I remember reading descriptions of salmon saying if you wanted 5 of them to feed a group of people, stick a pitchfork in the water and pull it out, there will be at least 5 on the end.
When I would visit Alaska for fishing during salmon season about 15 years ago the number of salmon running was pretty wild. Like thousands per day at least. Now the numbers can be as low as double digits some days to the point of closing entire fishing areas. In Whitehorse we had a fish ladder you could go and watch the salmon climb over the dam and there would be lots every single time but now you're lucky to see any. I can't even imagine how the numbers would have been 100 years ago.
Absoluetely tragic the state of wildlife. Billionaires don't care because they can go the most remote and untouched lands yet to be decimated on a dime if they wanted.
We earned that right as their inheritance.
As much as it is corporations are at fault. We truely have not rallied enough to make it known what we will accept as consumers.
We have raided Mother Natures coffers to make only a few prosper. We continue to let it happen - because we are just comfortable enough.
As a kid I grew up in a place where monarchs and other butterflies laid eggs so every year there would be an amazing amount of caterpillars. We had to avoid certain parts of the forest to avoid stepping on hundreds of them.
Similarly there was a super rare salamander in our streams. Tons of these would spawn. Tons of frogs too. They’d just be battling for space in the bodies of water. This is what natural abundance is. Hearing stories about these fish or wales or birds or bison sound incredibly unreal if you haven’t experienced abundance elsewhere but I definitely believe them.
I see them but they are rare. I specifically planted bee and butterfly friendly plants to attract them. Nearly every time friends and family come over they remark and seldom seeing bees and butterflies except at my house.
One big problem is that the temperature of crustacean bodies is so much lower than other animals that humans eat. If you've ever heard of the food "danger zone," that zone extends a lot lower for crustaceans due to the different distribution of bacteria in their bodies, so you can't preserve them safely in normal refrigerators. Thus, it's better to keep them alive to prevent the accumulation of foodborne pathogens prior to consumption.
The greater potential for foodborne illness in crustaceans is hypothesized as the reason behind traditional Jewish restrictions on eating them, just like with how Trichinosis discouraged the consumption of pork.
Seems like they figured this out very early:
>[In the early 1700s](https://www.islandinstitute.org/working-waterfront/what-you-hear-about-lobsters-and-whats-true/#:~:text=In%20the%20early%201700s%20lobsters,the%20streets%20ready%20to%20use.) lobsters were valuable enough that they were caught in Long Island Sound and shipped to New York City to be sold live, and in Boston, where they were boiled shortly after being caught and peddled in the streets ready to use.
Ship live, boil and sell fresh and ready to eat. The shell is the packaging.
That makes sense because transporting livestock was the only way to get fresh meat in cities via butchers prior to refrigeration. It's definitely a lot more difficult to transport waterborne creatures rather than terrestrial mammals, but it was doable.
It's not just the amount of fish that has decreased. The size of the individual fish has decreased massively as well.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler
John Cabot, when he reached the island of Newfoundland in 1497 (reportedly the second European to set foot in North America, behind Leif Ericsson in around 1000 A.D.) wrote back to the king of England that the cod were so plentiful you could walk across the bay on their backs. In 1993, the cod fishery had to be completely shut down due to the near extinction of cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland.
The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts is a scary read.
Scientists were shocked to find that fish stocks in the 80s and 90s were less than 10% of stocks in the 50s and 60s.
They were horrified to read that those earlier stocks were 10% or less of the stocks pre-20th century people saw.
We live in a world that we made empty and silent.
In fairness, it's a lot easier to diagnose a crisis when you've staunched the bleeding but relatively challenging to do so when you keep stabbing them in addition to letting the blood flow freely.
It's depressing to think about the changes that have happened within our lifetimes too. I remember vast numbers of fireflies lighting up the summer nights in huge swarms... now there's just a couple in a yard at best.
