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'Sustainable Fishing' is a Lie | The “maximum sustainable yield” is based on a pseudoscientific theory that justifies taking the most marine life for maximum profit. (www.currentaffairs.org)

submitted 1 day ago by usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml to c/green@lemmy.ml

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[–] Trimatrix@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Call me ignorant but isn’t sustainable fishing totally feasible its just how we go about calculating it completely too simplistic and optimistic to determine when enough is enough?

Like, we have been fishing since like the start of civilization. Things haven’t been a problem until we really started ramping up commercial fishing a hundred or so years ago.

I feel like this issue falls under what I call the dead body problem. Most people are fine swimming in the ocean. We can all collectively agree that there are dead bodies in the ocean. Conversely, we can all collectively agree that we would not lounge in a hot tub if there was a dead body in it. Thus, most people have an inflection point in the size of the body of water with a dead body in it and their willingness to go into said body of water. Hell if I know how to calculate that but it logically obviously exists.

same principle with fishing I would argue. except the inflection point is what is considered maximum sustainable fishing. My gut tells me a numerical value dependent on variables we don’t fully understand exists. However, we don’t understand the ecology of it all to derive a useful number.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

To get anything close to what that used to look like would take massive reductions in consumption and production across the board. Not just shifting what type of fish people eat. Having a lot, lot less of it overall

It's not just a higher population. Per capita consumption of fish has gone up quite a bit in the past decades, though has leveled off

[–] Goretantath@lemm.ee 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why can't we just make fish farms instead of taking them from the ocean?

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 day ago

Fish farms are not the environmental win they claim themselves to be. They can sometimes actually make things worse because they'll often take wild caught fish as feed too!

The sheer quantity of wild fish used in salmon farms is also a growing concern. About a fifth of the world’s annual wild fish catch, amounting to about 18m tonnes of wild fish a year, is used to make fishmeal and fish oil, of which about 70% goes to fish farms

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/11/global-salmon-farming-harming-marine-life-and-costing-billions-in-damage

Environmental impact is not limited to salmon farming either. All kinds of fish farms dumps large amounts of waste into the environment

For a world annual shrimp production [in fish farms] of around 5 million tons, 5.5 million tons of organic matter, 360,000 tons of nitrogen, and 125,000 tons of phosphorous are annually discharged to the environment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353277/

They can also drive deforestation in some parts of the world too

Conversion to aquaculture is the most prevalent driver of mangrove deforestation across the tropics over the last 50 years generating substantial carbon emissions. Preventing further aquaculture expansion within mangrove forest areas will be essential to achieve national emission reduction targets in mangrove-holding countries.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.14774