Are You Troubled ENOUGH ?

[Icarus]

Originally Posted by seandepagnier

the guardian is not fake news, it is just reporting facts about the world.


Cruising should be a low impact activity so that we can be a beacon of hope for humanity in the future to still have a good time, but instead it is one of the highest impact recreational activities and enjoyed by an over privileged few. It is so bastardized that fees are everywhere in place to exclude all but a rich minority from many destinations and other rights.

Cruisers can sure afford to stop using engines as well as flying places in airplanes, but stubbornly refuse to out of pure selfishness. The end game is near and the cruising world has a huge debt to pay, what will the history books read? It seems most in our community are not morally much different from past slave owners like George Washington who don't want to give up their lifestyle's conveniences to do what is morally right.

I think this post should be posted at Twitter
A bit of a stretch to compare people who travel by boats to privileged slave owners.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by john manning

I have a very low opinion of the Guardian. It is more a propaganda source than a news source.

The article quoted is a good example of how they work. The headline leaves you with the idea that nothing is being done to save a deteriorating environment. The detail, which 90% of people will not read, says progress is being made on 75% of the remediation goals set.

There is a website calling itself the Off-Guardian which devotes much of its time to giving the alternative view to the Guardian's articles and to correcting its errors.

There's nothing new about this approach to headline writing. Rarely is the headline writer the actual story author. They scan the story, pick out the most interesting or (hopefully) relevant piece, and write a catchy short one-liner that rarely consists of more than eight words, usually less. It's the original "click bait," whose intent is to engage readers enough so they're actually read the article.

Story authors often grimace at the headline attached to their story, but in most cases it's not wrong, just lacking nuance. So the main failure is as much with the readers, who are too lazy to read the article, although headlines can always be improved.

As you correctly point out (and as I said early on in this discussion), the story is far from a solely bleak picture. It outlines the areas of failure, along with the areas of success.

[john manning]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

The Guardian has a lean, and they are a little too earnestly anti-Trump, but when it comes to facts and research, they're still one of the better papers.

Off-Guardian - the slew of 9/11 truther articles kind of gives the game away. Nothing to see here...

My comment was not intended to support the Off-Guardian, just to point out that the Guardian's articles, were thought by some, to need continuous correction.

I have been blocked from comments on the Off-Guardian site because they do not like my opinions and corrections to their articles.

[StuM]

Originally Posted by jalmberg

As a full time cruiser who essentially lives outside, I don’t need to read a newspaper to get my facts. I am appalled at the state of the environment. The water is dirty, there are practically no birds left, fish are gone, coral reefs are dead. Anyone who denies these clearly visible facts is simply in denial, or maybe just an armchair sailor , sailing the seas of his fancy.

Guess that depends on where you are.
None of those "facts" are true around here.

[StuM]

So which is it:

Originally Posted by jalmberg

I am appalled at the state of the environment. The water is dirty, there are practically no birds left, fish are gone, coral reefs are dead. Anyone who denies these clearly visible facts is simply in denial

Originally Posted by jalmberg

I
I am constantly amazed at how clean the water is, even near big cities like Montpellier in the south of France, which has been occupied for thousands of years. And in most places, you can just pick your own mussels or other shell fish and not fear for your life.

[john manning]

The theme coming from a large number of comments here is that people are seeing significant changes in the marine environment. I haven't seen change to that extent, but then I live in New Zealand and sail the south west pacific. We do not have the human population density of the northern hemisphere.

My biggest concern about the marine environment is the growing carbon imbalance that is being created by fishing. We take millions of tons of fish from the sea each year. That is millions of tons of carbon. We used to replace some of that with our waste disposal to the sea but that is progressively being stopped. It seems only plastics get back into the sea.

Try doing that on a farm and you would be farming a desert within one or two generations.

When governments take action to fix the marine environment they always choose remediation goals that make the sea good for people. eg Clean clear and bacteria free water. Maybe we should look at creating a marine environment that is good for fish. It might look very different.

[bjp447]

If you can't change it, and are unwilling to do anything about it, get a beer, sit on your boat and don't worry about it. Remember the story about the starfish. 2 friends are walking down the beach, thousands of starfish stranded at low tide. One guy is picking them up and tossing them back in the water, The other guys says" why bother you can help them all" the guy tossing them back says' Yea, but I did help that one". Quit your bitching and go find a starfish to toss back! and can we get back to boating.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by bjp447

...2 friends are walking down the beach, thousands of starfish stranded at low tide. One guy is picking them up and tossing them back in the water, The other guys says" why bother you can help them all" the guy tossing them back says' Yea, but I did help that one".

Good thought. Along the same lines, I was always a bit inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's act of spinning a little bit of cotton every day. His rationale was that if everyone did that, there would be no shortage of cloth.

My own homage to that action is that whenever we are out for a walk, I try to pick up at least one piece of litter. Like Gandhi's, maybe it's just a token act, but again the idea is that if everyone picked up one piece of trash that wasn't theirs, parks would be clean in short order, and people would be more mindful of not littering.

"Be the change you want to see" - M Gandhi.

[Buzzman]

Originally Posted by sanibel sailor

One only needs to make one decision for the rest of your activities (good or bad) to be relatively inconsequential. Don't reproduce. The problem is too many humans, period. ...

