The authors seem to want to redefine "sustainable" to match their moral values and policy preferences. They should get their own word — this only muddies the discussion.
"Sustainable fishing" means just that the populations do not decline. "Zero tolerance for marine mammal bycatch" has nothing to do with this. Taken literally, it's also a completely unattainable goal, which makes me doubt the authors' intentions. What's next? No mammal killing in agriculture? Good luck. Even biological agriculture farms have snake shelters to keep the vermin numbers in check.
> "Sustainable fishing" means just that the populations do not decline. "Zero tolerance for marine mammal bycatch" has nothing to do with this."
Environmental sustainability doesn't "scope creep" for the same reason as other morality terms (eg justice). It scope creeps because of the nature of environmental sustainability. Affecting non-target species (bycatch etc.) tends to have unpredictable effects on target species... and longer time horizons yield more complexity. That's what ecosystems are, interdependent sets of population dynamics.
Anyway, at this point, "sustainability" means environmental decency in the general sense. Like the term "literally," it has evolved with usage. If a beef farm is poisoning a nearby lake and all its neighbors' farms, but could theoretically continue doing so without a decline in beef production... we wouldn't describe this as sustainable.
There's also a practical sense to it. Commercial fishing (and aquaculture) gets away with a lot of environmental harm, for relatively little economic size. This isn't oil & gas. In some places, even recreational fishing is a bigger industry. This is not sustainable politically. Eventually, people will just want to ban it... like most commercial hunting was banned, inland fisheries retired, etc.
That's unsustainable in the literal sense. It will lead to the end of commercial fishing.
> Anyway, at this point, "sustainability" means environmental decency in the general sense. Like the term "literally," it has evolved with usage.
The problem with this is, that now there is no way to talk about the original meaning of "sustainable". Since that is an important concept, much is lost when it can no longer be talked about.
Getting mad at etymology is a sisyphean torture. You will always lose at this game. It's the nature of language.
I'm mad at "literally," because it evolved out of a misunderstood cliche that became an "um word." Lowest form of etymology. I'm trying to get over it.
Sustainability evolved because it was used to describe slash and burn agriculture, overfishing and such. It evolved in a pretty natural way, reflecting the way ecosystems actually work. It also became associated with "sustainability practices" which really do improve sustainability in the narrow sense. Bycatch reduction does improve the sustainability of target species harvest. Bycatch reduction is also environmentally preferable regardless of target species sustainability... but it still gets called environmental "sustainability" even if the goal is not "continue doing what you are doing uninterrupted.
The broader sense of "sustainability" is also related to the narrow sense in practice. Oil pipelines leak and pollute, on average. If you try to build one today, locals will vigorously try to stop you. Leaky pipes do not directly prevent oil from being piped, but they do create a political reality where you can't continue to build them. Very few overground (or over-river) pipelines are being built in places that have political rights.
All this seems like a good, healthy, literate way for a language to evolve.
Overused, I agree... but still way better than literally.
> Getting mad at etymology is a sisyphean torture. You will always lose at this game. It's the nature of language.
There seems to be a lot of intentional evolution of meaning, and I believe the criticism of the article is based upon feeling that this is such a case. Using a word with a certain meaning in a different context uses the word's power without having the same meaning. The usefulness of the word as a rhetoric tool is the delta between the impact ("original sustainable") and the thing referenced ("modern sustainable"). It's why Peta calls dairy industry cow rape and speaks of Pig concentration camps: evoking emotions to further their agenda.
I would say this happens every time someone chooses one word over another in a sentence. Language is intentional and rhetorical by nature. "Cow rape" is a good way down the spectral extremity, but choice of words is always like this. Choice of words is what evolves the meaning of words. Metaphors become cliches, become idioms, etc. That's how we get homonyms, multiple meanings, archaics...and etymology generally. Evolution is neither deterministic nor random.
It's also true of how we interpret words. The term sustainability's most common modern usage means "ecologically harmful." The narrow sense of the term, "will conclude at some point," was never commonly used.
Objecting to the modern usage is intentional and rhetorical also. It signifies objection to the moralizing about the environment. It's a shiboleth, at least for now.
On this thread, the semantic objection earned top comment. An objection that doesn't address anything related to the article, but an objection nonetheless. That's a rhetorical win. An ad hominem is cheap, but this is inexpensive. Sweet spot.
That's kind of what "rhetorical skill" is. Chris Hitchens was one of the greats, IMO. Backed against the wall, he would hit back with inexpensive rhetoric. Inexpensive is ok, just not cheap. People can smell cheap.
There's a difference between a natural evolution of meaning and an artificial one. A similar thing (though in reverse) happened with "retarded" & similar words that started as neutral descriptions, had connotations added to them by the general population and then got intentionally pushed out by (I believe well-meaning but ultimately misguided) decision makers. They bring on the next word, the cycle repeats.
I do believe that it's important to point it out when you see it, because it's actively harmful to communication. Not only does it get harder to communicate (as words now become variables that can carry whatever meaning you currently want them to carry), it also destroys the trust between people, much like lying. The individual lie may not be a huge deal, but a society that loses any and all trust in each other does not have a bright future.
"Okay, yes, it's wrong, but let's not talk about that, let's focus on the topic now that we're here" isn't the right approach either, imho. I prefer the idea of "fruit of the poisonous tree" in that regard: if you start with a lie, you can't expect everyone to forgive and forget because you've now decided that it's not important and want them to focus on what you want to achieve. Agreeing to that is normalizing deviance.
I think I disagree at the fundamental level. There is no dividing line between artificial and natural. Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people.
Language evolves naturally. It's very hard to control and thus not under control of decision makers. As you said, some people try to introduce terms such as "cow rape." It doesn't work easily though. The term feels unnatural.
Language is also natural to us. We're wired for dealing with its complex ambiguities. That's why we have no problem using the word "natural" to communicate things that have a very abstract relationship to the core meaning of the word. Natural beauty. Good natured. It comes naturally to me.
This is how language works.
The evolution of language also reflect values. The term cow rape is more likely to off in vegan subcultures.
It is also, obviously, used intentionally in rhetoric. The term "sustainability" was spread, intentionally and unintentionally by those in green circles.
The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly." This is not a lie. This is the literal (meant literally) definition. If you read about sustainability in the newspaper, or it is discussed by legislators... they are talking about the modern definition. That means it is the literal definition.
In terms of dishonest rhetoric, lies... Insisting that "sustainability means continuation without disruption" is a lie. It's a lie in the sense that it is untrue. This isn't what the word means in most cases, including this one. It is also a lie in a more abstract and important sense. The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.
Insisting on the archaic usage also almost always reflects values, intentionally or otherwise. Cow rape is marginal enough (at least currently) to trigger a neutral observer. To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.
I also think these things are important to point out when seen. Taking a semantic left turn to avoid substance is, to paraphrase one famous campaigner, the "flood with shit" approach. It's effective, insidious and Orwellian. It worked a charm here.
> Artificial means made by people. Language is always made by people.
Artificial in language, to me, means "made by decisions" vs "made by accident". Some things evolve because plenty of individual people see the value and use them in a new way, other things get forced into language because some people see the value of framing issues in a certain way. To me, the former is natural progression of language while the latter is artificial. Much like you can have traditions and religions be created over time in a region or population, that's quite natural. If an army comes and forces them to adopt different traditions and religions, those are artificially implanted.
That Peta isn't able to push some term doesn't mean that there's no term-pushing happening or that it's not successful. Framing is a popular tactic.
> The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly."
But it really doesn't. Sustainability is quite literally (!) the ability to sustain. Environmentally friendly is very vague and can mean lots of things to lots of people. Factory farming is very sustainable on its own, but it's not environmentally friendly.
Sustainability is generally not used as a synonym for environmentally friendly neither, otherwise we wouldn't talk about environmentally sustainable policies, we'd just talk about sustainable policies - but that would be confusing, because there are also economically sustainability issues that have nothing to do with the environment, as are plenty of others, e.g. manually sorting each letter in a country can be done, but it can't be done sustainably.
> The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.
My reaction is the opposite. When someone claims that there's a "white genocide", I disagree and generally discount their argument because it's not strong enough to stand on it's own and therefore they mix in the word "genocide" to create an emotional impact. Pointing that out isn't about derailing the conversation, it's about keeping a minimum level of honesty in communication. Don't use words while massively changing their meaning to advance your agenda, don't do silly card tricks to win an argument by confusing the audience. It's important to insist on it, otherwise you get what Trump has demonstrated quite nicely: if language has no shared meaning any more, the person who says the most outrageous things, delivers the best zingers, talks the loudest or makes the most expressive faces wins every argument because he'll go "they murdered that guy", reap the effect of making people believe somebody was murdered, and when confronted "well, I used murdered in a modern meaning".
> To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.
No. To be against torture of terrorists, you don't need to be pro-terrorism, you just need to be anti-torture. That is, unless all those words have been assigned random new meanings, then it may very well be true.