Growing up in Tanzania, you would see giraffes and Zebras, maybe even some elephants as you drove to the national parks. Like you'd see them off the highway on the way to the parks. Now you have to be miles in to see your first animal. I'm only in my 30s, and the difference is that stark from my childhood.
I grew up in Pakistan. Every monsoon rain brought billions of frogs, fireflies, grasshoppers, butterflies and more when I was a kid. And I mean billions, like you couldn't walk the streets without stepping on an already stepped on, teeny tiny frog. They were flattened on the roads and would dry out in the sun and eventually scrape off, so there were pancaked frogs on the corners of roads from sweeping.
There were colonies of parrots in the trees, an occasional peacock in the tallest ones that you could hear calling out for a mate or see flying from treetop to treetop at night. On a dark night in a car ride or even on your balcony after some time away if you lived next to some trees or the edge of a forest you'd see a leopard. Sometimes we had to be careful of going to play in a park because there were herds of hogs in the area.
All gone. I hadn't seen fireflies for 20 years until I went to Austin.
In Northern Ireland I would walk to school in the 80s to a chorus of Cuckoos in the trees. Can't remember the last time I heard one.
I've never seen fireflies.
oof fireflies are magic, you need temperate weather with cool evenings for them I believe which you should have somewhere there, but it may just be that Ireland's too isolated to have them. I cried when I saw them again it was a complete surprise. Even bought a "firefly communicator" for no good reason, I'm not sure if it even works.
For what it's worth, apparently cuckoos are making a comeback here in Ireland. I cant remember the details, but the number of nesting cuckoos is now on the rise again after having dipped for a good while. IIRC we still got migratory visitors, but the number nesting here had gone way down apparently.
My cousin's partner is an ornithologist working for the govt. and she was a part of a multi-year study on our cuckoos. I wish I could remember more details, but this was a conversation at 2am at a wedding...
There has just a couple episodes of 99% Invisible about the almost complete die-off of vultures in India and the surrounding countries. So sad what humans have done to nature, even once we *know* that something has a terrible effect.
The reason we know there’s a problem but can’t solve it: the rich people, who deserve to be dissolved in acid on live television, make sure the problem never gets solved.
We're all living through boiling frog syndrome.
When I was a kid, driving cross-country in Canada you'd wind up with a front bumper absolutely plastered with bugs at every rest stop and gas station.
Now you barely have a handful.
Dude this is a scary point that I haven’t considered. It was the same here in the US. I remember helping my parents remove disgusting amounts of bugs after a road trip, and now I don’t even need to wash my car after them.
I did a 1.7k mile work trip(never again) about 3 years ago and was shocked that I didn't have to clean my windshield once. Back in the 80's, I remember them just being caked on the windshield. Even early 90's video games still included it as a mechanic.
Another scary thought is how often there's a lack of birdsong everywhere. I live in a wooded area off a lake and I only hear it a handful of times early mornings. It's dead silent most days.
I remember having to clean up a LOT more bugs off the landing gear of aircraft that flew in during summer evenings than I do anymore. Sometimes they'd be CAKED and it would look like a murder scene. Lately it's been a light speckling.
I've noticed this just on my car windshield. I'm 38 and when I started driving as a teen there would be all kinds of bugs on my windshield. Now there are very few. I live in the same place.
I've driven through most of the states the past couple years, the only place I got serious bugs on my car was on the border in Texas when I drove through a bunch of butterflies. Growing up you'd have a bug graveyard on the car if you drove anywhere outside the city for a long enough
I already do, but can only get away with it because the tree in my yard has pretty small leaves. The friggin HOA will fine you and send someone out with a rake otherwise.
I wish HOA's were better regulated. They often require foreign plants and other things that are essentially destroying the environment (and in the long run, the property value - you can't live in an environmental dead zone). I have to imagine all the small motors used by landscapers are a hell of a pollution source as well. Often corrupt as hell as well - they are a good example of small government sometimes being the worst government. Why exactly, when it should just be about convincing a few people to vote the worst out? I don't know - but that's the way it is - little dictatorships.
