BWE
Posts: 1902
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (guthrie @ April 04 2008,09:41) | That statement you quoted, is it all one piece by the same person in the same post?
It seems a bit disconnected and rambling. It also suggests that the author doesn't really agree with the ag and fish people, because they personally have seen more of the supposedly endangered fish species, so why should anyone be bothered about their rarity now since they seem to have recovered?
Also, I'd say they need to do some stock assessments on those other fish PDQ.
[snip] |
The stock assessments are going on. My first reaction was similar to yours although perhaps slightly more emotional. What a back handed compliment to the ODFW. The link in the OP should work. I snipped out some parts for brevity's sake. Personal experience diving (the man must be an animal BTW, the water is co-old) |= methodically collected data. It pisses me off because he casts the Governors decision as somehow sneaky when it wasn't. It makes an ill-informed reader think it is news rather than opinion.
| Quote (Assassinator @ April 04 2008,09:53) | It all comes down to this: if we don't watch out, we're going to f*ck ourselfs. We can do all we want, we're just destroying ourselfs. If we want to live properly as well the next 200 years or so, we'll have to change certain things. If we don't care, we can just do what we want because in a stamina-fight between us and Earth, Earth alwayse wins. And that's the only benefit we should keep in mind.
That's all there is to it, and it has nothing to do with the Bambi-Syndrome wich is rampant out there. |
We are already f****ing ourselves but whatever. If we are going to do that it should be with eyes open rather than in a state of unnecessary ignorance.
| Quote (Louis @ April 04 2008,09:54) | | Quote (BWE @ April 04 2008,11:37) | [SNIP]
I have a question in all of this rambling. When you see this statement, what is your first reaction?
[SNIP] |
My first reaction is that I don't know enough about ecology to make a decent contribution.
My second reaction is that the little I do know about fishing/ecology etc is that we as a species are vastly over fishing certain areas of the oceans. I know we don't have infinite resources and I think it's demonstrably not the case that we can will-he nill-he exploit the resources that we do have as if they were infinite. |
Aral Sea in Russia.
| Quote | | The fundamental tension this draws up between the politics and economics (i.e. the things we want) and the responsibilites we have to properly managing our resources (i.e. the things we might have to accept we ain't getting) is found the world over. This brings two thoughts to mind immediately: a) we should suck it up, stop whining and take the political and economic hit because our resources are not going to miraculously spring back from the brink of depletion because we whine alot, b) we should engage the politics and economics of the situation as intelligently as we can becaue like it or not there bozos who are going to deny the facts because they don't like the conclusions or implications. |
Easier said than done. Just getting facts into official documents is sometimes politically difficult. "The situation is delicate. They will think we're overdramatizing the problem to get grant money." Or some such tripe.
| Quote | | Somehow this means working WITH big businesses, WITH climate change denialists, WITH governments to acheive a "least worst" outcome. That is the best we can hope for. This will take a MASSIVE shift in policy. To use a local (UK) example, the problem we have over here is our government is putting a huge and punative tax burden on the electorate and not focussing on the bigger, business end of the problem. It's all well and good taxing polluting vehicles highly, or eliminating plastic bags (if these changes do actually make a difference) for example but if there is no immediate incentives for big business to change ( e.g. make less polluting cars, cut back the awesome amount of packaging in supermarket products) then the usual kneejerk reactionary idiots get to appear to have some justification for their paranoid claims that "climate change is a lefty conspiracy to raise taxes". They don't of course, but without the commensurate burden being placed on big business, the electorate has at least got a legitimate axe to grind (the burden is placed to heavily on them). |
Just because I'm paranoid…
I've been developing a faux conspiracy theory for a story I'm writing that uses income inequality as its premise. The super wealthy have a sort of tri-lateral commission type agency where they conspire to bring about double inflation for a period of time until money is worth about 10% of current value. The super rich first buy up the assets since they are now the only ones with any cash and create the only jobs in the chaos, that of soldiers in their private armies, and let the public works dissolve. With no running water, electricity, gas etc, and environmental destruction exacerbated by desperation the humans not living in the enclaves die off, horribly of course…
Anyway, persons are reasonable, people aren't. I've met a lot of very civic minded business and political leaders but they often suffer from the infinite resource syndrome. They just can't accept that logical conclusions follow from evidence. One person actually said to me (referring to the Ogallala aquifer in the American Midwest) during a presentation I was giving on various managed resource systems, "We'll just genetically engineer salt resistant crops. What are you, a Malthusian liberal?"
No shit. I laughed and politely went into a bit of detail so everyone could manage to finish the event but the mindset was sadly typical. Many only see straw men.
| Quote | | It's all well and good to say "ah yes, but market forces will sort it all out", but the problem is that market forces alone will simply not do this quickly enough if those market forces are applied to one segment of the economy unevenly. I've got no problem with big business, they acheive something that can only be acheived by big businesses, I've got no problem with capitalism or a relatively free market, and given the authoritarian proclivities of the governments we seem to have world wide I have no interest in seeing them get bigger and MORE controlling. However, placing the majority of the burden for effecting environmental change on the little guys (as it were) is a monstrous cock up. At least because it simply means that items that are environmentally costly can become seen as status symbols. Ferrari anyone? Want a tan so badly you'll get it from a bottle to appear like you can afford an overseas holiday, or perhaps a package tour to Alicante will suit? |
If you want to curb consumption, there almost always needs to be a mandate somewhere along the line. I also agree about business and Gov't too but what we have now is straw men rather than the real animal.
| Quote | | I want a Ferrari, and dammit I love to fly abroad. But I want a Ferrari and a plane that run on hydrogen fuel cells (or whatever cleaner energy source we can find for the job). There's plenty of energy out there, we just need to harness it. The trick we need to do is not merely wear sackcloth and ashes and the hairshirt of environmental responsibility, which we do to some extent undoubtedly need to do, but to convince businesses and governments that it is in their interests FINANCIALLY to change from the top down as well as from the bottom up. One of these things alone is not enough, and to be blunt, someone with a massive wodge of cash in their pocket is unlikely to listen too closely to the plight of storm ravaged Indonesians (for example). |
Well, I've seen huge donations but I've never once seen a willing change of business practices.
| Quote | | Sorry, but that is the fundamental hypocrisy of the "generous West". Heroes we ain't (and I DO mean we completely inclusively). Our comfortable lives are bought and paid for by the blood, toil, lives and misery of hundreds of millions of people across the world. Regardless of what the DaveTards of this world think, we didn't get to this position by some demonstrable superiority, we were "lucky". And some of us realise this. We can do something about this at exactly the same time as we attempt to slowly change which source we use for our energy addiction. |
Slowly change but start now. I've used that line on many occasions. In the near future (5-20 years?), I suspect either we will have to suffer huge cutbacks in our material standard of living or we will need to maintain a military to enforce the rules of our empire. That will mean a lot more 'either you're with us or you're with them' kinds of policies inside the fatherlands.
| Quote | | Perhaps I've diverted from your original ideas BWE, but I know too little about fisheries science to make a decent specific detailed contribution. |
It really wasn't the specific issue that ticked me off. It's just that someone sent it to me and I know what it's about and etc. The problem was the global sell-job that's being done to prove game theory.
| Quote | I could witter on for days about green chemistry and the attempts by the pharma industry to improve. But perhaps that's even more tangential.
HTH
Louis |
A friend of mine retired from Monsanto a few years ago as a chemist/ chemical engineer. He said the same thing. But the general practices never change, just isolated programs.
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