> The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.
>IN 2018, THE most recent year for which relevant data are available, people consumed more fish than they did either pork or beef or poultry.
The lede isn't buried, it's right there, but it goes unremarked. We already converted land mammals to human food:
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
> If we're pulling out more fish from the sea than all those pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, etc., that's gonna leave a mark, eh?
The sea is big, though. 3x as large as the land, and it's mostly teeming with life. It gets just as much solar energy per square km as the land, so it can support a roughly similarly dense ecosystem.
The problem is more about what type of fish we like to eat than the sheer volume: if we were willing to make do with krill and plankton we could sustainably consume many times our current intake, but not so when we want cod and tuna.
It’s nutrients not sunlight that’s the ocean’s limitation. Much like comparing forests and deserts the ocean is a wildly different place based on local conditions.
> The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
To me the wild thing is the first sentence:
>IN 2018, THE most recent year for which relevant data are available, people consumed more fish than they did either pork or beef or poultry.
The lede isn't buried, it's right there, but it goes unremarked. We already converted land mammals to human food:
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
https://xkcd.com/1338/
If we're pulling out more fish from the sea than all those pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, etc., that's gonna leave a mark, eh?