You are missing the point. If I say that "poisoning birds of prey on your farm is unsustainable," that is not a claim. The meaning of the term is not "cannot go on."
"Can go on" is another definition of sustainable. This why dictionaries have multiple definitions, wikipedia has disambiguation pages, etc.
The archaic definition is relatively rare, and easy to discern from context. Environmental sustainability has a wikipedia entry. Ability to sustain does not. Also news articles, book titles, legislative literature, academic literature. etc.
I don't know what more I can say. Words mean what they mean, and that evolves over time.
Insisting that the modern usage is wrong and the archaic usage is correct is basically using a "loaded" term. No one writing or speaking about sustainability in an intellectually honest way expects the narrow, archaic usage.
Environmental sustainability almost always has a wider definition. If we are having a discussion about environmental sustainability and someone insists that a practice is sustainable "really" means "can go on" regardless of environmental harm.... then they are loading the term.
It's an attempt to change the meaning of the term, as it is commonly used, while keeping the moral connotations. Why would anyone care about environmental sustainability in the narrow sense?
Inexpensive rhetoric. Disingenuous.
It's disingenuous even if it is semantically correct. In this case (and often) the argument is factually wrong. This is what makes it good red herring. It's effective at rallying even if factually incorrect.
What would you like to talk about under the original definition of sustainable, then? It seems to me like we're still discussing all this stuff just fine. In fact, this whole subthread seems to be a deliberate attempt to sidetrack discussion of important ecological policy with a pointless war about linguistics.
Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch), why should we call that "sustainable", exactly?
This is how human language works. Our brains are specifically designed to work out these ambiguities. That's why NLP is hard. It's what the "L" means.
This is why you did not have any trouble understanding the author.
Humans are also good at creative problem solving. In your case, the problem is that the article is well reasoned and hard to argue against. Semantics are always easy to argue though. So, you argue that we must use the term "sustainability" in in the way it was used back when no one used it.
I wonder why this even works. The author's usage is obviously and demonstrably correct. It is a far more common usage than yours. Homonyms exist. Somehow this nonsense makes top comment on half the threads on HN, and everywhere else... derailing actual conversations about actual stuff.
I reckon it's the same brain bug that makes reality TV popular. The conversation about nothing adjacent to the conversation about something.
> In your case, the problem is that the article is well reasoned and hard to argue against. Semantics are always easy to argue though. So, you argue that we must use the term "sustainability" in in the way it was used back when no one used it.
It's fascinating how you made all that up. The inner motivation of someone you've never met. The claim that I argued against the article. What I'm supposedly arguing for.
None of that is in what I wrote. It all happened in your mind.
> In fact, this whole subthread seems to be a deliberate attempt to sidetrack discussion of important ecological policy with a pointless war about linguistics.
The fight for marriage equality was a "pointless war about linguistics" in those jurisdictions where the same-sex couples already had the same substantial rights? The choice of signs is important; in particular some carry more respectability than others.
The word choice does matter if what you're doing is taking a concept that the public already supports, and tack on additional meanings to advance your agenda. If all that mattered in a discussion
> Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch)
It wasn't a fight over linguistics, it was a fight for the right for same-sex couples to be able to enter into the same legal contract as any other couple. the idea that there existed a "separate but equal" set of rights under a distinct legal contract is questionable, but also not a fight over linguistics.
> For relatively little economic size. This isn't oil & gas
Don't underestimate it. Maybe is not obvious, but the majority of humans, many millions of people do not starve to death because fisheries save them each day providing the main and only reliable source of protein in their daily intake.
The impact of all fishes vanishing tomorrow would be devastating for the world. A thousand of countries would burn in war in less than a year, and there would be huge, massive, migrations towards the North Hemisphere.
I didn't mean to be trite. Fishing is nutritionally important, and economically important to a lot of people in the world. This shouldn't be measured in gdp contribution. I also don't take the cultural element lightly. Fishing is culturally essential to many cultures and subcultures wherever there is water.
There is a reason fisheries are still one of the main diplomatic issues to this day.
Dollar amount is, on the other hand, meaningful in the ways that it is.
Oil & gas are "unsustainable" in the "considering that we live on this planet" sense... the same sense that many fishing industries are unsustainable. The environment would be significantly better off without them. But, it's only recently that we can even see ourselves living without oil and gas. Those mines and pipelines, leaks, coal coughs and refineries still power us. Energy touches all of us, a lot. Ocean fish... we eat them sometimes.
..and oceanic ecosystems are not something that we can destroy regardless of economics. It's morally wrong.
That’s wildly inaccurate, the largest percentage of fish come from aquaculture not wild capture. ~90 Million tons of fish sounds like a huge number but quite a lot of that’s ends up as animal feed etc. Pork by comparison adds up to ~120 Million tons per year and people actually directly consume the majority of it. People get well over twice as much protean from cows than wild fish. Add in chickens for 130 Million tons per year for even more perspective, before looking at plant based sources.
Serious analysis shows wild fish are critical for a few communities, but have a minor role in the global food supply.
In 2018, 150 million tons of fish and shellfish were used directly for human food. This is more than pork (113 millions in 2018). Other 29 millions were used to feed animals. (Source: FAO)
> People get well over twice as much protean from cows than wild fish
This is an eurocentric point of view.
To start, around 65% of the humans in the planet are lactose intolerant. The second most populated country in the planet will not eat cattle, and Jews and muslims will not eat pork. US people eat 100Kg of meat/year on average whereas Hindi survive with 5Kg of meat/year on average.
> wild fish are critical for a few communities
There is not modern aquaculture without a regular supply of wild fish flour provided by fisheries. Remove all the seafood suddenly and Japan or Singapore would not survive two years. Not as we know it currently. Neither would do India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Chile or Peru.
Just the muslims would have a hard time to not starve, and one of each four people in the planet is a muslim.
Of that 150M tons of fish ~90 was from fish farms and ~60 Million tons was from the wild. Yes, some of that wild fish is used to feed fish farms, but you don’t turn 29M tons of wild fish into 90M tons via fish farms. It’s simply one of several cheap protein sources used in fish farming.
Overall fish farms are ~50% more important than fishing and trying to combine them when I already noted the difference is disingenuous.
And no this is not Eurocentric these are worldwide totals. Cow meat on it’s own provides more protein than wild fish and that’s less important than cow milk. Worldwide cow milk represents 85% off all milk consumption it’s somewhat regional though still plenty global.
I suggest you actually look into milk and meat consumption in say India which you said would be devastated without fishing. ~1/4th of Indians consume zero meat of any source they would be completely unaffected by fishing being banned. Cattle consumption in India is 2.7 million metric tons which actually puts it reasonably close to the worldwide average in terms of ocean fishing : beef consumption ratio. https://www.statista.com/statistics/826722/india-beef-and-ve...
PS: Further confusing the issue the majority of India’s fish come from fresh water.
> Of that 150M tons of fish ~90 was from fish farms, you can't convert 29...
There are several confusions here. One is that those 150M tons of fish are composed of just fish. There are clams also, there are oysters, mussels, crabs and shrimps. You can produce 100M tons of mussels even if you have only 29M tons of flour fish available. They don't need it at all.
The other wrong idea is that fish farms equal fishes of non wild origin. This is not necessarily true.
The 60M tons of wild fish is also mussels etc, it’s also largely irrelevant in terms of nutrition thus the generic term fish. Aka crab fisherman even though crabs are not fish.
If you really want to be specific some of that of that 29M tons of wild “fish“ is also fed to cattle, chicken, and pigs etc. But, it’s really only a net benefit of ~3M tons worth of increased output for human consumption across all intermediaries. The basic cycle of feeding stuff to animals we prefer eating is extremely inefficient, but to world food surplus is so massive and that 29M tons has such a low value it’s not a big deal.
Getting back to the main point, I think I have clearly demonstrated how irrelevant fishing is in global terms.
> it’s also largely irrelevant in terms of nutrition, thus the generic term fish
In English. To assume that marine molluscs or cnidarians are "a type of fishes" is a mistake that the majority of languages did not commit.
For millions of people shellfish is an excellent, healthy, nutritive and easily available food. Very far from "irrelevant". This point of view is (probably, I could be wrong) not so widespread in the anglosphere, but this is just a cultural thing. More for us.
If cooked properly, Mussels, crabs, lobsters and sea urchins are delicious and highly appreciated among connoisseurs, that's for sure.
It’s not a linguist mistake, it’s overloading a single word which happens a lot in most languages. The same thing is going on in English when referring to a group or generic unknown people as male.
Anyway, I will accept this as a backhanded agreement and leave it at that.
> Environmental sustainability doesn't "scope creep" for the same reason as other morality terms (eg justice). It scope creeps because of the nature of environmental sustainability. Affecting non-target species (bycatch etc.) tends to have unpredictable effects on target species... and longer time horizons yield more complexity. That's what ecosystems are, interdependent sets of population dynamics.