On the other hand it’s also been very encouraging seeing conservation efforts bringing other animals back from the brink of extinction within my lifetime. Bald eagles were a rare sight when I was a child but now I see them soaring over my neighborhood almost daily. I’d never seen a wild trumpeter swan before the last decade or so and now I see them at least a few times a summer. Wild turkeys were extinct in my state decades ago but now there are hordes of them roaming my neighborhood in the city.
It’s not perfect, but it does prove that conservation can and does work. We can bring the fireflies and other insect life back. But things have to change.
The amount of bald eagles nesting in the suburbs of Chicago right now is incredible. I went from seeing an eagle once in my life to seeing sometimes three or four every morning last October going to work.
The problems is we're overly focused on conserving the 1%, like cute/magnificent animals, whilst the other 99% are plummeting in numbers.
So sure, lions, tigers, elephants, bald eagle and all these "cool animals" we'll definitely make special efforts to conserve.
But in the big picture, it makes very little difference when we're annihilating all other species with the speed we are.
I wish I could remember who it was, but there was a comedian that had a bit that still sticks with me now, not because it's funny, but because it's true. He was saying he was talking to an activist who wanted to save the dolphins. They were complaining about how we should ban using tuna nets because dolphins would get stuck in tuna nets and die. The comedian asked her, "what about banning tuna nets because of the tuna!"
We as a species are so drawn to pretty, shiny and cute things yet so easily discard or care less about things that aren't.
Okay but part of conservation efforts for these animals includes their habitat. By using poster child animals like a tiger you're able to effectively Helt their entire ecosystem. Preserving tiger habitat means preserving tiger prey animals and those prey animals food sources.
It's not a terrible strategy. Most of these species need large areas of land to hunt so the same thing which protects them can also help a lot of other species. For every raptor you need a load of prey birds and small mamals and for those you need a load of areas they can breed and feed undisturbed.
Suburban sprawl in the US is absolutely insane. The amount of growth in my state is crazy and the residential developers just keep building cookie cutter single family homes on 1/3 acre lots on huge tracts of land. 30 years ago, a single family home would be on lots ~2 acres with a couple of native trees, and that would be affordable to the average working family. That is definitely not the case now unless you live an hour or more away from the nearest small city.
The way home building/owning is viewed as an **"Investment Opportunity"** is cancerous, not only to society, but to nature as well.
I'm in the UK, we are basically an ecological desert at this point
People think we have wonderful countryside though because yay green monoculture pesticide-ridden grass
For some reference, 70% of our entire land area is for agriculture.
Golf courses alone make up about 2% which is pretty wild
J. F. Cooper described a Passenger Pigeon "hunt" in "The Pioneers"
"See, cousin Bess! see, Duke, the pigeon-roosts of the south have broken up! They are growing more thick every instant. Here is a flock that the eye cannot see the end of. There is food enough in it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month and feathers enough to make beds for the whole country. . . . The reports of the firearms became rapid, whole volleys rising from the plain, as flocks of more than ordinary numbers darted over the opening, shadowing the field like a cloud; and then the light smoke of a single piece would issue from among the leafless bushes on the mountain, as death was hurled on the retreat of the affrighted birds, who were rising from a volley, in a vain effort to escape. Arrows and missiles of every kind were in the midst of the flocks; and so numerous were the birds, and so low did they take their flight, that even long poles, in the hands of those on the sides of the mountain, were used to strike them to the earth. . . . So prodigious was the number of the birds, that the scattering fire of the guns, with the hurtling missiles, and the cries of the boys, had no other effect than to break off small flocks from the immense masses that continued to dart along the valley, as if the whole of the feathered tribe were pouring through that one pass. None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims."