I made this decision myself while still a teenager. No woman I hooked up with was ever happy about this, hence why they moved on. ONe, at least, even told me, expressly. She already had one child and wanted another. I didn't. So she left. I subsequently had a child by accident(or, could it have been by subtle eco-ego-undermining...??) and am happy to have done so. But that one son has since produced two grandchildren....so that's three more, on account of me....

But I do deplore the huge families of those in so-called developing nations, where the need to make more babies to address the formerly higher risk of death of juvenules is yet to catch up to the increased health care that (largely) prevents this.

A hundred years ago, even in the 'developed west' a cholera epidemic could wipe out whole families, so people still had large ones. these days, only those with 'right wing conservative religious views' seem to hold to this practice.

Now, even a SARS-CoV-2/19 pandemic is unable to achieve what cholera once did. Although there's an argument for ebola-as-a-modern-cholera in West Africa....

What will nature come up with next....???

The ecosystem has a way of 'balancing' itself, that only we humans are able to mock and (largely) ignore.

I read Garrett Hardin as a teenager. His 'Tragedy of the Commons' had a particular impact on me because my local village was one of the very few that still had an active 'common' that was 'managed' the local people.

It was always overstocked and short on feed and mired in endless bickering about who should or should not remove their animals from the land.

Only gentrification eventually reduced the impact, as farmers abandoned the area and 'weekenders' took over.

As to 'population growth'? Paul Ehrlich (following Robert Malthus) 'Population Bomb' while somewhat accurate in overall terms, failed to predict that increased gentrification, female emancipation and workplace participation would eventually lead to lowering birth rates.

Most developed countries have neutral or in some cases negative 'natural birth rates' and population growth only occurring due to immigration.

Sweden and Australia are both in the latter category, for example.

Frankly, based on this, the BEST thing we could all do for the world (especially the environment) is to speed up development, increase health inputs into devloping countries, and increase the availability of work for women.

When you need two incomes to service a mortgage, there you find the birth rates dropping.

[Mike OReilly]

Once again, population growth is not the problem. There are very few areas of the world where rates are increasing. They've been decreasing for decades. Regardless of which model comes to fruition, we are soon going to level off, and very rapidly go into a steep global population decline. This will happen in the next 30 to 70 years, which is a blink of the planetary eye.

What shows no sign of coming under control is the intensity of resource uses that support so-called developed world lifestyles. This is where the real environmental problems lie.

The problem is not over population. The problem is our ever-expanding need for resources to support us. And as more of the world becomes like us, the problem only gets worse.

[Wotname]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Once again, population growth is not the problem. There are very few areas of the world where rates are increasing. They've been decreasing for decades. Regardless of which model comes to fruition, we are soon going to level off, and very rapidly go into a steep global population decline. This will happen in the next 30 to 70 years, which is a blink of the planetary eye.
........

Maybe or maybe not. This shows growth rate is still positive thru to 2100 so is the 'rapid decline' starting sometime after 2100???
https://www.worldometers.info

Totally agree about the use of resources!

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by bjp447

If you can't change it, and are unwilling to do anything about it, get a beer, sit on your boat and don't worry about it. Remember the story about the starfish. 2 friends are walking down the beach, thousands of starfish stranded at low tide. One guy is picking them up and tossing them back in the water, The other guys says" why bother you can help them all" the guy tossing them back says' Yea, but I did help that one". Quit your bitching and go find a starfish to toss back! and can we get back to boating.

You can't help yourselves can you.

Somewhere in that sand was some sort of crustacean which was going to un-bury itself and come out of it's hiding place and make it's monthly meal and now it's going to starve to death.

You just shouldn't mess with nature.

[Tonali99]

Originally Posted by CaptWho

Has anyone ever noticed how a lot of the great disaster movies begin with the politicians ignoring the scientists? Just sayin'.

What?? Truth in hollywood!
I know, and they should have listened to the kids (Steve McQueen) in the blob too.

[Tonali99]

Originally Posted by ABfish

There's a balance in all of it. Living like a caveman is not something I aspire to.

Since I was born in the early '60's, the following animals have made astounding comebacks in my neck of the woods: deer, turkey, black bear, bald eagles, coyotes. And that's in spite of the fact that North Carolina has tripled in population.

Water quality and air quality are dramatically better than 50 years ago thanks to environmental regulations and better technology.

Growth may not always be progress, but the opposite of growth in an urban setting means declining population, declining ad valorem tax collections, and an eventual erosion of a municipality's ability to maintain it's infrastructure and provide services to its citizens. Take a look at Detroit or Cleveland or Baltimore or any other urban area that's faced population decline.

Those mentioned cities declined due to the loss of jobs. Hence, a loss of revenue.
I'm happy to hear that N.C. is doing well. But can you hunt those same animals where you nused to? Or are they wandering around the suburbs like they do in some towns?
Where I grew up I could take my gun and dogs and go hunting right from the backyard. It turned into a subdivision.
A lot of small towns want to stay that way. Not let a bunch of people come in and screw it it up.
'Member when your parents said they missed the "good old days"?

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Tonali99

A lot of small towns want to stay that way. Not let a bunch of people come in and screw it it up.
'Member when your parents said they missed the "good old days"?

...And I'd like to be 27 again. But with a paid-off house, and a boat.

Nostalgia... it ain't what it used to be...