There is a British company called SafetyNet producing products to make fishing more sustainable (I have a friend who works for them). One product is a light intended to work exactly in the way described here:
Now that's useful. Fishers can now play around with colors and blinking, and see if they can catch more of what they want and less of what they don't want.
In practice, research and experimentation is done to work out the right combinations of light colour for the particular sort of fish you are trying to catch, and then fixed light sources are built for that. In some cases the roll-off from colours you want to colours you don't is quite sharp and that's easier with fixed illuminators rather than RGB.
Edit: I have a clearer way of explaining the challenge. We are used to 'any colour' being possible from RGB style LEDs. That is one resolved colour that we perceived. But for this we aren't trying to achieve one colour, we are trying to configure a particular spectral output. You could maybe get close to that with lots of LEDs across the spectrum, but it's not the same as well designed cluster.
To put it bluntly, we use R,G,B because those are the photoreceptors in our eyes.
Our R,G,B LEDs are tuned for maximum effectiveness on our photoreceptor cells [1]. Red photoreceptors are probably not very useful for sea fish as red is easily scattered in water.
This is wonderful, but I wonder if cost of adoption is an issue? I know that abandoned netting is a substantial source of plastics in the ocean, so I expect that fishing operations are sensitive to the replacement cost.
Why? That just means we would be fucking up the land more. No joke, if we don't eat fish we are eating something that requires land to grow, and agrarian land usually comes from destroying biodiverse ecosystems.
We already grow enough plant matter on land to feed to entire world population, we just feed most of it to animals instead.
If we stop fishing, we don’t need to use more land to grow more food, we just need to shift consumption towards plants and away from inefficient options like cows.
In some idealized world where everyone acts collectively toward the goal of minimising animal production, sure, but that's not actually how it works. If the supply of fish is constrained, demand for terrestrial animal protein and related land use increases.
For arguments sake though, let's grant that all terrestrial food production becomes plant based: adding some well managed fishing would then reduce the land footprint required to produce the calories we need. Some of the ecosystems that have been razed into biodiversity deserts to produce crops won't be needed for agriculture, and can return to wilderness.
We don't need to do a lot of things. Sustainable management of all sources of food is going to save species, taking 71% of the surface of the earth entirely off the table of potential solutions is not optimal for most reasonable metrics of what we should do.
Our oceans have lost 50% of life in the last 40 years; 1/3 of marine mammals and sharks and others are at risk of extinction and close to 90% of the ocean has been damaged by humans.
I’ll say it again, we have nothing close to sustainable management.
Not trolling, and nothing personal but I pointed out an inaccuracy in a vapid and snarky comment with the level of detail it deserved.
The fallacy in your understanding of fisheries management, as you describe it, is that fisheries are not managed as a single global stock. Your argument is the equivalent of saying "all worldwide governments are terrible because some totaltarian despots exist".
There certainly are some historical failures and cautionary tales in fisheries management. But partially in response to those missteps, like the collapse of Atlantic cod fisheries in 1992, the implementation of science-based fisheries management have greatly improved. This isn't just an exercise in hypotheticals, where intensive management is applied, previously overfished stocks rebuild, or stocks are at target levels that can support sustained harvesting (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/2218).
Fisheries management works where applied, and there are absolutely examples of sustainably managed fisheries today - take skipjack tuna a cosmopolitan species that is not at risk of overexploitation. They can be harvested on a commercial scale with pole and line gear, one at a time with very low rates of bycatch. This isn't some fringe case either, skipjack make up the majority of global tuna harvest.
nobody brought up fisheries management specifically until this comment of yours. In fact the first mention of "sustainable management" was when you said "sustainable management of all sources of food." good information, but weird argumentation to say the least
Can't agree it is weird, the comment I replied to raised exclusively ocean-related examples to support their taking exception to the existence of sustainable management (of food production), I reckon management of capture fisheries is a pretty logical place to establish that examples of sustainable management do exist in response.
Also, to counter 'there's no sustainable management (of food production)' one only needs to establish that an example does exist, and an example is going to be within some specific niche of production. As a gift to HN, I chose to stay within my realm of expertise.
Finally, maybe it's just me but considering the broader context of the thread in which we were told we ought to stop fishing entirely and rely solely on plants for sustenence, I don't get the impression that the commenter had management of cereal grain agriculture in mind when they implied 'management' practices are inherently unsustainable.