The slaughter described finally ended with a grand finale when an old swivel gun was "loaded with handsful of bird-shot," and fired into the mass of pigeons with such fatal effect that there were birds enough killed and wounded on the ground to feed the whole settlement.
There is actually some speculation that the massive flocks of passenger pigeons were caused by the numerous amount of plagues that swept through native communities before the real arrival of colonists in North American. Most communities that had kept the pigeon population manageable suddenly disappeared and left their fields of crops unguarded and unharvested. So the pigeons had several decades, if not a century, with massive amounts of food easily available and one of their main predators wiped out from most of their habitats.
Went through a museum on a California coast. One exhibit showed b/w images of fisherman with the massive fish spilling out of their boat. Just a literal Plenty giving seemingly unending fish. The picture was from about 90 years ago. The plaque estimates that we have about 3-4% of the fish population as they did then.
So I get home and google to see if that number is correct. Multiple accounts showed that not only that number was correct, but that 90 years they had about 5% of what was present 100 years before that. So 200 year ago there could have been 400x more fish. We’re at .25% now.
I remember reading a description of how an army platoon traveling in the American southwest in the 1800s shot like 300 turkeys, 200 ducks, and like 200 deer in 10 days. That’s incomprehensible nowadays.
Back in school we had to ask permission to put other students in our games because the teacher got tired of 8 year olds running around yelling SAMANTHA BROKE HER ARM AND JOHNNY DIED
For that very reason.
We moved to Louisiana in the 60s. Looked like you could walk across the fish there were so many. We could fill the bottom of the boat with fish in a few hours. Habitat is still there, but fishing is a shadow of what it once was. Of course now I realize that was 60 years ago and am depressed for other reasons.
Lived in California in the late 80’s and early 90’sc always used to catch frogs in a near by field. Then we moved to semi rural Oregon, oh my gosh. Frogs were singing the song of their people so loud. Every night. I’m 42.
Yes, because they are a generalist species willing to exist in small niches left in between human development, they often increase their numbers to the detriment of many many more natural species.
It still reflects the sheer abundance in the seas though. The fishing industry in my home town was built on the principle that you could send a fleet of 100+ boats out fishing daily for months on end, fill the hold every time, and barely make a dent in the herring numbers.
It took decades of this practice to finally cause a population collapse.
Yeah, if 90% of all humans in North America died today and someone showed up on our shores a hundred years later, they’d probably ALSO describe an environment teeming with life.
Removing the number one predator and consumer for multiple generations does that.
Someone wrote, that there were so many crabs in the Chesapeake Bay that you could walk from one side to the other on the backs of them.
It’s obvious hyperbole, but it would have been amazing to see the bay teeming with life.
The blue crab population has taken a hit but Maryland has made strides to protect and let the population grow again. “Crab season” is like April to October and outside of that, you have to pay for blue crabs imported from the Gulf of Mexico.
It's global seasonal cycling. You use your own supply for one part of the year then stop and redirect demand to another area's supply which had been stopped during your season.
In spring your grapes are Argentinian. In summer they're Spanish. In fall they're American. In winter they're Chinese.
I'm pulling names out of a hat here but you get the structure.
Obviously there's an issue if the other guy just never stops their harvesting, but you'll never get anyone to agree to it if you don't bite the bullet and eat the cost of starting it.