But even under this interpretation, the article doesn't attempt to argue that the bycatch is causing the mammal populations to collapse. Instead, it focuses on the damage inflicted on _individuals_. Incidentally, this is the kind of advocacy that often pits animal rights activists against conservationists, for instance when the latter resort to culling or even simply let a large percentage of a population die of hunger.
It's not really an interpretation. This is what the word "sustainable" means. This is the way the author is using the term sustainable. When she says "a key independent labeler of sustainable seafood..." she's referring to a stamp using the term this way. It's even used this way in legislation, diplomacy, etc.
Past a point, I find the semantic discussion boring. This is just how language works. Words have multiple, often related meanings. It changes over time. You are not encountering it for the first time.
I was just pointing out that the evolution of the term has a logical etymology to it. There's a logic to "environmental harm" having acquired the near synonym "environmentally unsustainable." That has nothing to do with the author though. The word just means what it means.
Why does the author need to argue that the bycatch is causing target fish populations to collapse? That's not what she's writing an article about. She's just using the english language how it is spoken, especially in the context she's writing within. She didn't invent it.
Anyway... I kind of feel this is going in a silly direction. The article is about something important. The top comments are me and you having a stupid conversation about the history of words.
If you disagree with the author, you should have argued with what she has to say.. as opposed to the semantics. I'd say that onus applies more than the other way around.
Yep. The kelp forests in California have been devastated in the last few years, due to "sea star wasting disease". The sea-star population crashes, sea stars are a no longer a major predator of purple sea urchins, sea urchins like to eat the "holdfast" where the kelp attaches to the seafloor, and boom, no more kelp forests. The resulting denuded landscape (seascape?) is known as an "urchin barren". Instead of a lush underwater forest teeming with crabs, snails, and fish, you have mostly bare rocks and urchins. The ocean truly is a system.
I really like the idea that things could be better. If you tell me that you've got a way to fish and all the other animals that you like end up safe, then I like the idea that we could be using way.
However, this article isn't a plan it's a wish list. It wants you to feel bad about whats happening to some animals. It doesn't really talk about how they're going to achieve this.
If the how ends up starving millions or billions of people, then I'm really sorry but I'm not going to side with the whales as much as I would like them to be okay.
The article sounds like it's coming from someone with other options when it comes to eating. If they don't have a plan, then they're just hoping someone else will do all the work for them. If they really cared about the whales then they would find a way to provide for the people who eat the fish that power the industry that is hurting the whales.
> If the how ends up starving millions or billions of people, then I'm really sorry but I'm not going to side with the whales as much as I would like them to be okay.
If the world has too many people, and we're fishing beyond replenishment rate, those people are going to starve to death anyway. It's just a matter of when. Who should be sorry if there's evidence the world is beyond it's carrying capacity?
> If they really cared about the whales then they would find a way to provide for the people who eat the fish that power the industry that is hurting the whales.
It's not the job of non profits to figure out how to feed endless amounts of humans. This is no different than environmental constraints that force population declines in all other species. You can't continue to expand the human species unbounded and foist the problem on someone else when physical systems are pushed beyond their limits.
This is up for debate. I want my government to protect our fisheries from other countries (as well as our own fishing industry) strip mining them bare until there's nothing but sea floor remaining.
They're not just fisheries for today, they're fisheries and ecological systems for the future, and if unreasonable demands are placed on them (for whatever reason) government is responsible to push back to protect those resources. If this causes food insecurity, the government of those impacted must make efforts to source food supplies elsewhere.
> No mammal killing in agriculture? Good luck. Even biological agriculture farms have snake shelters to keep the vermin numbers in check.
Just like the other comment explained, while accidental marine mammal bycatch will always happen, it's possible to reduce it drastically, at a reasonable cost.
Similarly, while our agriculture cannot be completely separated from the animal world, there are low-hanging fruits. We can collectively decide that we shouldn't eat meat from animals raised in horrid conditions, and accept the condition that we can't reasonably do that without cutting a bit of the average 100kg of meat a year.
A zero-carbon lifestyle is completely unattainable for the simple reason that we breathe out CO2. Zero deforestation is crazy because people rely on wood for heating in winter.
Overfocusing on the ambitions of the end goal is missing the point.
> A zero-carbon lifestyle is completely unattainable for the simple reason that we breathe out CO2. [..]
That's a misconception that I often encounter.
Note that CO2 breathed out by humans and animals has (almost) no effect on atmospheric CO2 levels. Humans consume exclusively non-fossil carbon, i.e. only carbon that was harvested from plants out of the atmosphere using photosynthesis. When we breath out we merely give back the carbon that the plant removed from the atmosphere maybe few months earlier.
This is different from cars which primarily consume fossil carbon, so their exhaust puts carbon back into the atmosphere, which hasn't been in the atmosphere for at least a few tens of million years.
Luckily mankind hasn't found out yet how to turn fossil carbon into food :)
CO2 is fungible once it is in the atmosphere. There is no law of physics which says what can and cannot - only assumptions. Although it is a matter of scales given implementation details.
Technically we turn fossil carbon into food indirectly all of the time with fertilizer and fueling agricultural vehicles but again implementation level details. We could also subsitute non-fossil sources or make it regenerative even though it wouldn't be that practical.
Somebody with far too much funding and power in the literal energy over time sense could theoretically be a smartass jerk and start sequestering enough CO2 over time that lack of carbon starts to be a threat. In practice it would be less of a threat than being crushed to death by massive stacks of dollar bills.
This is true, but there's no physical law that says humans have to consume carbon positive food, it's a social choice not something inherent to humans.
> A zero-carbon lifestyle is completely unattainable for the simple reason that we breathe out CO2. Zero deforestation is crazy because people rely on wood for heating in winter.
The total amount of carbon dioxide is the problem, not emissions themselves.
Exhaling carbon dioxide from metabolizing produce that extracted carbon from the short term cycle makes no difference.
Cars or other fossil fuel consuming processes on the other hand introduce extra carbon into the short term cycle by burning substances that contain carbon that was sequestrated long ago. This can happen indirectly, e.g. by converting oil into plastics first and later burning these plastics as garbage in a power plant. Boom, extra carbon emitted and nobody really noticed.
Planting trees and burning them is the perfect example of a carbon neutral thing to do. Not sure what is your point here. The problem is adding new carbon into the biosphere, as we are doing today.
No, that is not true. We know how to produce energy without fossil fuels. All carbon emission can either be completely replaced by such means, or adequately reverted.
Yeah we do. Nuclear, solar, wind. If you absolutely can't do something without releasing carbon (concrete and air travel are an example that comes to mind), you use carbon-free energy to suck CO2 from the air and sequester it. That just costs money.
Less than 1% of energy comes from wind and solar and we aren't looking at more than 3-4% in 2030. Wind and solar require either nuclear, gas, coal and oil as backup. Nuclear is completely out of vogue and will take years to build.
It's not just concrete and air travel it's ships, trucks, steel production, anything that require large amount of heat.
You can't power a hospital based on solar and wind etc.
Fossil fuels are not going anywhere until we either get fusion or some sort of fuel cell technology, but they require som fundamental breakthroughs we aren't close to meeting just yet.
The problem is doing things at scale not just proving in some lab what is theoretically possible.
It's that simple going up to maybe 70% of energy consumption. As you note we're still in single digits. Until we reach critical points where large scale storage becomes truly necessary we still have time to get things that work in small scales up to mass production. For example batteries and Power-to-X technology. The only thing missing is political will to address the problem.
No it's not that simple and if it was we would already have done it. It's not just a matter of political will it's a matter of what makes sense from a market perspective. It doesn't make any sense to rely on wind and solar. The are not and will never be the primary source of energy for our needs.
We will have fusion before we have wind and solar covering just 50% of the worlds energy consumption.
If we don't have wind and solar covering more than 50% of the world's energy consumption in the next twenty years the climate will be fucked beyond repair.
It's not physically impossible to cover 2-4% of the land with solar panels and wind turbines, replace ICE vehicles with electrics and home heating systems with heat pumps. It just costs money. And as the COVID response shows, when we want to, trillions suddenly become available.
Money, and space, and natural resources for the CCS membrane / infrastructure, etc. No guarantee that none of those will run out if we try to do this at the required scale.
I've worked in one industrial plant, and they mostly just needed power and steam to run the processing equipment.
If you need oil as a chemical input, you could offset that carbon or likely synthesize it. But even just reducing our fossil oil use to ingredients and not fuel would make a massive difference.
> not if you want to live a modern life with all the benefits that comes from that.
That seems like a rather imprecise and thereby meaningless refutation of the parent's point.
IMO a more honest statement of that idea would be:
"Not if you want to live a totally unconstrained life, drawing on all currently available benefits, whether neccessary or not".
I do think, that "modern life" would be compatible with zero CO2 emission (for some definition of "modern life"), people would merely have to face more constraints and regulation.
