Bottom Trawling As Seen From Space

It’s just the Rlyehian equivalent of those hummingbirds in the desert. A landing strip for when the Elder Gods return.

How do trails of dredged-up dust prove that bottom-trawling is harmful?

I agree that as of right now, the human species does not deserve long term survival (long term on a planetary timeline.) But I dispute that every generation gets worse and the implication that technology isn’t helping.

On a per capita basis, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we have made decent strides in improving our environmental impact. But we still must do much more to improve and much faster. Technology is what allowed us to visualize the damage of this horrid practice. Hopefully it will help spur change just like the picture of Earth on the way to the moon from Apollo helped jumpstart the environmental movement.

It’s going to take a lot of work to fix this planet.

Emesis: It doesn’t. But it is interesting if you already know what bottom trawling is: scraping clean an entire ecosystem just to get to one product—er, fish. It would be the equivalent of burning down a village to get the floor tile of its residents. It is the kind of thing that is done because it has always been done and is only now being questioned now that the majority of the large fish in the ocean are critically overfished. National Geographic’s website is a good unbiased source for more information. The way we are treating the oceans is so shocking it only continues because we can’t see it happening. So any visual indicator is good.

A couple of points: bottom trawling is no worse than forest clear cutting or burning down rainforests. North America was covered with forests as little as 300 years ago and most of it is now gone. In South America, Africa and Asia the tropical rainforests are slowly disappearing. Humans have burned about 50% of the fossil fuels in the earth. The end result will be a cataclysmic end to the human race when we can no longer sustain the food and energy requirements to feed 6+ billion people. When the humans die off, the non-human plant and animal species will return. It may take a million years or more for the full diversity to manifest itself, but it will happen. The rise of the human race is but a blip in the life cycle of the earth, and though we’ve scorched it pretty well, once we’re gone, nature will continue on quite nicely without us, thank-you.

This is a downright travesty. It should be outlawed outright.

Of course, on the flipside I love ocean fish. I love tuna and salmon. If it is either my diet or the welfare of the world I think I could abstain.