Fish: the once and future fast food

[MMIX]

http://www.scotsman.com/news/education/scots-research-finds-fish-evolving-to-evade-nets-1-3849689

Damn I hope this is right; Swim faster little fishy. I just love the Law of Unintended Consequences  , don't you? Eventually huge numbers of people may starve to death because we turbo-charged the fish stocks, and what is not to love about that

[Acosmicist]

what is not to love about that

Are you saying it's a bad thing that humans will have selective pressure to get better at fishing?

[MMIX]

what is not to love about that

Are you saying it's a bad thing that humans will have selective pressure to get better at fishing?

Getting better at fishing is just that tired old trope the Arms Race in a different light anyway. We need better solutions not just faster ways of doing the same old things. Of course YMMV

[Acosmicist]

what is not to love about that

Are you saying it's a bad thing that humans will have selective pressure to get better at fishing?

Getting better at fishing is just that tired old trope the Arms Race in a different light anyway. We need better solutions not just faster ways of doing the same old things. Of course YMMV

The key word here was *better*, whether we give up at actually going out and fishing, find a new approach, or just domesticate them.

[Doktor Howl]

Seeing as how the ocean is mostly empty now except for vent worms and jellyfish, we should probably concentrate on domesticating fish.

[MMIX]

Seeing as how the ocean is mostly empty now except for vent worms and jellyfish, we should probably concentrate on domesticating fish.

We'll have to catch them first  but that sounds like a good solution to me.
                 

eta Also there is a fortune to be made for anyone who can work out wtf to do with jellyfish

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If we could just ease up on our determination to view absolutely everything as a resource to be used up as fast as possible, fish stocks would probably rebound pretty quickly. Hell, with decent fishing management combined with habitat restoration we could probably even restore the salmon and eel runs.

Instead, we have this absurd situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, with street runoff the largest contributor to ocean pollution, huge dead zones caused by ag runoff, enormous warm water patches pushing massive droughts in growing regions, and everyone too stupidly myopic to look at more than one problem at a time to see how they all fit together.

[MMIX]

If we could just ease up on our determination to view absolutely everything as a resource to be used up as fast as possible, fish stocks would probably rebound pretty quickly. Hell, with decent fishing management combined with habitat restoration we could probably even restore the salmon and eel runs.

Instead, we have this absurd situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, with street runoff the largest contributor to ocean pollution, huge dead zones caused by ag runoff, enormous warm water patches pushing massive droughts in growing regions, and everyone too stupidly myopic to look at more than one problem at a time to see how they all fit together.

And, I know it isn't a particularly popular view in some quarters, but while there are currently diminishing resources of fish, fowl, and good red herring there always seems to be an unlimited quantity of people. That is one thing the world surely isn't short of - people. And until we start to look seriously at social alternatives in which our comfortable 21st c lives are not supported on the backs of slave labour; most, if not all of them conveniently hidden in places where we don't need to look at them, whole other continents for preference, it doesn't look as though there will be any improvement. And market capitalism, that wonderful system where the market element is manipulated at government level to ensure that the market not only doesn't but in reality can't operate as the theoreticians say that it should/could. And we are living in a system that is predicated on infinite and perpetual growth of both the size of the population and the size of the world economy to maintain standards of living and fuel continually rising prosperity? More Law of Unintended Consequences there than you could shake a stick at. I reckon that when that shit hits the fan people are going to look back to the dark ages with nostalgia. [/old fart]
In other words, yes you nailed it Nigel

[Doktor Howl]

If we could just ease up on our determination to view absolutely everything as a resource to be used up as fast as possible, fish stocks would probably rebound pretty quickly. Hell, with decent fishing management combined with habitat restoration we could probably even restore the salmon and eel runs.

Instead, we have this absurd situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, with street runoff the largest contributor to ocean pollution, huge dead zones caused by ag runoff, enormous warm water patches pushing massive droughts in growing regions, and everyone too stupidly myopic to look at more than one problem at a time to see how they all fit together.