Is there a reason it could not happen, or do you just think it won't? I wouldn't be so sure in say, ~100 years, that we'll be doing much significant ocean fishing.
More than half of seafood is now produced from farmed fish so my guess is that it is possible. The fish farming industry has a wide range of serious problems but maybe it could save ocean wildlife?
They are comparing apples with oranges in that chart.
Cultured algae, molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms, and cultured fish versus... wild fish.
So they are removing wild molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms and wild algae from one side of the equation in an article that focus in the message that that part has decreased. Lying with statistics. If we compare wild fish against farmed fish only, the result would be really different.
And there is pirate fishing also. Some companies under-report a percentage of their captures routinely, to hide that they fish more than are allowed to. Not so easy to do in sea farms when you can't produce more than the space assigned to you.
I'm pretty sure the wild capture fisheries data includes shellfish etc. FAOs numbers for total fisheries production matches aquaculture + capture fisheries that says 'wild fish'. Often fish is used in a very loose sense in fisheries.
Why would everyone voluntarily stop hunting? People don't go out and run ocean trawlers every day for their meals, they buy it at the supermarket, and for most the source is irrelevant.
Trolling is a fishing term. The sense of 'internet troll' is based on a fishing metaphor.
Trawling and trolling are slightly different fishing techniques. Both are ways to catch fish from a moving boat, but trawling involves dragging a net, while trolling means trailing a baited line.
Not sure what your point is. Are you saying I'm trolling because I'm saying that consumers will mostly be fine with farmed (and possibly 'lab grown') alternatives in the future? The sources used for our food have changed dramatically over time, no reason for that to not happen again.
But there are highly abundant stocks of wild fish that can be harvested sustainably en masse, like pollock, it's really hard for scalefish aquaculture to entirely outcompete the simplicity of that — allowing nature to feed your fish and control all the necessary variables. I don't think we'll see capture fisheries totally disappear.
if hunting and fishing should be on the same level, hunters would have large trucks where they could skin filet and do anything with the animal on the go then just dump out whatever is left out the back, there is no comparison in these two, fishing should for sure be way more regulated than it currently is, the large fishing fleets are disgusting murder houses for pet food..
We are destroying ecosystems on land as well. Everything is connected and there is no free lunch — the answer isn't to completely stop doing one or the other only to greatly increase impacts on the other parts of the biosphere, it is to produce food with sustainable, science based management, which is absolutely possible in the ocean.
But that might not include anything recognisable as "fishing" or harvesting wild populations.
As was said to you eleswhere - much of the world does have a choice of where to get their calories. Taking from the sea until it has nothing left to give is a profit-driven exercise in the main, not one of caloric necessity.
> But that might not include anything recognisable as "fishing" or harvesting wild populations
That's just not true. About half of scientifically assessed fish stocks at or above target levels, thus sustainably harvested, or they are successfully rebuilding from previous overexploitation i.e. fisheries management is working. One can easily consume seafood without engaging in "Taking from the sea until it has nothing left to give". Doing so reduces the land footprint of your diet, and for some seafood like whitefish, small pelagics or cultured bivalves, you will probably decrease your carbon footprint, even relative to a vegan diet.
I also strongly agree. Members of HN like to silence views like this, but it's a valid point that is growing in support.
You may not see it now, but views like yours are part of the problem. We can't keep destroying the planet. Change comes at multiple levels, whether it be from the individuals with their purchasing power or governments forcing reform.
The counterfactual to fishing isn't nothing though. People need to eat. Any calorie not coming from seafood has a footprint on land. Some seafood like whitefish, small pelagics and farmed bivalves, when sustainably managed are about the most low carbon and environmentally low footprint foods you can eat, and they are also very micronutrient dense at a time 'silent hunger' is affecting at least a billion people on earth.
Well those folks experiencing silent hunger certainly aren’t getting the fish you’re promoting that we eat, so that doesn’t seem to be a good reason to continue doing it.
Human beings already grow enough food to feed the planet. In fact we grow enough food to feed to hundreds of billions of animals we slaughter every year. We could easily give up fishing and factory farming AND eradicate hunger, but it requires significant change to folks priorities and supply chains. It’s possible though, and we should work towards it ASAP
> so that doesn’t seem to be a good reason to continue doing it.
Forgive me, but "Many people worldwide are struggling to get certain nutrients, so it doesn't matter if we remove an important source of those nutrients" doesn't strike me as very well reasoned.