You're right that a sustainable economy will demand change. I think the problem is thinking that all the change will be bad. Some things that will have to change:
- More pubic transit on trains
- Less packaging and throw away plastic utensils so you might have to carry a fork with you or employ more dishwashers at restaurants
- Less meat and fish consumption, returning America to its more traditional diets modulo beyond meat type substitutes.
- More local production and transport instead of shipping things across the world
- Less non-essential work and the travel accompanying it
- More urbanization to make ecological systems more efficient
- Use of LED lighting systems
- Less "fast fashion" and wearing more durable clothing
- Use of electric heat wherever possible
- Widespread battery production
- Global solar network to ship sunlight power around the world
- Emphasizing power efficiency in electronics
Some of these changes are fairly disruptive, but extremely mild compared to the challenges humans have faced in history such as war and starvation.
Keep in mind that these so-called "modern lifestyles" that are most carbon intensive are lived most vibrantly by the wealthy (e.g. private jets, endless consumption of materials). Many people will not be hugely inconvenienced compared to their current life circumstances.
the one you replied to however, is making the point that extra carbon emissions are required by the modern lifestyle, and we would have to give up some of its benefits to attain the zero goal. hence adding to the conversation.
how about if you want to have a meta discussion about the discussion, you start a separate thread no one will read, and stop spamming the discussion with offtopic comments.
The paper linked in the article suggests that most of the problem is gill nets, and that acoustic pingers on the gill nets reduce marine mammals being caught by 90%.
So, as you say, their current goal seems unattainable. But there's an obvious attainable goal. Seems focusing on that first should be the priority.
I agree with parent though. It’s a noble goal, but you have to name it something else. Otherwise it’s moving goal posts. Call it reduced by catch fishing or something catchier, but don’t mix two goals by coöpting a term that already has established meaning.
Look at what the hookpod people have achieved, https://www.hookpod.com/ It seems an utterly impractical problem but they have a solution that works, apparently really well.
With a will, some incentives and some clever thinking it seems that similar solutions could be found for mammals. In some ways it's an easier problem as cetaceans are generally known not to be dumb. Seals I'm not so sure of ;)
The more these discussions progress, the more I wonder if there is really only one solution. We need less people. Trying to convince 8 billion people to do something like never eat meat or fish seems like an impossible goal. We need to raise the standard of living in countries that reproduction rates > 2. We could also remove tax breaks for kids after the second in developed countries to mitigate the incentives for extra children. Maybe if we only had 4 billion people, we might be able to have everything be sustainable. Such a hard problem to solve.
> We need less people. Trying to convince 8 billion people to do something like never eat meat or fish seems like an impossible goal.
Again this is the problem I'm mentioning. You're picking an impossibly high goal and concluding that there is no solution. Let's try to consume 2 or 3 times less meat/fish, it's gonna be much easier and faster than the problems associated with extreme population reduction (radical population aging, no career opportunities for young people, overloaded medical staff, etc).
For the average American, eating 3 times less meat still means you can get 3 steaks a week. It's not completely crazy.
Most sources agree that the average American eats 250ish pounds of meat a year, which adds up to about 5 pounds per week or 9ish 8 ounce steaks. (I do agree that the average American isn't eating that in the form of steaks - there's a lot of bacon, burgers, and chicken mixed in.)
Okay, fair. Trying to convince 8 billion people to cut their meat and fish consumption in half seems like an impossible goal to me.
We can't get people to wear masks at scale despite people dying. I just don't honestly think we can convince them that eating a cheeseburger is a major problem. Even if we cut meat production in half, as the population doubles we end up exactly where we are now.
Well, Sustainable means sustainable, but not for humans, for the ecosystem. Ecosystem must remain (relatively) stable. To keep its stability the ecosystem must be allowed to grow diverse and awfully complex.
That the fish populations do not decline is not enough. All economically valuable species of fishes populations are depleted. In all parts of the planet. They must increase ASAP.
And there must be something left for the fish predators and other parts of the ecosystem. If not, there is a serious risk of collapse of the entire house by a waterfall of collateral damages.
If you remove predators, there will be consequences in prey populations, that range from displacement of key species to extinction of the preys.
Marine Mammal's bycatch is a waste and not a desired outcome in fisheries management, but moral reasons are the wrong reasons here.
They should not be wasted because we want and need fishes in the sea. We don't want oceans filled with unedible jellyfishes.
>"Sustainable fishing" means just that the populations do not decline. "Zero tolerance for marine mammal bycatch" has nothing to do with this.
Why should only the targeted fish population levels be considered when determining if it is sustainable? Wouldn't that encourage bycatching, as the elimination of a predator would allow you to catch more fish?
>Taken literally, it's also a completely unattainable goal, which makes me doubt the authors' intentions.
Taken literally, it means every marine mammal bycatch faces punishment, a completely obtainable goal.
The author wants to pay top dollar to eat fish and chips while people with less means go hungry.
The author wants somebody to feel bad enough about the whales so that they will figure out how to actually save the whales. The author doesn't want to actually figure out how to save the whales themselves.
The author may appear to be on the right side of history. And maybe that's all that matters. What people mis-believe about you after you're dead.
On HN I don't want to hear about how the whales are having a hard time. I already know about that. I watched Voyage Home. I know about how all the whales had a great time when we temporarily shut down shipping after 9/11 and they didn't have to deal with all the noise pollution. I know about the 52-hertz whale. And I know about the 3 billion people who need fish to not stave.
On HN I want to hear about how they're going to save the whales and also prevent mass starvation.
The "Right Side of History" doesn't mean the "Good Side of History". Maybe the save the whale people figure out how to convince the rest of us to let the people who need to eat fish to live just starve. Everyone will agree the author was on the right side, but I would rather be said to have been on the wrong side of history in that scenario.
From a website that's trying to support sustainable fishing practices.
(I actually thought the number was 2 billion until I looked it up before making my previous post. It shouldn't be too surprising considering how much of the world's population lives on the coast AND fish basically take care of themselves, so it's an easy to way get your food.)
That doesn't say anything about starving, just that those people use fish as their primary source of protein. Presumably they could get that protein from poultry or even beans and pulses.
"Well, I presume that instead of going fishing once a day you can start a farm. Watch over and feed some chickens. Whatever."
And, like I said in my other post. If you can find a way to actually save the whales and let everyone still eat, then I'll be right there with you. But right now this looks like rich people who have time to go whale watching wanting the poor people who barely have time to get enough food to eat to stop eating so that they can still go whale watching.
Give me some actual numbers that show that people who rely on fish can actually farm to make up the difference and I'll be convinced. But right now I'm on the side of caution that says "let's not do something that might starve some percentage of 3 billion people" and the article is saying "eh, 3 billion people can probably find something else to eat".
That's OK as far as it goes but ultimately we are destroying yet another resource that people rely on. You can make a choice to change direction or get forced to further down the road. Being forced to do something is more painful than making a choice.
There is a frustrating catch-22 with "sustainable" fishing methods. Methods that are more careful about bycatch in generally lead to less fish per gallon of diesel, which is the primary driver of CO2 emissions for fisheries.
It is confusing to me that MSC is fine with being the forcing function to double carbon emissions - which is expected to have large effects on ocean habitats - while ostensibly being interested in ocean habitat.
I guess the complexity is that.. there doesn't seem to be a good answer, currently.
> I guess the complexity is that.. there doesn't seem to be a good answer, currently.
Encouraging people to eat less fish might be the easiest (and thereby best) solution.
I'm not saying humans should eat /no/ fish – indeed there are many human communities which rely on fishing, and for which fishing plays a key role in their culture. Similarly, some people may need to eat fish for health reasons.
However, it seems to me that /reducing/ consumption by cutting consumption of fish for pleasure/taste would likely benefit both the environment and people; for example, indigeneous groups which traditionally rely on fishing would face less competition from industrial-scale fishing. From an environmental standpoint, most things, even whaling it seems, are inherently sustainable in smaller scales.
Again, I don't mean to say that everyone needs to comsume zero fish. But if those of us who can, which likely includes many HN readers, cut down our consumption it may benefit everyone at quite a small cost to ourselves; as a middle class Northern European, I can testify that me not having consumed fish in the last 5 years has had 0 immediate impact on my health or happiness levels.
Note: Of course this is all assuming that there are more eco-friendly alternative protein/fat/omegas sources available. Again, I do not mean to say that this is applicable for everyone.
I was under impression that it was a green policy to recommend people eat more fish, acting as a replacement for e.g. beef which (if I recall correctly, I'm not certain) has more harmful environmental effects than fishing.
It often feels like we think fishing is less environmentally harmful but we don't actually know it, because the ocean is extremely opaque to us, and has very high buffers both ways.
Numerous stocks have crashed and most times the collapse has been extremely brutal, similar to the passenger pigeon, going from "it's everywhere" to "it's nowhere" in a few years.
And even with what we know at least 1/3rd of current stocks are being overfished.
