Refer to:
http://www.sciencenews.org/20030726/bob10.asp
Catch Zero
What can be done as marine ecosystems face a deepening crisis?
Ben Harder
Give a man a fish, goes the Chinese proverb, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. If he catches too many fish, however, he may leave few fish behind for his children's table. It has taken less than a generation for modern industrial-scale fishing, once it's deployed in an ocean area, to exhaust the vast majority of that area's edible bounty. These massive harvests have left behind devastated ecosystems and depleted economic opportunities.
I think we're finally seeing the empirical falsification of the argument presented by Julian L. Simon, and recently updated by Bjorn Lomberg, that industrial economic practices aren't "really " harming the environment. Immortalists, who ideally should be taking a practical, long-term view of the resources situation, probably shouldn't adopt uncritically this kind of short-range apologetics for modern capitalism. Even if you defend capitalist values and practices, you have to take into consideration that they incorporate the assumptions of people who don't expect to be around very long, It's easy to "discount the future" when you won't be around to have to deal with it. Considering that we're living in "the long run" discounted by the people who ran things in earlier decades, it's clear that we've inherited the problems and costs they decided to postpone until after their deaths. Immortalists should rationally try to make better decisions, or we won't last very long ourselves.
Edited by advancedatheist, 28 July 2003 - 03:02 AM.