> It’s possible though, and we should work towards it ASAP
Why should we give up fishing? Improve sustainability and management of fisheries, sure, but if the goal is to eradicate hunger, why would you want to get rid of something that is an important provider of jobs and nutrients for some of the poorest people?
Because in an ideal world we reduce the suffering of all sentient beings as much as possible, which includes sea life.
I understand that there are folks who are dependent on fishing right now for livelihood, but we should change that so they aren’t.
But that also brings about a point often overlooked by carnists: are _you_ personally dependent on eating fish to survive? If not then you should stop. For some reason carnists often think in terms of “well this person on the other side of the world needs to rely on fishing, so it’s fine for me to continue eating fish”
As a "carnist" (first time I have seen that, it's a good choice) who would, in an ideal world, prefer not to be one:
Stop focusing on things you can't change (even tho they make you look good/moral) and start focusing on results.
If all the energy used to try and convince people to not eat meat (something that can't even theoretically happen) had instead been focused on lobbing for systemic support for development of artificial meat ... we would have already had it. Then no one would have to give up meat. Most people have no connection to the animal as is - if the messaging is done right, most will not care, especially if it's seen as "better, cheaper and healthier".
But for that, someone would have to start a massive pan-EU campaign to start devoting billions into research and commercialization of artificial meat.
I would support such a (vegan) candidate.
I eat meat, but I would much prefer if there was no suffering attached to it.
This is very silly. Your argument is based on thinking it’s futile to resume suffering as much as possible. The time spent trying to get folks to change isn’t a waste at all, as we can all see that there is progress. This is how any rights movement works.
Also, there are already made viable replacements for meat. I’d start with lentils, but you don’t like them there are hundreds of other options.
> Your argument is based on thinking it’s futile to resume suffering as much as possible.
My argument is, that there are multiple strategies and that you are using a suboptimal, possibly at this point a counter-productive one.
You will NEVER convince everyone (or even close to a majority) to stop eating meat. At least not in anything close to a lifetime and without highly authoritarian methods. So working toward that end is pointless. You should be, instead, working on providing an alternative and making sure people adopt it.
> This is how any rights movement works.
Yeah, and they all make the same mistake. Most of them have managed to change the values of the population but then lose steam, slow down and get stuck or even slide back when trying to change societal systems.
Almost like changing values and changing systems isn't the same thing.
> Also, there are already made viable replacements for meat. I’d start with lentils, but you don’t like them there are hundreds of other options.
I've tried most of the ones that are available here. And no, they have not. They are getting better, and some are very interesting as a standalone thing, but they are not a replacement.
> You will NEVER convince everyone (or even close to a majority) to stop eating meat.
But… I have… numerous times. You don’t really know what you’re talking about at all.
If you have an actual legitimate reason you think you ought not to reduce the suffering of animals, let me know. Otherwise, have a good life and I hope you go vegan.
Sure, I don't doubt that. The current proportion, from a quick google search, is between 1%-10% in the western world. That's after A LOT of effort and before any serious pushback.
Now try doing it for 99% of the population. The world population. How long will that take? 100 years? 500? Don't forget that historically impoverished areas are on the rise economically, and they want, justifiably, what they didn't have an abundance of - meat (among other things).
Now imagine we get real artificial meat, that people can't tell apart, but is cheaper, better tasting and nicer to look at.
How long till we get the percentage of people who don't eat "real" meat up to 90%? 20 years? Maybe less?
So it's up to you how many animals will have to be killed before we stop eating them.
You seem to think veganism is all about meat consumption. That’s only a part. Veganism is manifestation of the belief that animals ought not to be exploited for anything, meat included. Lab grown meat merely addresses part of the issue, at best.
Besides, what exactly is your argument? That it’s hard to change things like this? If so, why does that matter at all? Lots of things are hard but worth doing.
My argument is, that to archive your goals (which I in a way share), the strategy of securing drop-in replacements is a much, much more realistic one than the existing strategy of convincing people to give up luxury.
All ecological and anti-climate change movements have the same problem. Convincing people to give up the luxury of a car, airplane, vacation, phone, (overly) warm home etc. is a great way of putting people on the defensive and triggering pushback.
That's why I'm saying you will NEVER convince anything near a majority of people to give up meat. It's a rare luxury. They will never give that up, especially as long as they watch rich people have fun on their private islands.
