Posted by speckx 17 hours ago
The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.
soon humanity will be the only footprint that matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Isl...
This is our turn; eg, similarly dinosaurs preying on proto-mammals and our abuses of avians.
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation. The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
“A combination of factors drives blast fishing, including ineffective enforcement and management,” said Hampton-Smith, highlighting how indiscriminate the explosions are, killing all manner of species, regardless of age, size, or intent.
Destroying habitats and the future of fellow fishermen for short-term gain is just selfishness and greed.
Desperation is no excuse.
I’d argue this practice hurts poor fisherman more than helps as coral reefs are important nurseries for fish and reliable sources as well. Blowing them up will rob communities of shallow fishing grounds and future fish
Paternalistic racism might as well be a central tenet of certain political movements — whose entire ideology is that certain humans are not fully equal as thinking moral agents in the world.
The new “scientific racism”.
Developed countries are rich after centuries of extracting natural resources, to the point that Europe is nearly deforested, American rivers in the rust belt used to catch on fire from chemical pollution, and we destroyed a pacific atoll with over 20 nuclear bombs.
A little rich for us to suddenly care about the coral so much that we can lecture developing countries about it. In this case, it doesn’t seem these are the acts of desperate people, but the arrogance of someone who will probably never face hardship beyond “ramen profitability” saying desperation is no excuse is astounding.
I am calling out exactly that sentiment, because it removes the intelligence, agency, and morality from the people you’re discussing by reducing them to animals. You call them lessers and stop holding them to the same standard — and that so many did so here, despite poverty being unrelated, is precisely the evidence their motivation for doing so was racial stereotypes and not facts.
You see the same with, eg, excusing gangland violence as “poverty”, despite areas with much higher poverty (including foreign nations) not experiencing the same anti-social behavior.
If you have money for buying bombs, you have money for a fishing rod to feed your children for the entire year.
There's always someone out there who is going to make the argument.
I’m sure if you told an indigenous tribe you were planning to do this they’d agree that it’s stupid, yet here we are.
[0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...
>Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...
>The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.
you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening
They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.
From the article:
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation.
> The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
None of those things cost a lot of money and the return on investment for just affording a single bomb pays for itself almost immediately.
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
There's basically one solution to bomb fishing: make it economically nonviable. You could ban it an punish the people doing it, which is often the immediate action taken and seems like the path being set up here...
but really any money spent on enforcement may be better spent on setting the bomb fishers up with the tools to make a living doing something else — ironically "teach a man to fish"