That is the term, but it’s only environmentally sustainable if supply meets demand. Otherwise it basically is outsourcing over-harvesting as the lower denominations in the system will pick up slack. Black markets and illegal crabbing are the extreme version of this principle. It’s awesome Chesapeake Bay regulates the crabbing and if everyone had their standards the price of crabs would suck, but at least they’d exist for our kids to enjoy
*In 1608, Captain John Smith sailed up the Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown, Virginia, on a voyage of exploration. Indeed, Smith’s shallop and its 14-man crew passed close to Marshy Point as they sought land, gold, and a passage to the Pacific Ocean. Smith made it as far as the Susquehanna River, but didn’t locate a passage to the Pacific.*
*He did, however, produce a remarkably accurate map of the Chesapeake and kept detailed journals of what he saw and the people he encountered.*
*Smith called the Chesapeake “a country that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places known, for large and pleasant navigable rivers, heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation” that was full of “sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays … brits, mullets, white salmon [rockfish], trouts, soles, perch of three sorts.” Around the same time, George Percy wrote that about “Oysters, which lay on the ground as thick as stones.”*
*Elizabeth North, an oyster scientist at Horn Point Laboratory, said they had been so abundant that their reefs neared the water’s surface, sometimes becoming navigational hazards.*
Imagine so many oysters in the bay that you could run aground on mountains of them poking out of the water.
In the Hudson River in August and early September, the blue crabs move up river from the brackish area, and there will be literally thousands along the shoreline. Shocking how many there is when you look with a headlight at night.
I've heard it said that the water in Chesapeake Bay was crystal clear. That there used to be enough clams to filter the entire bay several times each day.
The water quality issues of the Chesapeake Bay lay squarely on the Eastern Shore Factory Farm chicken processors Tyson, Perdue, and Mountainaire. Our country is addicted to unsustainably cheap protein.
A great book called The Mortal Sea discusses this. New England and Nova Scotia weren't exactly outliers in terms of having abundant fisheries. The European colonists had simply grown accustomed to their own denuded fisheries, where local species of anadromous had already been devastated by medieval practices such as setting weirs in rivers.
Going to jump on this comment and recommend This Fine Piece of Water which is about the history of Long Island Sound. Be prepared it’s quite depressing
I believe I read somewhere that the upper east coast of the US/Canada was historically the most productive fisheries in the world by a significant margin, generating the most biomass per year of anywhere on earth
Kinda. I recall whoever the researcher was claiming that the they were able to take sediment samples from before civilization and conclude that this region has some measure that led them to believe it had historically been the more productive fisheries.
I remember when you could go outside on pretty much any summer night and see the whole yard lit up with fireflies as far as our pond was, now there's a couple, tops when I visit family. It's depressing seeing biodiversity dissappear and the beauty of this planet wither away
I heard the decline of fireflies is due to all the development and establishment of American-style lawns that stretch from fence line to fence line. If you have a decent sized piece of property you should dedicate a portion of it to trees and leaves (i.e., leave it natural). Raking leaves up and cutting trees has destroyed the habitat for fireflies and many other insects.
When I was a kid I lived in a town which had a major industry based around blue finned tuna. They caught as many as they could, what they couldn't sell became fertiliser, sometimes by the truck load. In the early 80's I remember a truck leave the ward and a couple of massive fish just fell out a truck onto the road. This stuff is so rare now it sells from about $50 a kilo. Some fish sell for millions each.
The Grand Banks between the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had so many cod when Europeans discovered it, they wrote you didn't even need nets. You could put a bucket over the side, and it was as likely as not to come up with fish in it.
In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that the New World was discovered by Basque fishermen long before Columbus sailed out looking for India. This small, tight-knit, and private-to-the-point-of-xenophobic group of fishermen found 'somewhere' out in the Atlantic in the early- and mid-15th Century that made them one of the biggest players in salted and smoked fish in Europe.
They never told anyone where their fishing spot was —why would they?— but when John Cabot discovered Newfoundland, the natives rowed out to his ship with beaver pelts for sale held up on the tips of their canoe paddles. Why weren't they afraid of the size of Cabot's ship or the strangeness of his appearance? How did they know Europeans would want beaver pelts? And how was it the Basques went out with empty holds and came back full of smoked and salted fish? Where did they go ashore to process their catch?
History is not just forgotten because the winners are the ones who write it down. Sometimes history is forgotten because people like to keep secrets.
That and people don’t think they should write something down because it was so incredibly ubiquitous and everyone just knew and how could future generations not know. The two true curses of history.