Agree. This is what we do. Try to opt for species that have low impact (trout and farmed arctic char, for instance) and otherwise treat fish the way we do beef: As a luxury saved for special occasions.
I've eaten less than 10 fish in my entire life. I don't like it at all. I haven't eaten any meat in 15 years. I don't miss it at all. I also don't miss any of the health problems that went away after I stopped eating meat.
There's an out for the Catch-22: don't eat fish. Except for a very small few, it's unnecessary to eat fish at all, and is more of a convenience or form of entertainment (it tastes good).
I agree with the sentiments expressed by the author, however redefining sustainable fishing before it’s been implemented widely seems a bit premature. Not that we can’t pursue that implementation alongside efforts to raise the bar, but, at current rates of exploitation, many parts of our oceans may not even survive long enough to see the impact of that redefinition.
I'm not vegan or anything, but I just didn't eat any fish or meat since at least a year, I have more than enough with fruits and vegetables (locally foraged - I've no garden, even if I live in an urbanized environment, there are plenty figs for example currently, or at local producer), and some rice
We already played this game with commercial game hunting, hardwood harvesting, etc. We even played it to conclusion with oceanic species and systems. EG cod fisheries.
The same principle are at play in the ocean. Technology & markets combine to create an unsustainable industry that comes to an end. With bison hunting it was demand for conveyer belt leather meeting railroads. The population crashed very suddenly.
Oceanic ecosystems is vast, so the process can take longer. They're also harder to harvest, so technology proceeds more gradually.
We were crashing oceanic systems in the 19th century though. Whales. Several cod fisheries. Many tuna fisheries, as soon as canning became a thing. Almost all coastal fisheries in the mediterranean.
Fisheries policies, in actual practice, tend to fall below true sustainability most of the time. Even defined very narrowly (harvest of this specific species will not decline), they fail regularly. West european mackerel populations crashed 2 years ago, and many times previously. This despite strict, high profile fisheries policies.
A ban is just easier. I am extremely dubious of sustainable wild harvest. Also, fishing is a small industry.
This creates severely "de-nutrinized" food, so much that it one might argue this kind of food is junk.
Many fishes are fed with grains, this destroys their nutritional value, which begs the question if it even makes sense to eat fish who are fed with food they wouldn't eat at all in a natural environment.
Be wary of intrinsic thinking. Something may not be intrinsic, but still be the expected result.
In principle, wild harvests are not intrinsically harmful to the environment. In practice, all commercial fisheries are to various degrees.
Large scale aquaculture has a ton of issues. Disease, nutrition, pollution. Not intrinsic, but practically.
That said, I do think we can attain a decent quality of aquaculture. The best commercial approach is currently freshwater fish grown in isolation from natural water sources with waste water used for irrigation. Tilapia, basically.
Problem is, people want salmon, cod, tuna, oysters... Salmon is farmed at scale. We know the result. Very high parasite loads. Visibly reduced health of the fish. Nutritional issues.
We could easily farm a different species, that naturally thrives in environments similar to those we can recreate agriculturally... the demand is for salmon.
> We can craft nutritious, similar-to-natural, or even better, fish foods.
Citation needed. There have been trillions spent on meal replacements/supplements for humans and it never beats eating a variety of raw, unprocessed foods, like fruits and veg.
I am in favour of the immediate cessation of all commercial fishing worldwide until such a time as the world can come together to build a system with the primary goal of protecting the fish and ancillary goals of providing a fair allotment, executing poachers, & educating children about extinction.
It doesn't seem all that different from scaring a herd of buffalo into running off a cliff. No reason that we need to by flying to spring the trap on wild resources.
> Fish Farming seems more sustainable.
It does seem like any major market should be required to farm their resources rather than taking from the commons.
> Imagine we farmed cattle by flying about in Zepplins, lowering giant nylon nets and dragging across the ground.
That would be more fishing in a submarine.
Lots of farms use planes and drones and helicopters for hunting and droving.
An ok equilivent to fishing is just when you eat game bird. They are even caught in nets.
One problem with fish farms is they feed them with small fish caught at sea for this purpose. If the environmental movement wasn't so toxic you could stop this quite easily though.
But hunting from a zeppelin would be amazing. On my bucket list.
It's not necessary to be alive either yet here we are. I am not sure what happened to rationals about humans and the environment but it's taken a really dangerous twist into something very very antihuman. Thanks but not thanks. I'll eat my fish with pleasure.
Accept previous generations messed up(greed & pride). Even now, most powerful & wealthy are respected more than most wise people. Often power/wealth is mistaken for wisdom.
- Precise definition of territorial waters depending on mainland's size & population
- Hands-off fishing in international waters; farm & eat marine food within mainland marine territory
No international body out there is strong enough to protect sea-life.
"Sustainable fishing" means just that the populations do not decline. "Zero tolerance for marine mammal bycatch" has nothing to do with this. Taken literally, it's also a completely unattainable goal, which makes me doubt the authors' intentions. What's next? No mammal killing in agriculture? Good luck. Even biological agriculture farms have snake shelters to keep the vermin numbers in check.
Environmental sustainability doesn't "scope creep" for the same reason as other morality terms (eg justice). It scope creeps because of the nature of environmental sustainability. Affecting non-target species (bycatch etc.) tends to have unpredictable effects on target species... and longer time horizons yield more complexity. That's what ecosystems are, interdependent sets of population dynamics.
Anyway, at this point, "sustainability" means environmental decency in the general sense. Like the term "literally," it has evolved with usage. If a beef farm is poisoning a nearby lake and all its neighbors' farms, but could theoretically continue doing so without a decline in beef production... we wouldn't describe this as sustainable.
There's also a practical sense to it. Commercial fishing (and aquaculture) gets away with a lot of environmental harm, for relatively little economic size. This isn't oil & gas. In some places, even recreational fishing is a bigger industry. This is not sustainable politically. Eventually, people will just want to ban it... like most commercial hunting was banned, inland fisheries retired, etc.
That's unsustainable in the literal sense. It will lead to the end of commercial fishing.
The problem with this is, that now there is no way to talk about the original meaning of "sustainable". Since that is an important concept, much is lost when it can no longer be talked about.
I'm mad at "literally," because it evolved out of a misunderstood cliche that became an "um word." Lowest form of etymology. I'm trying to get over it.
Sustainability evolved because it was used to describe slash and burn agriculture, overfishing and such. It evolved in a pretty natural way, reflecting the way ecosystems actually work. It also became associated with "sustainability practices" which really do improve sustainability in the narrow sense. Bycatch reduction does improve the sustainability of target species harvest. Bycatch reduction is also environmentally preferable regardless of target species sustainability... but it still gets called environmental "sustainability" even if the goal is not "continue doing what you are doing uninterrupted.
The broader sense of "sustainability" is also related to the narrow sense in practice. Oil pipelines leak and pollute, on average. If you try to build one today, locals will vigorously try to stop you. Leaky pipes do not directly prevent oil from being piped, but they do create a political reality where you can't continue to build them. Very few overground (or over-river) pipelines are being built in places that have political rights.
All this seems like a good, healthy, literate way for a language to evolve.
Overused, I agree... but still way better than literally.
There seems to be a lot of intentional evolution of meaning, and I believe the criticism of the article is based upon feeling that this is such a case. Using a word with a certain meaning in a different context uses the word's power without having the same meaning. The usefulness of the word as a rhetoric tool is the delta between the impact ("original sustainable") and the thing referenced ("modern sustainable"). It's why Peta calls dairy industry cow rape and speaks of Pig concentration camps: evoking emotions to further their agenda.
It's also true of how we interpret words. The term sustainability's most common modern usage means "ecologically harmful." The narrow sense of the term, "will conclude at some point," was never commonly used.
Objecting to the modern usage is intentional and rhetorical also. It signifies objection to the moralizing about the environment. It's a shiboleth, at least for now.
On this thread, the semantic objection earned top comment. An objection that doesn't address anything related to the article, but an objection nonetheless. That's a rhetorical win. An ad hominem is cheap, but this is inexpensive. Sweet spot.
That's kind of what "rhetorical skill" is. Chris Hitchens was one of the greats, IMO. Backed against the wall, he would hit back with inexpensive rhetoric. Inexpensive is ok, just not cheap. People can smell cheap.
I do believe that it's important to point it out when you see it, because it's actively harmful to communication. Not only does it get harder to communicate (as words now become variables that can carry whatever meaning you currently want them to carry), it also destroys the trust between people, much like lying. The individual lie may not be a huge deal, but a society that loses any and all trust in each other does not have a bright future.
"Okay, yes, it's wrong, but let's not talk about that, let's focus on the topic now that we're here" isn't the right approach either, imho. I prefer the idea of "fruit of the poisonous tree" in that regard: if you start with a lie, you can't expect everyone to forgive and forget because you've now decided that it's not important and want them to focus on what you want to achieve. Agreeing to that is normalizing deviance.
