to be a common response: it's not us - its foreign fisherman, big fishing companies, climate change, different types of fisherman, marine use etc.
"If fishing was done on land and not miles off sea and underwater where the public can't see what's going on - I'm sure there would be much more care about how we fished and it wouldn't take a massive collapse in fish populations before something was done about it."
I think that's a but wishful. Just look at stuff like CAFOs. The majority of consumers don't give a damn as long as the price in the store is cheap enough. They're not thinking of where the stuff they're buying came from.
I've done a lot of highway driving around the US and CAFOs are probably the worst part of it. They are depressing to look at, and you can often smell them miles before you see them. Central California, all of Nebraska, and Northern Indiana are three places that stand out in my mind for having outrageous "density" of abhorrent-smelling places.
There's a correlated issue here-- housing (and other goods) have gotten so expensive with respect to real wages that most consumers don't really have much of a choice.
Wealth inequality is a huge part of the reason consumers won't opt for the more eco-friendly or ethical options on the market.
Even if the market had a significant shift, the industry wouldn't have the capacity to accommodate it without a rather large negative change in consumption.
I'm not so sure about that. The horrors of factory farming happen on land and while a lot of people criticize it, nothing much has been done about it since the 30s.
I worked on an Alaskan fishing vessel. They had a live aboard agent of the state making sure everything we did was kosher. I don't think the Russians in the Bering Sea had such restraints.
The public only cares about what is affecting them today and is right in front of their face. And often even then they don't care that much about those things.
Generally speaking, people as individuals are simply not willing to change and will always point to someone else as being the problem.
The only thing that has a chance at "solving" climate change and environmental collapse is individual action and individual change.
You are directly contradicting yourself in the last sentence?
This nonsense-belief of "individual change" as a necessary precursor to societal adaptation of necessary policies is an absurdity most likely cooked up by industry spin-doctors.
Of course, it is exactly the other way around. Abstract insight into a problem and its solution needs to be implemented into policy by the government. That is it's primary function.
> Abstract insight into a problem and its solution needs to be implemented into policy by the government.
That's all well and good if you live in a dictatorship, but those of us under democracy are lead by the same individuals that who won't act. Only once they have decided to act and feel the need to clean up the outliers who continue to go against the grain will they use their governmental powers.
Complacency and greed can just as easily exist in a dictator as it does collectively in a democracy. That being said, I think there are particular factors in the United States that favor corporations and their profits over the general good of the country.
Environmental degradation is a socialization of (opportunity) costs. Unaccountability for those is a systemic failure that needs to be adressed as such.
This has nothing to do with democracy per se. The constituency in the US isn't directly involved with legislature. They vote for "representatives" who supposedly defend their interests in a role of mediation.
In reality, long-term interests of the public are of little import.
Public perception is easily swayed, what counts more than votes is, who has money and knows how to use it.
Those responsible steal themselves out of accountability.
Look no further than plastic recycling for the impact that individuals can have on improving the environment. Which is to say, none. For all of the pro-recycling propaganda, 95% of it ends up in landfill.
Pro-recycling propaganda started within packaging industry.
Pro-animals and vegan movements have different roots. Dairy & meat industry is trying its best to discourage individual actions ... their concern with plant based alternatives and naming of stuff is a clear indicator. Even terms like almond milk (1000 years old term) is somehow a problem.
Plastics are very visible within our environment, that was the reason behind population accepting recycling.
Animals do not have the voice and the horrors of their lives are generally hidden from the consumers. If most of the population remains ignorant incl. politicians, we cannot expect that anything will change.
Industries produce goods that are _intentionally_ made NOT to last, but are made to go garbage and pollute our environment. Even if we as consumers will put that into recycle or re-use it in some other way, still vast majority of that goes into waste. It is not done to make it cheap and affordable, it is produced that way to maximize profits of manufacturers by allowing frequent sales repetitive sales. Companies that used to produce reliable stuff don't do that no more. Not in their offer list. How do I fix this individually?
The driving factors of climate change:
* industrial
* end of list
Individuals changing their behavior will not do a single thing to solve, reduce, or delay the climate crisis. It’s a feel-good thing for individuals to do, yes, but it doesn’t help in the slightest.
I feel like I've been reading this same article again and again my entire life, from the collapse of the cod fishery in '93 until now, we continue to learn nothing and make the same mistakes.
It's really weird, science has pretty much figured out the maths of how to fish a stock sustainably, and doing so would give good yields for the forseeable future (climate change may have an impact).