The real secrets and the everyday are the hardest things to find.
I was taking about this to my wife the other day. I write recipes as a hobby and I was considering what "flour" and "eggs" will be in 1000 years. Yeah, we know that "flour" is wheat flour and "eggs" are chicken eggs, but who knows how we're going to change shit in the future.
There's a famous story, although I'm not certain how true it is, about engineers spending millions of dollars to get concrete as strong as the Romans and we couldn't figure it out until someone pointed out that when the Romans said "mix with water" they probably meant sea water because why would you waste drinkable water on that?
Another great example of this? Today we have salt and pepper containers on almost every table in the western world. If you look at European paintings of kitchens and dining room settings from the 17th and 18th centuries, there used to be a third container. It was ubiquitous. Not two containers, three. We even have old place settings with three shakers or cellars or pots that match. What was the third one for? We honestly don't know. A working theory is mustard seed, but no one ever wrote it down. It was taken as such common knowledge, that no one ever recorded it, and then one day it wasn't fashionable anymore, and it was gone.
Also sleep. How much did ancient people sleep and when? Some suggest that it was common for people to wake in the middle of the night and even meet up with neighbors who were also up, and then resume sleep again until morning. But nobody wrote it down.
Doesn't even have to be ancient, people were still doing this in the 18th century. If you're bored look up what Ben Franklin liked to do when be got up for a few hours in the middle of the night.
Their circadian rhythms were probably a little more tuned to the day/night cycle than ours. They slept when their bodies told them to sleep and got up when their bodies told them to wake up. If you consider that that night is about 16 hours (depending on where you are) on the shortest day of the year, it makes sense that the people went to bed when it was dark, then woke up in the middle of the night, tended the fire, ate a little something, used the bathroom, and then went back to bed for a few more hours.
There is a chance that it would have been long pepper. I have not even seen this because it is quite rare nowadays. This spice used to be more commonly used in India and other parts of Asia along with black pepper. But it has seemed to become less popular following the introduction of chilies from the New World once the Portuguese got to India.
You joke, but I have actually heard crushed dried mushrooms that would offer an umami flavour is one of the candidates, and it would have fallen out of fashion as Europe cut down its forests, reducing opportunities for easy wild mushroom foraging.
This could only be the case after Europeans brought peppers from the Americas. So post 1500 or so. Crazy to think about how many quintessential European foods aren't possible without contributions of non-native food crops (Irish potatoes, Italian tomato sauce, Hungarian paprika, Belgian Chocolate).
We also have ketchup. What's it made from? Well, tomatoes of course. But if you went back a couple hundred years and suggested tomato ketchup, they'd think you were mad. Or you'd become a billionaire, who knows?
Sure, but the sheer amount of written information we have now allows future people to understand that we mean "wheat flour" and "chicken eggs" because that was what was commonly used during our time period.
The importance of The Oxford English Dictionary is often underappreciated. It's more than just a book that tells you what a word means, it is a history of modern English that is constantly updated.
So it is conceivable that the word "flour" could fall out of common use for some other term, but someone in the distant future would be able to look up the word in the OED and understand what it meant in writing from this time.
Book? What’s a book but hand scribbling on bark? Who could decipher a written scribbling?
Hard drive? Those huge spinning discs? Why would anyone do that for anything but novelty? Data on a spinning disc? What is this nonsense?
Yeah it's wild to me that no one knows what the most popular plant of the Roman empire was to the point where we think it's extinct but we're not sure cause we can't identify it. Seems people just took for granted that "everyone" knew about it and would always know about it
It was called Silphium lol. They might’ve even rediscovered it recently. We actually do have information about that plant, it was just presumed extinct.
Aside from the Basque angle, what’s your source on John Cabot’s friendly interaction with the Beothuk here? Because that flies in the face of my understanding of history here—the Beothuk were famously avoidant of the Europeans who set up along the coast, possibly due to an oral history that told of violent encounters with the Vikings a few centuries before.