This is the difference:
- "You can't ever eat burgers again, or you're a bad person"
- "Want to eat Wagyu beef burgers, but can't afford it? No problem! Now you can, plus, you're a good person for not killing a cow in the process!"
You must realize that "belief that animals ought not to be exploited for anything" is a belief enabled by privilege. A lot of privilege. That's not bad, as privilege (a really shitty word to use for the concept) is not a bad thing. But it's a privilege that many people lack. So you need to find ways to convince people to do what you want without relying on the privilage.
So you want us to optimise for minimised nonhuman animal suffering rather than for minimised environmental footprint or maximised human well-being.
I respect that, but it's a value judgement, and your priorities therein are different than mine.
That said, I'm also not sure I should stop if I did share your ethical priorities. Example: sometimes, I spearfish not far from where I live and take a fish or abalone. Fish often get headshotted and never realise they were speared, not sure there is suffering in those cases (Other times it is a few seconds before I pith them after spearing). No bycatch. Sometimes tens of meals from one sentient being if it is a larger species. I'm pretty sure a meal of agriculturally produced plant foods results in similar amounts of animal suffering once you include animals poisoned and killed by harvest machinery.
Yes I appreciate that there's portion of the population in dire need of food or who have little option but to fish - I doubt any would begrudge them doing whatever they can to survive.
The rest of the world (where we have choice when walking down a supermarket or picking where to eat) should be looking to more ethically and environmentally friendly foods.
> Your diet of dead animals is killing the planet.
You are showing your hand too soon mate. I'm taking about food with zero land use footprint - less than an entirely plant based diet. Nowhere did I advocate for eating terrestrial farmed animal protein. So really, by bringing up the land use footprint of terrestrial food, you are making a strong case for incorporating some seafood to reduce the impact of food. While it's cool that you are unintentionally supporting my case, I'm afraid you may come off as a zealot if you share vegan talking points that are irrelevant to the comment to which you are replying.
Are (pragmatic) views really a problem? I'm not so sure. Depends on what you are trying to achieve.
If you're trying to change people's values (i.e. from "who care about the environment" to "we need to protect the environment") than pragmatism isn't the way to go.
But if you want to convert values (i.e. "we need to protect the environment") into actual real world results, well in that case pragmatism is the only way to go.
Look at the whole green energy discussion. If the green movement contained its activism to fossil fuels and turned pragmatic on the topic of alternatives ... we would be living in a much cleaner world today.
But they didn't and as a result, they radically reduced their net positive effect on the world.
I agree. Have you noticed that there are people who don't eat fish out there? There's quite a few, as an ideal it's something most would surely agree with, to differing degrees of enthusiasm.
Somebody not liking fish is perfectly OK in my book.
Everybody being forced to stop eating fish because a few don't like and lobby against it, is totalitarianism, and in the practice is genocide. We should be fully aware that many millions of humans depend on sea food to survive.
'Let them eat candy instead' is not a realistic solution.
There's six hundred million vegetarians in India alone, that's not a few. Still, even if we ignore that, why should anyone not be allowed to lobby against the eating of fish? Speech is free, is it not? To close down such speech would surely be totalitarian.
I also wonder, since you used the word genocide, what word would you use to describe the amount of death wrought on fish? Or the farming of them? Would being brought up solely to be eaten and never to roam free come under your use of totalitarian?
> 'Let them eat candy instead' is not a realistic solution.
Have you thought about letting people eat all kinds of non-meat foods? I enjoyed tempeh on savoury rice tonight. This morning was pumpkin soup with a mixed bean salad. Lunch was very light, just toast with almond butter. All very tasty, healthy, and high in fibre, protein and macro-nutrients.
Regardless, in most instances, vegetable farming produces much higher yields - and thus calories - per unit of farmland than farming animals ever could. It's a more realistic solution than expanding animal farming.
> why should anyone not be allowed to lobby against the eating of fish?
Because the "solution" that they propose would kill millions of people, and the majority of non-vegans have rights also.
Therefore is a non-solution for a non existent problem
And don't try to convince me that there are lots of acceptable replacements in your mind, because this is incorrect at this moment. Where you want to culture all those pumpkins?, in national parks? there is not enough fertile soil available unless we eat all the remaining nature.
> just toast with almond butter
Yep, what California needs now is to plant more almonds that suck all the water. This line explains perfectly the problem with this ideology
> Because the "solution" that they propose would kill millions of people, and the majority of non-vegans have rights also.