Language evolves naturally. It's very hard to control and thus not under control of decision makers. As you said, some people try to introduce terms such as "cow rape." It doesn't work easily though. The term feels unnatural.
Language is also natural to us. We're wired for dealing with its complex ambiguities. That's why we have no problem using the word "natural" to communicate things that have a very abstract relationship to the core meaning of the word. Natural beauty. Good natured. It comes naturally to me.
This is how language works.
The evolution of language also reflect values. The term cow rape is more likely to off in vegan subcultures.
It is also, obviously, used intentionally in rhetoric. The term "sustainability" was spread, intentionally and unintentionally by those in green circles.
The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly." This is not a lie. This is the literal (meant literally) definition. If you read about sustainability in the newspaper, or it is discussed by legislators... they are talking about the modern definition. That means it is the literal definition.
In terms of dishonest rhetoric, lies... Insisting that "sustainability means continuation without disruption" is a lie. It's a lie in the sense that it is untrue. This isn't what the word means in most cases, including this one. It is also a lie in a more abstract and important sense. The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.
Insisting on the archaic usage also almost always reflects values, intentionally or otherwise. Cow rape is marginal enough (at least currently) to trigger a neutral observer. To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.
I also think these things are important to point out when seen. Taking a semantic left turn to avoid substance is, to paraphrase one famous campaigner, the "flood with shit" approach. It's effective, insidious and Orwellian. It worked a charm here.
Artificial in language, to me, means "made by decisions" vs "made by accident". Some things evolve because plenty of individual people see the value and use them in a new way, other things get forced into language because some people see the value of framing issues in a certain way. To me, the former is natural progression of language while the latter is artificial. Much like you can have traditions and religions be created over time in a region or population, that's quite natural. If an army comes and forces them to adopt different traditions and religions, those are artificially implanted.
That Peta isn't able to push some term doesn't mean that there's no term-pushing happening or that it's not successful. Framing is a popular tactic.
> The key point about the word "sustainability" though, is that it does mean "environmentally friendly."
But it really doesn't. Sustainability is quite literally (!) the ability to sustain. Environmentally friendly is very vague and can mean lots of things to lots of people. Factory farming is very sustainable on its own, but it's not environmentally friendly.
Sustainability is generally not used as a synonym for environmentally friendly neither, otherwise we wouldn't talk about environmentally sustainable policies, we'd just talk about sustainable policies - but that would be confusing, because there are also economically sustainability issues that have nothing to do with the environment, as are plenty of others, e.g. manually sorting each letter in a country can be done, but it can't be done sustainably.
> The purpose of the argument is not to argue about words, but to take a conversation into the weeds.
My reaction is the opposite. When someone claims that there's a "white genocide", I disagree and generally discount their argument because it's not strong enough to stand on it's own and therefore they mix in the word "genocide" to create an emotional impact. Pointing that out isn't about derailing the conversation, it's about keeping a minimum level of honesty in communication. Don't use words while massively changing their meaning to advance your agenda, don't do silly card tricks to win an argument by confusing the audience. It's important to insist on it, otherwise you get what Trump has demonstrated quite nicely: if language has no shared meaning any more, the person who says the most outrageous things, delivers the best zingers, talks the loudest or makes the most expressive faces wins every argument because he'll go "they murdered that guy", reap the effect of making people believe somebody was murdered, and when confronted "well, I used murdered in a modern meaning".
> To be triggered by the term sustainable, you usually need to really disagree with the implication. In this case, that we should protect oceanic ecosystem protections from commercial fishing more.
No. To be against torture of terrorists, you don't need to be pro-terrorism, you just need to be anti-torture. That is, unless all those words have been assigned random new meanings, then it may very well be true.
"Can go on" is another definition of sustainable. This why dictionaries have multiple definitions, wikipedia has disambiguation pages, etc.
The archaic definition is relatively rare, and easy to discern from context. Environmental sustainability has a wikipedia entry. Ability to sustain does not. Also news articles, book titles, legislative literature, academic literature. etc.
I don't know what more I can say. Words mean what they mean, and that evolves over time.
Insisting that the modern usage is wrong and the archaic usage is correct is basically using a "loaded" term. No one writing or speaking about sustainability in an intellectually honest way expects the narrow, archaic usage.
Environmental sustainability almost always has a wider definition. If we are having a discussion about environmental sustainability and someone insists that a practice is sustainable "really" means "can go on" regardless of environmental harm.... then they are loading the term.
It's an attempt to change the meaning of the term, as it is commonly used, while keeping the moral connotations. Why would anyone care about environmental sustainability in the narrow sense?
Inexpensive rhetoric. Disingenuous.
It's disingenuous even if it is semantically correct. In this case (and often) the argument is factually wrong. This is what makes it good red herring. It's effective at rallying even if factually incorrect.
Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch), why should we call that "sustainable", exactly?
That is how communication dies and people misunderstand each other.
This is how human language works. Our brains are specifically designed to work out these ambiguities. That's why NLP is hard. It's what the "L" means.
This is why you did not have any trouble understanding the author.
Humans are also good at creative problem solving. In your case, the problem is that the article is well reasoned and hard to argue against. Semantics are always easy to argue though. So, you argue that we must use the term "sustainability" in in the way it was used back when no one used it.
I wonder why this even works. The author's usage is obviously and demonstrably correct. It is a far more common usage than yours. Homonyms exist. Somehow this nonsense makes top comment on half the threads on HN, and everywhere else... derailing actual conversations about actual stuff.
I reckon it's the same brain bug that makes reality TV popular. The conversation about nothing adjacent to the conversation about something.
It's fascinating how you made all that up. The inner motivation of someone you've never met. The claim that I argued against the article. What I'm supposedly arguing for.
None of that is in what I wrote. It all happened in your mind.
The fight for marriage equality was a "pointless war about linguistics" in those jurisdictions where the same-sex couples already had the same substantial rights? The choice of signs is important; in particular some carry more respectability than others.
The word choice does matter if what you're doing is taking a concept that the public already supports, and tack on additional meanings to advance your agenda. If all that mattered in a discussion
> Even taking all that, I don't see how we're breaking with the spirit of the word anyway. If you have a fishery that preserves the population of one target species, but is steadily depleting that of another (the bycatch)
The article doesn't make that argument.
Don't underestimate it. Maybe is not obvious, but the majority of humans, many millions of people do not starve to death because fisheries save them each day providing the main and only reliable source of protein in their daily intake.
The impact of all fishes vanishing tomorrow would be devastating for the world. A thousand of countries would burn in war in less than a year, and there would be huge, massive, migrations towards the North Hemisphere.
I didn't mean to be trite. Fishing is nutritionally important, and economically important to a lot of people in the world. This shouldn't be measured in gdp contribution. I also don't take the cultural element lightly. Fishing is culturally essential to many cultures and subcultures wherever there is water.
There is a reason fisheries are still one of the main diplomatic issues to this day.
Dollar amount is, on the other hand, meaningful in the ways that it is.
Oil & gas are "unsustainable" in the "considering that we live on this planet" sense... the same sense that many fishing industries are unsustainable. The environment would be significantly better off without them. But, it's only recently that we can even see ourselves living without oil and gas. Those mines and pipelines, leaks, coal coughs and refineries still power us. Energy touches all of us, a lot. Ocean fish... we eat them sometimes.
..and oceanic ecosystems are not something that we can destroy regardless of economics. It's morally wrong.
Serious analysis shows wild fish are critical for a few communities, but have a minor role in the global food supply.
> People get well over twice as much protean from cows than wild fish
This is an eurocentric point of view.
To start, around 65% of the humans in the planet are lactose intolerant. The second most populated country in the planet will not eat cattle, and Jews and muslims will not eat pork. US people eat 100Kg of meat/year on average whereas Hindi survive with 5Kg of meat/year on average.
> wild fish are critical for a few communities
There is not modern aquaculture without a regular supply of wild fish flour provided by fisheries. Remove all the seafood suddenly and Japan or Singapore would not survive two years. Not as we know it currently. Neither would do India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Chile or Peru.
Just the muslims would have a hard time to not starve, and one of each four people in the planet is a muslim.
Overall fish farms are ~50% more important than fishing and trying to combine them when I already noted the difference is disingenuous.
And no this is not Eurocentric these are worldwide totals. Cow meat on it’s own provides more protein than wild fish and that’s less important than cow milk. Worldwide cow milk represents 85% off all milk consumption it’s somewhat regional though still plenty global.
I suggest you actually look into milk and meat consumption in say India which you said would be devastated without fishing. ~1/4th of Indians consume zero meat of any source they would be completely unaffected by fishing being banned. Cattle consumption in India is 2.7 million metric tons which actually puts it reasonably close to the worldwide average in terms of ocean fishing : beef consumption ratio. https://www.statista.com/statistics/826722/india-beef-and-ve...
PS: Further confusing the issue the majority of India’s fish come from fresh water.