We'll be at 8 billion people soon.  That's 16,000,000,000,000 calories per day.  It's 24,000,000,000 pounds of human shit per day.  I have NO idea how much car exhaust or waste heat from air conditioning and refrigeration.

The root cause problem is poverty.  Poverty and insecurity make people breed.  More people means more poverty and insecurity.  We dug this whole at the end of world war II (before then, but that's when we automated it), and I am unsure what the hell can be done about it.

[MMIX]

Poverty isn't a cause, its an effect. Our system is in overdrive, it needs excess; it needs the "overs", over consumption, overpopulation, overproduction, etc etc. "Everything in moderation" might be the recommended course of action for the individual but the system's demands are immoderate; breed breed breed, consume consume consume.

[Doktor Howl]

Poverty isn't a cause, its an effect.

Not even gonna get into this.

[MMIX]

Why?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If we could just ease up on our determination to view absolutely everything as a resource to be used up as fast as possible, fish stocks would probably rebound pretty quickly. Hell, with decent fishing management combined with habitat restoration we could probably even restore the salmon and eel runs.

Instead, we have this absurd situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, with street runoff the largest contributor to ocean pollution, huge dead zones caused by ag runoff, enormous warm water patches pushing massive droughts in growing regions, and everyone too stupidly myopic to look at more than one problem at a time to see how they all fit together.

And, I know it isn't a particularly popular view in some quarters, but while there are currently diminishing resources of fish, fowl, and good red herring there always seems to be an unlimited quantity of people. That is one thing the world surely isn't short of - people. And until we start to look seriously at social alternatives in which our comfortable 21st c lives are not supported on the backs of slave labour; most, if not all of them conveniently hidden in places where we don't need to look at them, whole other continents for preference, it doesn't look as though there will be any improvement. And market capitalism, that wonderful system where the market element is manipulated at government level to ensure that the market not only doesn't but in reality can't operate as the theoreticians say that it should/could. And we are living in a system that is predicated on infinite and perpetual growth of both the size of the population and the size of the world economy to maintain standards of living and fuel continually rising prosperity? More Law of Unintended Consequences there than you could shake a stick at. I reckon that when that shit hits the fan people are going to look back to the dark ages with nostalgia. [/old fart]
In other words, yes you nailed it Nigel

You are dead-on. Problem is, the closest thing to a clue that I have about solving the basic problem of overconsumption based on growth. It worked for a long time because we had a lot of planet to grow INTO, and Western colonialism essentially views people as commodities so the poor and exploited weren't seen as a problem.

But we don't have anything left to grow into, and our rampant consumption has broken the ecological cycle we rely on to survive.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If we could just ease up on our determination to view absolutely everything as a resource to be used up as fast as possible, fish stocks would probably rebound pretty quickly. Hell, with decent fishing management combined with habitat restoration we could probably even restore the salmon and eel runs.

Instead, we have this absurd situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, with street runoff the largest contributor to ocean pollution, huge dead zones caused by ag runoff, enormous warm water patches pushing massive droughts in growing regions, and everyone too stupidly myopic to look at more than one problem at a time to see how they all fit together.

We'll be at 8 billion people soon.  That's 16,000,000,000,000 calories per day.  It's 24,000,000,000 pounds of human shit per day.  I have NO idea how much car exhaust or waste heat from air conditioning and refrigeration.

The root cause problem is poverty.  Poverty and insecurity make people breed.  More people means more poverty and insecurity.  We dug this whole at the end of world war II (before then, but that's when we automated it), and I am unsure what the hell can be done about it.

If people have access to education and options, they have fewer children. Hell, women with access to birth control will have fewer children, poverty be damned. But with education and options comes the expectation of development, electricity, cars, large houses with private bedrooms. And the first world consumes more, uses more resources, than all of the impoverished combined. So we need more than ending poverty, we also need to embrace a middle-class standard of living that doesn't involve rolling in excess.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Or, rather, we needed to about 50 years ago. It's too late now.