Natural equilibrium. I’m happy to report that the original speculation that the H5N1 virus had stopped spreading are plain wrong http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4881850.stm.
I was having a conversation yesterday about fish and chips. I persuaded a new family friend to change his dinner choice at a rather nice fish and chippie in Pinner. He traditionally chose Skate, rather ironically the full name is the "common skate". People have no idea as to the state that our fish stocks are in. Really serious population crashes have occurred in many species.
Now here’s a little story put to you in lay-mans terms to illustrate the shit that’s going down right now.
A few years back, in the cold waters off Canada, one adventurous local found Cod. Lots of Cod. It was said you could virtually put your hand over the side of the boat and pick em out. Big ones too. What happened, word got out. Then plenty of other fisherman began joining in and pretty soon there was a thriving industry. This worked well until one year, where they caught a few too many and the fish were over-fished. The problem was, they over-fished and then didn’t realise they had until it was too late. After all, all the government monitoring schemes saw that the number of fish being caught was still the same. The problem was, these fish were only a year or 2 old and not of suffiecient size to breed. They mature at between 3 and 5 years. 4 years later this Cod stock collapsed. No Cod left, nudda. Effectively extinct. Now governments being what they are in Western civilisation they had a tricky problem. There were quite a lot of fisherman at this point and they had some real voting power. They said they needed bigger boats to go further afield as the inshore fish stocks had disappeared (over-fished). The government, rather than being brave and telling them to find other work, gave them money so that they could buy bigger boats and achieve this. Its called subsidising. And it happens all over the world, even in the UK. So now other Cod stocks along with other fish species get into trouble. So the cycle begins again, more fishermen, more voting power, bigger demands equates to bigger boats that can fisher further, deeper, wider and catch more. And then said fisherman has kids who decide to join the family business, cyclic degeneration is how it should be termed. What we need it forward thinking people in power who see the long term benefits of not giving in to what is effectively, market forces.
Now, I hear the intelligent among you say "why didn’t the Canadian’s stop catching fish before it was too late. This would allow them to breed and then they would never "go bust" (had to get some poker terminology in there somewhere). Well they were canadians and they didn’t think of that. But did you know us Brits have our own Cod. In the North Sea, the same thing is happening and has been for several years. Scientists realised that if you use a big, big Mesh size in your nets, you allow the immature fish to get through, which will hopefully the mature ones to breed and allow you to take quite a lot of really big fish out of the sea. In fact, if you observe this practice for long enough, the fishermen could be taking out MORE tonnes of fish than ever before as these fish would be really big. Great idea. Let the stocks recover to a good level and only take out the big bastards that are probably going to die of old age soon anyway. Unfortunately the Cod species isn’t hunted selectively. Fishermen complained that now smaller, similar species like haddock (same habitat, depth etc) were now uncatchable as they simply swam through the nets. So a compromise was reached.
And compromise is usually a good answer to a lot of things. But not fishing, deforestation, human population growth, City growth, Global warming or any of the other ways in which humans interact with the earth. Compromise. Fuck compromise. Get someone with a hitlerian (new word?) mentality (minus the genocide, racial shit) in power instead of dumb yanks with guns and lets get this planet back on track..
P.S I went for a piss in the garden yesterday. It made me think that the natural way is almost always infinitely better as:-
you fertilise the soil
reduce the need for sewage works and their energy consumption
get fresh air and feel like a real man marking your territory
If that was in a part manifesto id pledge my allegiance
I was having a conversation yesterday about fish and chips. I persuaded a new family friend to change his dinner choice at a rather nice fish and chippie in Pinner. He traditionally chose Skate, rather ironically the full name is the "common skate". People have no idea as to the state that our fish stocks are in. Really serious population crashes have occurred in many species.
Now here’s a little story put to you in lay-mans terms to illustrate the shit that’s going down right now.
A few years back, in the cold waters off Canada, one adventurous local found Cod. Lots of Cod. It was said you could virtually put your hand over the side of the boat and pick em out. Big ones too. What happened, word got out. Then plenty of other fisherman began joining in and pretty soon there was a thriving industry. This worked well until one year, where they caught a few too many and the fish were over-fished. The problem was, they over-fished and then didn’t realise they had until it was too late. After all, all the government monitoring schemes saw that the number of fish being caught was still the same. The problem was, these fish were only a year or 2 old and not of suffiecient size to breed. They mature at between 3 and 5 years. 4 years later this Cod stock collapsed. No Cod left, nudda. Effectively extinct. Now governments being what they are in Western civilisation they had a tricky problem. There were quite a lot of fisherman at this point and they had some real voting power. They said they needed bigger boats to go further afield as the inshore fish stocks had disappeared (over-fished). The government, rather than being brave and telling them to find other work, gave them money so that they could buy bigger boats and achieve this. Its called subsidising. And it happens all over the world, even in the UK. So now other Cod stocks along with other fish species get into trouble. So the cycle begins again, more fishermen, more voting power, bigger demands equates to bigger boats that can fisher further, deeper, wider and catch more. And then said fisherman has kids who decide to join the family business, cyclic degeneration is how it should be termed. What we need it forward thinking people in power who see the long term benefits of not giving in to what is effectively, market forces.
Now, I hear the intelligent among you say "why didn’t the Canadian’s stop catching fish before it was too late. This would allow them to breed and then they would never "go bust" (had to get some poker terminology in there somewhere). Well they were canadians and they didn’t think of that. But did you know us Brits have our own Cod. In the North Sea, the same thing is happening and has been for several years. Scientists realised that if you use a big, big Mesh size in your nets, you allow the immature fish to get through, which will hopefully the mature ones to breed and allow you to take quite a lot of really big fish out of the sea. In fact, if you observe this practice for long enough, the fishermen could be taking out MORE tonnes of fish than ever before as these fish would be really big. Great idea. Let the stocks recover to a good level and only take out the big bastards that are probably going to die of old age soon anyway. Unfortunately the Cod species isn’t hunted selectively. Fishermen complained that now smaller, similar species like haddock (same habitat, depth etc) were now uncatchable as they simply swam through the nets. So a compromise was reached.
And compromise is usually a good answer to a lot of things. But not fishing, deforestation, human population growth, City growth, Global warming or any of the other ways in which humans interact with the earth. Compromise. Fuck compromise. Get someone with a hitlerian (new word?) mentality (minus the genocide, racial shit) in power instead of dumb yanks with guns and lets get this planet back on track..
P.S I went for a piss in the garden yesterday. It made me think that the natural way is almost always infinitely better as:-
you fertilise the soil
reduce the need for sewage works and their energy consumption
get fresh air and feel like a real man marking your territory
If that was in a part manifesto id pledge my allegiance
posted by Alex Martin | 5:48 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home