There are several confusions here. One is that those 150M tons of fish are composed of just fish. There are clams also, there are oysters, mussels, crabs and shrimps. You can produce 100M tons of mussels even if you have only 29M tons of flour fish available. They don't need it at all.
The other wrong idea is that fish farms equal fishes of non wild origin. This is not necessarily true.
If you really want to be specific some of that of that 29M tons of wild “fish“ is also fed to cattle, chicken, and pigs etc. But, it’s really only a net benefit of ~3M tons worth of increased output for human consumption across all intermediaries. The basic cycle of feeding stuff to animals we prefer eating is extremely inefficient, but to world food surplus is so massive and that 29M tons has such a low value it’s not a big deal.
Getting back to the main point, I think I have clearly demonstrated how irrelevant fishing is in global terms.
In English. To assume that marine molluscs or cnidarians are "a type of fishes" is a mistake that the majority of languages did not commit.
For millions of people shellfish is an excellent, healthy, nutritive and easily available food. Very far from "irrelevant". This point of view is (probably, I could be wrong) not so widespread in the anglosphere, but this is just a cultural thing. More for us.
If cooked properly, Mussels, crabs, lobsters and sea urchins are delicious and highly appreciated among connoisseurs, that's for sure.
Anyway, I will accept this as a backhanded agreement and leave it at that.
But even under this interpretation, the article doesn't attempt to argue that the bycatch is causing the mammal populations to collapse. Instead, it focuses on the damage inflicted on _individuals_. Incidentally, this is the kind of advocacy that often pits animal rights activists against conservationists, for instance when the latter resort to culling or even simply let a large percentage of a population die of hunger.
Past a point, I find the semantic discussion boring. This is just how language works. Words have multiple, often related meanings. It changes over time. You are not encountering it for the first time.
I was just pointing out that the evolution of the term has a logical etymology to it. There's a logic to "environmental harm" having acquired the near synonym "environmentally unsustainable." That has nothing to do with the author though. The word just means what it means.
Why does the author need to argue that the bycatch is causing target fish populations to collapse? That's not what she's writing an article about. She's just using the english language how it is spoken, especially in the context she's writing within. She didn't invent it.
Anyway... I kind of feel this is going in a silly direction. The article is about something important. The top comments are me and you having a stupid conversation about the history of words.
If you disagree with the author, you should have argued with what she has to say.. as opposed to the semantics. I'd say that onus applies more than the other way around.
I really like the idea that things could be better. If you tell me that you've got a way to fish and all the other animals that you like end up safe, then I like the idea that we could be using way.
However, this article isn't a plan it's a wish list. It wants you to feel bad about whats happening to some animals. It doesn't really talk about how they're going to achieve this.
If the how ends up starving millions or billions of people, then I'm really sorry but I'm not going to side with the whales as much as I would like them to be okay.
The article sounds like it's coming from someone with other options when it comes to eating. If they don't have a plan, then they're just hoping someone else will do all the work for them. If they really cared about the whales then they would find a way to provide for the people who eat the fish that power the industry that is hurting the whales.
If the world has too many people, and we're fishing beyond replenishment rate, those people are going to starve to death anyway. It's just a matter of when. Who should be sorry if there's evidence the world is beyond it's carrying capacity?
> If they really cared about the whales then they would find a way to provide for the people who eat the fish that power the industry that is hurting the whales.
It's not the job of non profits to figure out how to feed endless amounts of humans. This is no different than environmental constraints that force population declines in all other species. You can't continue to expand the human species unbounded and foist the problem on someone else when physical systems are pushed beyond their limits.
It's the job of governments to not create regulations that starve them.
They're not just fisheries for today, they're fisheries and ecological systems for the future, and if unreasonable demands are placed on them (for whatever reason) government is responsible to push back to protect those resources. If this causes food insecurity, the government of those impacted must make efforts to source food supplies elsewhere.
Just like the other comment explained, while accidental marine mammal bycatch will always happen, it's possible to reduce it drastically, at a reasonable cost.
Similarly, while our agriculture cannot be completely separated from the animal world, there are low-hanging fruits. We can collectively decide that we shouldn't eat meat from animals raised in horrid conditions, and accept the condition that we can't reasonably do that without cutting a bit of the average 100kg of meat a year.
A zero-carbon lifestyle is completely unattainable for the simple reason that we breathe out CO2. Zero deforestation is crazy because people rely on wood for heating in winter.
Overfocusing on the ambitions of the end goal is missing the point.
That's a misconception that I often encounter.
Note that CO2 breathed out by humans and animals has (almost) no effect on atmospheric CO2 levels. Humans consume exclusively non-fossil carbon, i.e. only carbon that was harvested from plants out of the atmosphere using photosynthesis. When we breath out we merely give back the carbon that the plant removed from the atmosphere maybe few months earlier.
This is different from cars which primarily consume fossil carbon, so their exhaust puts carbon back into the atmosphere, which hasn't been in the atmosphere for at least a few tens of million years.
Luckily mankind hasn't found out yet how to turn fossil carbon into food :)
Technically we turn fossil carbon into food indirectly all of the time with fertilizer and fueling agricultural vehicles but again implementation level details. We could also subsitute non-fossil sources or make it regenerative even though it wouldn't be that practical.
Somebody with far too much funding and power in the literal energy over time sense could theoretically be a smartass jerk and start sequestering enough CO2 over time that lack of carbon starts to be a threat. In practice it would be less of a threat than being crushed to death by massive stacks of dollar bills.
The total amount of carbon dioxide is the problem, not emissions themselves.
Exhaling carbon dioxide from metabolizing produce that extracted carbon from the short term cycle makes no difference.
Cars or other fossil fuel consuming processes on the other hand introduce extra carbon into the short term cycle by burning substances that contain carbon that was sequestrated long ago. This can happen indirectly, e.g. by converting oil into plastics first and later burning these plastics as garbage in a power plant. Boom, extra carbon emitted and nobody really noticed.
Planting trees and burning them is the perfect example of a carbon neutral thing to do. Not sure what is your point here. The problem is adding new carbon into the biosphere, as we are doing today.
Zero deforestation is attainable by growing wood in ways that don't deforest.
Zero mammals killed is not going to happen. But that's still beside the point that bycatch and sustainability are completely different things.
Less than 1% of energy comes from wind and solar and we aren't looking at more than 3-4% in 2030. Wind and solar require either nuclear, gas, coal and oil as backup. Nuclear is completely out of vogue and will take years to build.
It's not just concrete and air travel it's ships, trucks, steel production, anything that require large amount of heat.
You can't power a hospital based on solar and wind etc.
Fossil fuels are not going anywhere until we either get fusion or some sort of fuel cell technology, but they require som fundamental breakthroughs we aren't close to meeting just yet.
The problem is doing things at scale not just proving in some lab what is theoretically possible.
We will have fusion before we have wind and solar covering just 50% of the worlds energy consumption.
And of course we won't be fucked. Climate catastrophism is the last thing we need.
I've worked in one industrial plant, and they mostly just needed power and steam to run the processing equipment.
If you need oil as a chemical input, you could offset that carbon or likely synthesize it. But even just reducing our fossil oil use to ingredients and not fuel would make a massive difference.
That seems like a rather imprecise and thereby meaningless refutation of the parent's point.
IMO a more honest statement of that idea would be:
"Not if you want to live a totally unconstrained life, drawing on all currently available benefits, whether neccessary or not".
I do think, that "modern life" would be compatible with zero CO2 emission (for some definition of "modern life"), people would merely have to face more constraints and regulation.
- More pubic transit on trains - Less packaging and throw away plastic utensils so you might have to carry a fork with you or employ more dishwashers at restaurants - Less meat and fish consumption, returning America to its more traditional diets modulo beyond meat type substitutes. - More local production and transport instead of shipping things across the world - Less non-essential work and the travel accompanying it - More urbanization to make ecological systems more efficient - Use of LED lighting systems - Less "fast fashion" and wearing more durable clothing - Use of electric heat wherever possible - Widespread battery production - Global solar network to ship sunlight power around the world - Emphasizing power efficiency in electronics
Some of these changes are fairly disruptive, but extremely mild compared to the challenges humans have faced in history such as war and starvation.
Keep in mind that these so-called "modern lifestyles" that are most carbon intensive are lived most vibrantly by the wealthy (e.g. private jets, endless consumption of materials). Many people will not be hugely inconvenienced compared to their current life circumstances.
the one you replied to however, is making the point that extra carbon emissions are required by the modern lifestyle, and we would have to give up some of its benefits to attain the zero goal. hence adding to the conversation.
how about if you want to have a meta discussion about the discussion, you start a separate thread no one will read, and stop spamming the discussion with offtopic comments.
Personally I would always want to factor in some sort of ROI for the conversation to have any meaningful context.
There are many ways we can "fix" things but the cost of the fix should always be measured against what it is fixing.