However in most regions the industry and politics alwas keep setting quotas too high, with ever decreasing yields that end in a stock collapse. And this is not in developing nations with other problems, the latest example is the cod stock collapse in the Baltic Sea.
This mostly fixed the problem but demand keeps on increasing along with changes to water temperature, so local collapses in specific populations are becoming a big problem again.
There is a very long list of collapsed fish stocks. The industry is only saved by fishing down the food chain and exploiting new species, which are often harder to catch, helped by techonology.
From the wikipedia article, sounds like not great, although some signs it _could_ recover in the near future if left alone -- which we are unlikely to do, because every time it starts to look like it might recover, we just overfish it again.
> In 2015, two reports on cod fishery recovery suggested stocks may have recovered somewhat.[56][2][57]
> A Canadian scientist reported that, cod were increasing in numbers, health, normalizing in maturity and behavior, and offered a promising estimate of increased biomass in particular areas.[2]
> A US report suggested that a failure to consider reduced resilience of cod populations due to increased mortality in warming surface water of the Gulf of Maine had led to overfishing despite regulation. Thus, overestimates of stock biomass due to generalization of local estimates and ignorance of environmental factors in the growth or recovery potential of a cod fishery would lead to mismanagement and further collapse of stocks, through further unsustainable quotas, as in the past.[58][59]
> In June 2018, the federal government reduced the cod quota, finding that the cod stocks had fallen again after just two years of fair catches.
While people are clearly happy about the return of this fish, seems clear there's a lot of uncertainty around what to do next and whether fishing for it is a good idea.
It's tough to talk about North Atlantic fisheries in aggregate. Some are reasonably healthy, others are still collapsed. Cod is just starting to rebound.
I read many years ago, the fishing fleet in the NE US was outdated, but Pres Carter provided subsidies in the 70s to modernize the fleet due to foreign competition.
The result was the same as what the Article mention for Alaska. Boom times for quite a while, then the crash which the NE is still working through.
The obsolete fleet provided more employment and was not as efficient, providing for some recovery on the ocean.
What matters is the total amount of fish caught, along with bycatch and other damage from lost fishing great (ghost nets). The size of the vessels doing the catching is irrelevant. Fisheries should be managed based on quotas and allowed fishing techniques rather than boat size. Larger vessels also tend to be safer for the crews.
Not sure what you are asking, but yes, many people upgraded their fleets due to the no/low interest loans provided in the 70s/80s. I do not know the state of the fleet now. But catches are very low compared to back then.
> Trawl industry representatives say that bycatch, which the industry is required by law to discard, is not the driving force behind recent crab, salmon, and halibut declines. They point to climate change and warming waters as well as natural population variability as the primary culprits.
I don't think they are wrong here. I think blaming trawlers is looking for rounding errors. But there are still a litany of reasons to start sensibly restricting trawling.
I remember having to take a class about The Blockchain for professional development about ten years ago and they gave fisheries as an example industry where blockchain would help guarantee whatever fish was caught on whatever day and delivered to the store. What a joke.
I feel pretty impotent and helpless clicking an upvote button as my contribution to these types of calamities that I, due to other priorities in my life, can otherwise do nothing about. I have almost zero faith in the government to remedy these issues when there is large corporate interest in the status quo.
You can. Your actions matter. Simply refuse to to participate in that. Even saving a small piece of nature has a meaning. Maybe not to you, but to what is saved it has.
If there was no demand, it would not be happening.
Your example can help others to see what's wrong with their way of living. If lot of people change, the laws shall be changed.
> almost zero faith in the government ... when ..is large corporate interest
All (western) governments are puppets of corporate interests. Just look behing most armed conflicts of the last century, and also how are goverments handling the climate crisis. We can expect no meaningful change from their actions.
Demand for change must come from the people, and it must come from a significant part of the population (majority is not required, though), otherwise the status quo and business as usual will prevail.
Maybe you can't do much about this directly, but what about being part of the bigger solution by not consuming fish. I get my protein en omega 3 from plant based foods.
The pipeline was successfully blown up. Now it gets carried by trains manned by overworked employees with constant derailments, or by gas guzzling tractor-trailers. Mission accomplished!
I was listening to a piece on the local news radio about fish hatcheries in the PNW and the numbers are shocking with the fish that make it back to spawn; Chinook salmon sound like they're barely holding on with all our best efforts.
I have a lot of pessimism about our ocean health, we really need to do anything we can to support fish populations -- if those collapse it's just a matter of time before the rest of the ecosystem follows.
