Overfishing Harms the Environment. Is There a Way Out?
Overfishing Harms the Environment. Is There a Way Out?
Commercial fishing is destroying ecosystems around the world. Is anything being done about it?
We could just eat less fish or stop eating fish completely. There's plenty of crops on land to feed everyone.
Would there be enough land for the crops once everyone went crop eater, is the more important question, I think.
Easily. Most crops are used for animal feed. For example, 90% of soy grown in the US is sold as animal feed, and all of the soy grown in the Amazon is being sold to the US as animal feed. Not to mention crops like alfalfa that are useless for anything except animal feed that we could swap out for crops humans could eat. We could easily feed the entire world's population with our current crops.
Would there be enough land for the crops once everyone went crop eater
Yes. Even despite absurd levels of agricultural waste (40% of our crops go in the trash, in large part due to poor refrigeration infrastructure, dismal labor conditions, and market price fluctuations killing a harvest season) we end up with enormous vegetable surplus.
Fish, shellfish, and other sea life are still a highly efficient source of protein and other nutrients. Crawfish, for instance, are basically an invasive species byproduct of sugar and rice harvests in the Gulf Coast. There's little reason not to eat them, given you're getting them whether you want them or not. Same with mussels and clams, as anyone who has had to clean the underside of a boat can tell you.
But the degree to which pollution and industrial fishing wreck coastal and deep sea habitats absolutely does make it unsustainable long term. We could live to see a future without tuna or swordfish or halibut purely due to our aggressive ecology-wrecking fishing practices. So it's less a question of "Could we live without fish?" and more a question of "Will we live to see the extinction of fish?"
More than 70% of all crop land is used for animal feed which makes up about 10-15% of the diets. So yes, there is more than enough land. Many multiple times even. Same goes for water usage.
At some point we all gotta start farming bugs. Most prevalent protein source on the planet.
Well, sea surface temperatures are cooking the entire ocean, we are going to see fishery stocks collapse globally in 10 to 15 years, possibly sooner.
Aquaman is gonna be so pissed
Arrest, and imprisonment of any sailing crews caught engaged in the activity, or with pirated catch in their ship's holds. Along with these measures, immediate scuttling of their vessels in question would quickly deplete the stock of boats illegitimately engaged in the type of fishing which is depleting entire wild stocks.
Nations should band together and establish realistic limits, and coordinate to enforce them rather than imposing impotent fines. Vessels registered to nations which refuse participation or decline to abide by the rules laid out should be engaged as hostile entities both in and outside of member nations naval territory. Some of the coordinated pirate fishing is roughly equivalent to strip mining, the damage may take decades to heal, if at all still possible.
As it is, the oceans are set to fill with jellyfish over the next few decades due to anticipated overall temperature increases, and lack of predation by other sea creatures. If fish stocks face this additional competition on top of the already ludicrous figures of harvest, the entire oceanic food web may face collapse.
Banning trawling is a good start.
Maybe we can increase freshwater aquaponics and decrease net fishing.
I'm gonna get called a misanthrope for this -- but we've gotta stop having children. This "Line go up", shit of ours can't keep going on or we're going to starve ourselves out of existence.
I don't think that should be the main worry. People are already having less children, below replacement in most of the developed world. Meanwhile the trend on meat consumption is going up, we should focus more on trying to stop that.
That's okay, most people don't want to follow the other major advice of eat more lentils, way more.
I definitely get where you're coming from, but I think population reduction comes naturally from things like abortion rights, good family planning provisions, and a lack of poverty. Countries with those things are seeing a decline in population without making having children into a moral issue.
Extra point is that, although the population is up, the amount of meat eaten is waaay up. Just looking at that one issue, we can solve over fishing pretty easily without requiring any change to the current population numbers.
Catch’em all!