So, as you say, their current goal seems unattainable. But there's an obvious attainable goal. Seems focusing on that first should be the priority.
With a will, some incentives and some clever thinking it seems that similar solutions could be found for mammals. In some ways it's an easier problem as cetaceans are generally known not to be dumb. Seals I'm not so sure of ;)
Again this is the problem I'm mentioning. You're picking an impossibly high goal and concluding that there is no solution. Let's try to consume 2 or 3 times less meat/fish, it's gonna be much easier and faster than the problems associated with extreme population reduction (radical population aging, no career opportunities for young people, overloaded medical staff, etc).
For the average American, eating 3 times less meat still means you can get 3 steaks a week. It's not completely crazy.
(example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/vi...)
We can't get people to wear masks at scale despite people dying. I just don't honestly think we can convince them that eating a cheeseburger is a major problem. Even if we cut meat production in half, as the population doubles we end up exactly where we are now.
Source: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/04/we-have-met-enemy-and...
That the fish populations do not decline is not enough. All economically valuable species of fishes populations are depleted. In all parts of the planet. They must increase ASAP.
And there must be something left for the fish predators and other parts of the ecosystem. If not, there is a serious risk of collapse of the entire house by a waterfall of collateral damages.
If you remove predators, there will be consequences in prey populations, that range from displacement of key species to extinction of the preys.
Marine Mammal's bycatch is a waste and not a desired outcome in fisheries management, but moral reasons are the wrong reasons here.
They should not be wasted because we want and need fishes in the sea. We don't want oceans filled with unedible jellyfishes.
Why should only the targeted fish population levels be considered when determining if it is sustainable? Wouldn't that encourage bycatching, as the elimination of a predator would allow you to catch more fish?
>Taken literally, it's also a completely unattainable goal, which makes me doubt the authors' intentions.
Taken literally, it means every marine mammal bycatch faces punishment, a completely obtainable goal.
A very low bar considering many of those populations have already declined greatly since the 1970s.
Nope.
The author wants to pay top dollar to eat fish and chips while people with less means go hungry.
The author wants somebody to feel bad enough about the whales so that they will figure out how to actually save the whales. The author doesn't want to actually figure out how to save the whales themselves.
The author may appear to be on the right side of history. And maybe that's all that matters. What people mis-believe about you after you're dead.
On HN I don't want to hear about how the whales are having a hard time. I already know about that. I watched Voyage Home. I know about how all the whales had a great time when we temporarily shut down shipping after 9/11 and they didn't have to deal with all the noise pollution. I know about the 52-hertz whale. And I know about the 3 billion people who need fish to not stave.
On HN I want to hear about how they're going to save the whales and also prevent mass starvation.
The "Right Side of History" doesn't mean the "Good Side of History". Maybe the save the whale people figure out how to convince the rest of us to let the people who need to eat fish to live just starve. Everyone will agree the author was on the right side, but I would rather be said to have been on the wrong side of history in that scenario.
Is that really true? I find it hard to believe.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/sustainable-seafood....
From a website that's trying to support sustainable fishing practices.
(I actually thought the number was 2 billion until I looked it up before making my previous post. It shouldn't be too surprising considering how much of the world's population lives on the coast AND fish basically take care of themselves, so it's an easy to way get your food.)
"You can't fish anymore."
"Then what are we going to eat?"
"Well, I presume that instead of going fishing once a day you can start a farm. Watch over and feed some chickens. Whatever."
And, like I said in my other post. If you can find a way to actually save the whales and let everyone still eat, then I'll be right there with you. But right now this looks like rich people who have time to go whale watching wanting the poor people who barely have time to get enough food to eat to stop eating so that they can still go whale watching.
Give me some actual numbers that show that people who rely on fish can actually farm to make up the difference and I'll be convinced. But right now I'm on the side of caution that says "let's not do something that might starve some percentage of 3 billion people" and the article is saying "eh, 3 billion people can probably find something else to eat".
MSC certified line-caught fish will on average have double the CO2 emissions of seine caught fish, see: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/estimating_the_carbon_f...
It is confusing to me that MSC is fine with being the forcing function to double carbon emissions - which is expected to have large effects on ocean habitats - while ostensibly being interested in ocean habitat.
I guess the complexity is that.. there doesn't seem to be a good answer, currently.
Encouraging people to eat less fish might be the easiest (and thereby best) solution.
I'm not saying humans should eat /no/ fish – indeed there are many human communities which rely on fishing, and for which fishing plays a key role in their culture. Similarly, some people may need to eat fish for health reasons. However, it seems to me that /reducing/ consumption by cutting consumption of fish for pleasure/taste would likely benefit both the environment and people; for example, indigeneous groups which traditionally rely on fishing would face less competition from industrial-scale fishing. From an environmental standpoint, most things, even whaling it seems, are inherently sustainable in smaller scales.
Again, I don't mean to say that everyone needs to comsume zero fish. But if those of us who can, which likely includes many HN readers, cut down our consumption it may benefit everyone at quite a small cost to ourselves; as a middle class Northern European, I can testify that me not having consumed fish in the last 5 years has had 0 immediate impact on my health or happiness levels.
Note: Of course this is all assuming that there are more eco-friendly alternative protein/fat/omegas sources available. Again, I do not mean to say that this is applicable for everyone.
Numerous stocks have crashed and most times the collapse has been extremely brutal, similar to the passenger pigeon, going from "it's everywhere" to "it's nowhere" in a few years.
And even with what we know at least 1/3rd of current stocks are being overfished.
I'm not really sure what is considered a good fishing method that minimizes bycatch?
That being said, long-line fishing can be done entirely CO2-neutrally, with sails like they did back in the day. ;)
For food, we should be farming fish, in indoor, controlled environments.
We already played this game with commercial game hunting, hardwood harvesting, etc. We even played it to conclusion with oceanic species and systems. EG cod fisheries.
The same principle are at play in the ocean. Technology & markets combine to create an unsustainable industry that comes to an end. With bison hunting it was demand for conveyer belt leather meeting railroads. The population crashed very suddenly.
Oceanic ecosystems is vast, so the process can take longer. They're also harder to harvest, so technology proceeds more gradually.
We were crashing oceanic systems in the 19th century though. Whales. Several cod fisheries. Many tuna fisheries, as soon as canning became a thing. Almost all coastal fisheries in the mediterranean.
Fisheries policies, in actual practice, tend to fall below true sustainability most of the time. Even defined very narrowly (harvest of this specific species will not decline), they fail regularly. West european mackerel populations crashed 2 years ago, and many times previously. This despite strict, high profile fisheries policies.
A ban is just easier. I am extremely dubious of sustainable wild harvest. Also, fishing is a small industry.
Many fishes are fed with grains, this destroys their nutritional value, which begs the question if it even makes sense to eat fish who are fed with food they wouldn't eat at all in a natural environment.
We can craft nutritious, similar-to-natural, or even better, fish foods. If the incentives are correctly aligned.
In principle, wild harvests are not intrinsically harmful to the environment. In practice, all commercial fisheries are to various degrees.
Large scale aquaculture has a ton of issues. Disease, nutrition, pollution. Not intrinsic, but practically.
That said, I do think we can attain a decent quality of aquaculture. The best commercial approach is currently freshwater fish grown in isolation from natural water sources with waste water used for irrigation. Tilapia, basically.
Problem is, people want salmon, cod, tuna, oysters... Salmon is farmed at scale. We know the result. Very high parasite loads. Visibly reduced health of the fish. Nutritional issues.
We could easily farm a different species, that naturally thrives in environments similar to those we can recreate agriculturally... the demand is for salmon.
Citation needed. There have been trillions spent on meal replacements/supplements for humans and it never beats eating a variety of raw, unprocessed foods, like fruits and veg.
This nutrition difference sounds very exaggerated, can you point me to a paper or something?
Citation needed
You cannot expect animals fed with corn to have the same nutrition value than an animal which feeds on diverse food in real life.
Read on NN Taleb, you don't understand complex systems.
There can be no environmental equality without worldwide social and racial equity!
Imagine we farmed cattle by flying about in Zepplins, lowering giant nylon nets and dragging across the ground.
Fish Farming seems more sustainable. Maybe less economic but then perhaps just don't eat the fish if we cannot do it economically.
> Fish Farming seems more sustainable.
It does seem like any major market should be required to farm their resources rather than taking from the commons.
That would be more fishing in a submarine.
Lots of farms use planes and drones and helicopters for hunting and droving.
An ok equilivent to fishing is just when you eat game bird. They are even caught in nets.
One problem with fish farms is they feed them with small fish caught at sea for this purpose. If the environmental movement wasn't so toxic you could stop this quite easily though.
But hunting from a zeppelin would be amazing. On my bucket list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture
It's not necessary to eat fish. We can just do without.
- Precise definition of territorial waters depending on mainland's size & population - Hands-off fishing in international waters; farm & eat marine food within mainland marine territory
No international body out there is strong enough to protect sea-life.