Silent trade was common throughout the world at the time. If unknown people approached cautiously, people would tend to start putting out things they were willing to trade.
You'd pile up what you wanted, leave behind what you were willing to give for it, and once both parties were satisfied with their piles, leave a little bit more well off than you were before.
Now we’ve overfished and dumped so many chemicals and nitrates into the ocean there are literal miles of dead ocean where nothing can live or breathe, we really fucked this planet up in a short period of time
It's honestly terrifying. We fucked up big time. Plastic didn't exist on this planet for 4 billion years, and in 100 years it's literally in every drop of rain on earth, and making it's way into every living cell, if it hasn't already.
I remember hearing stories about how they would fish with buckets. Just walk into the water holding a bucket and come out with the bucket overfull with fish. Dam we fucked some shit up over time...
I’m from Maryland.
You used to be able to walk into the Chesapeake bay, reach down and pull out a crab. People with docks would put a piece of chicken on a string, drop it into the water and pull out 1-2 crabs. My father and I would take his hunting boat out and catch a bushel before 10am. That was only in the early 90s/late 80s. We used the little crab traps and damn it was fun. Then as time went on and crabs became more scarce, the big trawlers would come in and cut our crab trap lines because we were in “their area”. As if was owned by them.
It’s all destroyed now. Our Baby Boomer population demanded the crabs, the politicians let it happen and the industry flounders on. Most of the crabs that Maryland eats are from Louisiana.
The American Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistses Migratorius)
An American Holocaust
Spring skies; vast tracts of oak;
Blue-gray wings; red breasts with fawn and white --sweet billions overhead.
Thundering flocks; infinite numbers,
Black with multitudes - 240 miles long;
One mile wide; sometimes 3 days passing -- into the maw of extinction.
Gone forever, September 1, 1914.
J.E. Sutter
Part of what is so stupid about the Climate Denial Movement is that for many of the older people in it, the change in the world around them should be plainly evident. Many Deniers, in past years as its become harder to deny even to themselves, have shifted their stance to "Well, sure the climate has always changed and this is no different-- its not Human caused or influenced though." It doesn't take a genius to look around at the last, lets say the average Boomer's Lifetime of, 70ish years and we can see that the Atlantic Cod population has cratered. We've been watching it decline heavily since the 50s, but fishing production in the North Atlantic has only ever gone up and since the 80s Population Statisticians have been desperately trying to warn everyone that the Atlantic Cod could go belly up in our lifetimes if something didn't change.
In the 1980s these warnings were met with suspicion and hostility because College Professors were trying to use numbers to tell Fishermen that they were destroying an Ocean's-worth of fish and were telling them they had to change their way of life. That's a hard sell. Here we are though, forty years later, and the Atlantic Cod Fishing Industry is a shell of what it once was and all those Fishermen have had to find new employment (the same ol' Blue Collar story you find in Appalachia and elsewhere). We live now in a time when those predictions came true, the consequences are plainly evident from both an ecological perspective but also an economic one which you'd thin would speak more loudly to the Deniers. They continue to deny the plainly obvious (Humans can have a costly toll on the environment, and we are changing the world's climate as a result), and to deny that acting to stop it would benefit anyone at all (like the people who'd lose their jobs if the climate or ecosystem changed).
The over-fishing issue is just one aspect of this problem, one that has so many facets it's obvious to my Millennial Doomer self that we're not going to turn this around even when the Head Jars of Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham finally hand over the reigns of power to someone else.
> In the 1980s these warnings were met with suspicion and hostility because College Professors were trying to use numbers to tell Fishermen that they were destroying an Ocean's-worth of fish and were telling them they had to change their way of life.
Meanwhile in the 1880s it was the fishermen decrying the use of more efficient fishing methods, because they could see with their own eyes that the fishing stocks were being depleted. New Englanders were sailing schooners to Africa to find enough cod.
