California cancels salmon fishing season (opens in new tab)

0: https://www.wur.nl/en/dossiers/file/pulse-fishing.htm

The regulation nominally exists to disincentivize bycatch but anecdotally it seems to just ensure that bycatch becomes waste.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/revealed-t...

https://web.colby.edu/st297-global18/2019/01/21/atlantic-blu...

It sounded very intelligent and convincing to me at 18, and sounds downright idiotic to me now.

Poke around and look up how big wild schools of anchovy can be, or how many krill it takes to feed a whale. And each of those numbers you find are just teensy little blips. The ocean is really big and its teeming with life.

The sheer number of animals that are slaughtered to produce meat for human consumption is absolutely mind-boggling. In addition to the fish, humans killed 72 billion chickens, 3.3 billion ducks, 1.3 billion pigs, over a half-billion geese, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, and goats (each!), over 300 million cattle, and over 70 million rodents for food in 2019 alone [1].

Animal agriculture overall generates more CO2 emissions than every automobile, ship, and airplane on Earth - more carbon than the entire transportation sector. An overwhelming majority of arable land on this planet is used to feed those animals, fated to death from birth, rather than humans - in many developing countries, humans starve while livestock are plumped for slaughter and export. [2]. 75% of historic deforestation in the Amazon, 55% of erosion, 60% of nitrogen pollution, and 44% of anthropogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions (each) are a direct result of animal agriculture [3].

If you live in the US, like I do, it's not just the animals and the environment that suffer under animal agriculture. It's an open secret that undocumented children are exploited to work in slaughterhouses in this country [4] while politicians are actively rolling back protections for those exploited children [5] to ensure that boneless skinless chicken breasts stay cheap at WalMart.

There is no such thing as sustainable animal agriculture - it is a lie used to greenwash products, to make us feel righteous when we pay for corpses at the grocery store or restaurant. The only sane and ethical response to this devastation is to completely reject the economic exploitation of animals - to adopt a fully vegan philosophy. Of course, this does cause some difficulties in the modern context (especially in the US), but the trouble of learning to cook vegetables and seitan is nothing compared to the harm that animal agriculture causes to billions of humans and non-humans every year. (It also cured my high blood pressure and pre-diabetes in three months, but everyone knows vegetables are good for you :)

[1] https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL (https://web.archive.org/web/20211208184438/https://www.fao.o...) [2] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2022/03/15/it-may-be-uncomf.... [3] https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/food/animal-agricult... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-find-100-children-... [5] https://www.axios.com/local/nw-arkansas/2023/03/13/arkansas-...

Why not? How many fish are born every minute?

Privatization didn't help ... small owners rent their land to the big ag, wildlife is still being decimated, land degradation accelerated, and now there are new deserts in central Europe (last week there was a sand storm in Hungary and Slovakia).

Also, it's not like fish are going to respect lot borders. Overfishing in the lot next to mine will damage my lot's value. The only correct way for me to respond is by overfishing my lot.

[1] And leave my neighbours to deal with the long-term fallout.

https://i.redd.it/bonkanv0xiba1.jpg

If that photo doesn't cause people to wake up to what's being done, ostensibly on our behalf, I don't know what will.

I still think the idea should be discussed and maybe g20 nations come up with some agreements.

Hopefully things like lab grown fish improve and maybe we can move people away from the real thing.

I keep telling my kids they are lucky anytime we get the treat of having some fish as in their future it may not be something available to the common person.

I respect your noble pursuit of not eating meat, and I have encountered arguments similar to yours enough times now that I feel compelled to respond in genuine kindness as someone who does like to eat meat (within "reason").

Animals are benignly cruel to each other beyond your imagination or the production of what nature documentaries will show you. Nature is a fight of survival. No animal wants pain or to be eaten, yet that is the reality that every wild animal faces. The conversation of humanizing animals is very interesting, but in the process we disregard the reality of their natural existence. Their lifespans are short, and often brutal. I weigh the reality of wilderness to the reality of industrial farming and ask myself if there isn't some kind of middle ground. I think there is. You can raise animals in pastures where they free range outside. They have a relatively peaceful, predation, free life after which you consume them (by killing them quickly and painlessly).