Take a look at Patagonia's Artifishal film[0]. The best thing to support anadromous fisheries might be just leaving them alone - in the rivers, and in the ocean.
I'm not necessarily opposed to this line of thinking but we probably need to do a lot more in other areas first, like undaming the Columbia and Snake rivers which were the largest salmon spawning grounds in the world.
Thanks for the link though, I'll take a look at it when I have some time.
Eh. Overfishing isn't a problem for the earth, or for the oceans, or for ocean life. It's a problem for the fishing industry.
We send certain types of boats with certain types of gear out to certain small areas where we have found concentrations of certain kinds of fish, and they catch lots and bring them back to factories with certain kinds of processing equipment which then send the product out to be consumed.
And after a while we've caught a good percentage of that concentration of fish, and then they start to peter out and it become uneconomical to run that entire costly process. And so we then identify other kinds of edible ocean life, and we change our boats and gear and locations and seasons and factories at great cost, and consume a different batch of fish.
And while we're on that second effort, the first area is being repopulated with the first type of fish, or maybe another, because the food sources for fish are still out there and available - the planktons and smaller fish - and nature abhors a vacuum.
It's all just a cycle. Fish stocks may move around in response to our overfishing - more reproduction over here, bigger schools back in the same place once we move on - but the net effect is that the biomass remains the same.
But change is expensive, and so we hear from the payers about how we're overfishing "their" fishstocks.
We're a tiny blip on the oceans' consumption radar. Don't mourn for the fish. Mourn for the people who need different boats and gear and territories every ten years or so.
I remember Ecology lectures, starting from Lotka-Volterra model... And getting into more complex scenarios. One, was an actual model of how much fishes the industry can predate while guaranteeing the sustainability of their biz. Of course, it only happens in books. Sadly, the seas are largely unregulated.. Or even if regulations are in place, enforcing is so difficult. In fact, it can very easily turn into conflict between nations.
IIRC, most of the models were predicated on, how can we sustain THIS small ecology in this spot with this type of fish so as to cause no change. But I'd argue that we change everything, and change isn't a bad thing by itself, and so if we go beyond the models - say, to the point of a cod fishery depletion - it becomes much like decrying an erosive path in a huge desert - fighting for stasis merely for the sake of stasis. The cod no longer congregate in this one area, but they're still out there in others and new species can easily swoop in (and will because the cods' energy sources are still there.)
We'll never be no-impact (at least until the asteroid hits.) But so long as we're not poisoning life away, we're just another niche species on the ocean.
Too early to tell, but my cynical mind expects the 30% requirement will be fulfilled by choosing parcels of ocean smack in the middle of nowhere with the least economical and thus ecological value.
I walked into the local Asian grocery store, and saw that Alaskan King Crab was something like $80/lb, and then I realized I'll never eat Alaskan King Crab ever again.
Decrease of 84% of the Alaskan king crabs stocks between 2018 and 2022 so, not... probably not soon.
May be covid-19 messing with the data (by several reasons), or changes in the environment or in the trophic chains, or pirate fishing fleets moving a lot of the stuff under the radar, or Fukushima. Probably all of them attacking at the same time.
In any case it seems that something hit the Alaskan crabs and it must be happened a few years before 2018. Marine biologists should be able to even estimate the exact year.
If this were true, there would be a marine zone of death near Fukushima that dissipates with distance. For the Bering Sea to be so impacted, the Pacific near Japan would be entirely devoid of life, and it isn’t.
> the Pacific near Japan would be entirely devoid of life.
I can't see why. Sealife does not work like that.
Ecosystems "collapse" only to rebuild in a different direction. All those cods vanished are now lobsters. To remove all the life in the ocean we would need a really extreme event. Not even an atomic bomb could do it in Bikini Atoll
And we need to stop lying to ourselves pretending that we have enough data about the Oceans. Some very serious troubles in the ecosystems can be spotted only by an expert, after a lot of hard work, and their effects will happen later and in a different continent.
What I can see is a list, that is getting longer and longer each year, about massive die-offs in the Pacific. Sometimes is El Niño, other is "the bird flu" or the "yellow flubmarine". Who knows? The fact is that --nobody knows-- exactly why this famished dolphins showing the ribs decided to strand here to die, and most of the corpses will be too decomposed after floating for three weeks before arriving to the coast.
We're destroying our local ecosystems for a quick buck, and a cap on exports would be the quickest fix. In the long term we should turn more to fish farms.