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Farmed Bluefin Tuna Brands Claim to Be Sustainable. Here’s What Really Happens.
(sentientmedia.org)
Exploiting and killing animals will never be sustainable.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
44 points (94.0% liked)
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Why is that? Seems to have been sustained and even expanded for multiple millennia at this point.
Even thousands of years ago, it still involved great expense to the environment. Human arrivals on continents coincides with extinctions of megafauna
Wild hunting vs Domestication. Hunting has to be done very specifically in order to make it sustainable meaning the animals going extinct otherwise. Domestication on the other hand can be expanded as needed to feed an ever growing population.* The end problems of domestication of animals isn't that the animals went extinct.
*Obviously other limits apply.
Tunas however cannot be domesticated, only hunted.
Tuna aren't hunted they are fished, as are lots of other versions of sea fauna. Fishing isn't really analogous to per-historic hunting for the simple reason that commercial fishing requires a level of sophistication that simply didn't exist back then.
Sustainable fishing absolutely Can, and Does exist in some areas of the world today. But not for all species, and not for all nations and of course under capitalism the rewards for cheating will always threaten sustainability.
But to your original point, tuna could be sustainably harvested, but enforcement is basically impossible.
In this case, fishing is very much comparable to hunting. Only we use much cruder and more destructive hunting methods underwater because we are not at home in the ecosystem.
As predators, tuna are involved in the regulation of numerous other species, migrate almost all over the world throughout the year and dive for miles depending on the time of day. Fishing them is like normalizing the hunting of tigers. Maybe even worse. After we have already wiped out some tiger species. And all for a cheap pizza topping.
By that same logic, exploiting and killing humans is sustainable.
I mean I guess? I don't see a world where humans are eaten to extinction by other humans and since humans aren't really that special, nothing about us would make us unsustainable via farming/husbandry. It seems like you are using a different definition of sustainable then what is commonly understood.
It's not about being eaten to extinction, obviously, but nice.
If you consider cultivating new zoonotic diseases and pandemics into existence and wasting energy and resources on feeding animals the nutrients that humans can more efficiently benefit from directly to be "sustainable", then I think it's you that is using a definition of sustainable that is different from what is commonly understood.
Sustainability isn't about absolute energy usage or energy usage per capita, or anything like that. It's about ensuring that the activity at it's current level of energy consumption can continue. So if it takes a 1000 acres of land to have a genetically diverse herd of animals that can feed a village of a given size forever, then the fact that 1000 times more calories in the form of anything else could be used on that land instead doesn't mean the herd of animals are unsustainable.
Diseases are a non-sequitur for sustainability discussions as is "wasted" energy. Efficiency is nice, but not necessary for sustainability.
I didn’t consider that they’d have to bring in the fish from elsewhere to feed them, that’s not sustainable at all.
Really we should be letting the free market do free market things and stop supplying as much fish, even if it does drive up prices. If you want the unsustainable fish, fine. Pay for it. Demand has to meet supply at some point.
I’ve actually run a computer model for this exact problem (overfishing in general, not tuna in particular).
The problem with a market based solution is that the feedback loop is too delayed. By the time the catches start to drop enough to affect prices, you’re already driven the ecosystem to the point of collapse. The same is true for many natural resources and systemic effects like climate change. And all of the market dynamics that come into play push the players to maximize resource extraction/profits in the short term. That’s why we need to limit harvests and pollution via taxes and other regulations. It’s not a problem that a market can solve - it’s a problem that a market creates.
That’s really cool! I wish I had more time to respond but it’s late. I wasn’t arguing that it’s a good way to fix things, it’s really a last ditch effort. There’s a reason regulations exist and should continue to exist (part of my many issues with the right-wing politics in the USA if not elsewhere… but that’s off topic).
That’s some really interesting insight into the issue at hand though, thank you!
Lemmy is neat :)
We should not be "letting the free market" do anything.