I deplore the reality of industrial farming and "agricultural waste". Chickens being raised for one singular body part and then thrown away. We do not treat any of our food with respect, living or otherwise. We are not efficient. We do not care about quality. We don't even try consuming the whole thing. That's where I find this industry disgusting. Meat should not be this disposably cheap.

From the article

> "It's devastating," he said. "This is more than just an income issue for me. It's an inability to do what I love. So, on a financial level and on a personal level, it's devastating."

I'm glad it's a financial loss. Nobody should be a commodity. And it's wrong that it's what somebody loves to do.

However I understand that people do need to eat something, and thus I would encourage people to consider their diet based on the more complex plane than vegetarian vs meat. Most food, especially cheap food, do have negative consequences on the environment. If you can, look into the background of food you buy, alternative raise and farm your own food (chickens are excellent pets and one of the best way to keep grass down without using machinery, and they eat practically everything that would go into a compost). It doesn't scale but it do reduce the problem. Those that want to take a even bigger step can try the few environment friendly choices like say seaweed and shellfish. There is zero risk of mussel genocide, through one has to be aware of the farming method.

People will instead say nonsense like, “corporations are the problem.”

I think it’s great that you’re taking steps to reduce your impact on the world (I’ve made many myself: no meat, no kids, no driving, no flying, small dense housing), but honestly don’t get your hopes up for anyone else following suit.

The heavily-processed vegetable-based "product" aggressively marketed to you has been shipped halfway round the world, having been farmed using just about the least sustainable farming practices imaginable.

Which one is harming the environment?

If I didn’t raise these animals they just wouldn’t have existed to begin with. So I do feel bad they have to die but I also gave them a great life.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop... [2008]

I suspect we'll see additional cessation of fishing in other areas as it further unravels that we've been chronically overfishing for decades.

Britain after WW2 overharvested mackerel from their seas for so long that they had to put permanent fishing quotas and even today the mackerel have not fully recovered from overfishing over half a century ago. Anglers have an enormous impact on fish and wildlife stocks.

https://www.science.org/content/article/common-tire-chemical...

Allowable non-treaty ocean harvest (thousands of fish)

  Coho:    C  R
  0–300    25 75
  >300     60 40
  Chinook: 
  0–100    50 50
  >100–150 60 40
  >150     70 30

There's a lot of different fly fishing experiences in California from traditional trout to really unique stuff. Please do try some out!

Sometimes I hear Millennials and Gen-Z say they don't want to have kids because the world sucks and think they're doomers but they have a point.

The otters are actually not a real problem for abalone. Yes, otters are a natural predator, but the current sea otter population is not recovering to levels that would seriously impact abalone recovery. To my knowledge, the Otter population is still plateaued at around 3-4k globally (used to be hundreds of thousands) In addition, many otters are found south of San Francisco, and while their range does historically include waters well north off GG bridge (where the red abalone are) it’s not a significant amount. I live within 10 miles of the Sonoma coast and frequently visit, I’ve seen maybe 5 otters in the past 10 years, even while kayaking/diving.

The biggest challenge for abalone right now is the lack of kelp beds (food) to recover a huge population die off in 2014/15 during a red tide event. The red tide devastated populations, literally thousands of shells washing ashore. In the wake of the die off, and unfortunately in conjunction with the timing of the sunflower star wasting disease killing off the urchins main predator, this left a huge vacancy for urchins to move in and create “urchin barrens” which are just rocks and ecosystems covered in urchins, nothing else. Urchins compete with abalone for food, and bull kelp for space to grow. So now the abalone, and their food source, don’t have the physical space to re-establish.

There was a sighting of the sunflower star in Sonoma this year so there are hopes that they will make a ferocious come back. In additions, the massive population boom of urchins has led to wasting and disease within that population, which is now slightly declining (good).

Abalone take 6-7 years to reach harvesting size and I think a few years before they can reproduce, so their recovery will always take a while. But it looks like we may have turned a slight corner this year.

Although you are totally right that they may never RE-open the fishery, I still hold hope they will someday as it’s an incredibly fun hobby and I love eating abalone. But at the end of the day, I just want to see healthy/balanced ecosystems. The waters used to be a lot more interesting when there was more abs, kelp, and other critters instead of the depressing urchin barrens of the last so many years. Thanks for reading.

Of course not. The more accurate word is "cartel" (note: I see management of a shared resource as a perfectly legitimate justification for cartel behavior).