Again, speech is the subject, speech cannot kill anyone, so you would limit speech based on possible outcomes - that is totalitarian. I also don’t see why preventing all fishing (which is a straw man, but an easy one to defend) would kill millions of people.
> Where you want to culture all those pumpkins?, in national parks? there is not enough fertile soil available unless we eat all the remaining nature.
As I pointed out before, because the farming of animals is so inefficient, if vegetables are grown instead the yields are so high that less land would be used to produce the same number of calories. If we’re only stopping industrial fishing then that may not work, of course, but it’s unlikely without a diet change across society anyway, and I mainly want to correct your erroneous assumption that all types of farming are fungible.
> > just toast with almond butter
> Yep, what California needs now is to plant more almonds that suck all the water. This line explains perfectly the problem with this ideology
Almonds are native to Iran, I’m not American nor am I in America, and I’m not proposing that almonds replace meat nor would I support or propose increasing almond production in California. I’d prefer that you try to avoid littering your responses with straw man arguments if you’re going to continue, at least, not ridiculously obvious ones that are coming out of assumptions that have been given nary a second thought.
> because the farming of animals is so inefficient,
As non efficient as any other process that has been improved over the last 4000 years at least. In arid places there are less things more efficient than a camel or a goat.
> if vegetables are grown instead, the yields are so high
Brace yourself for a nasty surprise. To have high harvests you will need high amounts of fertilizers. Period.
And to obtain that manure you need cattle.
Bird guano is a limited resource, scarce, local and expensive produced in islands that will sink by climate change. Bat guano has the same problems plus it spreads rabies and disturb bat colonies that are essential to fruit pollination and pest control so forget about it at large scale. And you need to burn fossil energy to move it.
But of course technology will save us. We can synthesize urea in labs and then move it around the planet. We just need to burn fossil energy and solve a few minor problems (ehem, biurea). This negates the claimed energy savings, or ecological benefits. And nitrogen is not the only bottleneck in agriculture.
So those utopian vegan societies had only one reliable source of manure, and is human feces. But to have enough brown stuff you need to introduce human food first in the system. And as you spend energy in each turn to support grow and life, one year of food for somebody can't return one more year of food for the same people. Just less and less.
This solution came with a different set of problems. Your lattice can spread parasite worm eggs and human diseases, so you need to sterilize it first, spending energy in the process. Human feces will also carry antibiotics or medication that are much harder to remove.
And cattle supports much more biodiversity than soy fields.
Everybody that felt for the utopian narrative of the full-vegan paradise smash hard their faces against this reality. This societies always are hungry of manure. Without an external source you can't feed your people, so they are unstable by default and are overpowered by the other societies. There is not one single successful example of a long lasting fully vegan country isolated from neighbors with cattle.
I asked that you pay me and the other HNers reading this enough respect that you avoid littering your responses with straw man arguments, and yet you provide one that is bloated with them. What kind of useful discussion is possible when you're doing that?
None, so I'll ignore them.
> > because the farming of animals is so inefficient,
> As non efficient as any other process that has been improved over the last 4000 years at least.
This is wrong, for several reasons, the main one being the most pertinent - less calories are yielded per unit of farmland in animal farming than in non-animal farming. That is an objective difference in efficiency.
You wrote “what California needs now is to plant more almonds that suck all the water”.
From [1]:
> Animal feed, which includes irrigated pasture, non-irrigated pasture, and other feed crops, has the greatest water requirements (15 MAF), followed by alfalfa, straw, and hay (5.5 MAF). Together, these crops provide the primary inputs to California’s meat and dairy industry.
Over ten times the water use of almonds and the largest use of water in California farming by far. It takes 84 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of almond milk, and 880 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of cow's milk. That is an objective difference in efficiency.
You wrote “In arid places there are less things more efficient than a camel or a goat.”
Arguing from an exception isn't a winning strategy but it doesn't matter as I'm all for goats using mountain pasture. By all means, use camels in the desert instead of trying to grow wheat or whatever. Did I mention straw man arguments?
Speaking of which, if you wish to amend the essay you've provided which reads as an argument to someone else, (as I'm not in favour of a vegan utopia - whatever that is) then I'll be able to respond to it. Otherwise, you'll only be wasting your own time from here on in.
How long until evolution makes these nets less effective against the desired fish populations? It seems like a good way for fish genes to "notice" the net over time.