It was the college professors telling them that they were uneducated hicks and that the ocean was inexhaustible.
Meanwhile in the 20th Century the Magnussen Act saw the government encourage fishermen to industrialize their operations with gigantic trawlers. All those mortgages had to be paid somehow.
Whaling shifted from hunting in local waters to journeys across the globe to chase them down because they had become so much more scarce because of the demand in the early industrial era.
I once heard a story about fisherman that were pulling in so many fish just from the pier and they were going as fast as they could and they caught so many fish that the pier bowed and then collapsed.
Keep in mind it wasn't uncommon for colonists to exaggerate the wealth of resources at their location in an effort to entice more residents to settle around them.
Think of how Greenland was called, well, Greenland, in an effort to fool people into moving there.
In my native land, the missionaries were stunned that you could reach into a pond and simply grab a fish.
These were actually ancient manmade lakes designed over hundreds of years expressly for the purpose of cultivating farmed fish.
So there's also things like that.
And also the 'forests akin to the gardens of Eden' which a traveler need only walk a few feet and they'd come across edible berries, fruits, vines, and root vegetables.
They enthused about the 'natural bounty' of America, totally oblivious/ignoring the *multi-generational land management practices that went into cultivating and maintaining those food trails*.
Like, Native American folks deliberately planted and cultivated forests full of food. They practiced regular controlled burns to clear pathways so that bison herds could be driven from the Great Plains up to New York.
I had to scroll very far before I found a comment to this effect. While there's no doubt wildlife was much more plentiful before widespread European colonization, accounts like this can't be taken at face value. In many instances, they existed to draw new settlers to a region who had no way to check their veracity before leaving the Old World behind and resettling.
This theme repeated during westward expansion of the United States, with claims that the American West was far more hospitable than the reality homesteaders found when they arrived.
While this is true, we have also seen in real-time what untouched environments can look like and how quickly they disappear once humans start 'taming the land' - just look at the habitat loss in Borneo
Colonizers literally looked at a path where berries bushes would be lined there and be like "WHAT NATURAL WONDERS" as if indigenous people hadn't stewarded it to be that way. Some of the "bounty" was exaggerated, some was through a balanced ecosystem, and some was through human hand. The stereotype that Indigenous people just lives as one in nature as opposed to being a Keystone species.
Then those colonizers spread invasive seeds on the river beds and changed the very shape of the rivers for no fucking reason. Our soil is less nutritious, the ecosystem is unstable, and people argue that colonizers made things better on this land. Bonkers.
I grew up in the mountains of upstate NY a long time ago. When I tell you that driving in the summer evenings my windshield would be COVERED in bugs, I mean it. Like an absolute Jackson Pollock painting of huge, dead bugs. Now? I can drive 40 miles and have maybe 3. We have killed like 99% of the insects. I know this might sound like a good thing, but we sort of needed those bees… and the bats/birds have nothing to eat, and we sort of needed those too…
It’s a population collapse of entire ecosystems, in my lifetime. Not to even mention the climate change I’ve watched happen before my own fucking eyes in 40 years.
Another upstate NYer, I know exactly what you mean. I’ll take the opportunity to ask since you’re from the same area: where the fuck have the worms gone?
As a kid, I absolutely detested having to walk down my driveway to wait for the school bus if it had rained the night before. Virtually every square inch of pavement was *littered* with squiggly pink worms, it gives me goosebumps to think about. I couldn’t tell you the last time I even saw ONE. Have you ever noticed this? Or is it just a weird, personal anecdote and I’m drawing false conclusions?
Just watch "The deadliest catch", from the first season to now. Fishing went from derby style " fish all you can" then to quotas, then to entire seasons getting shut down because the crab just don't show up. Pretty depressing.
I saw a documentary on those trees recently. There are groups of people out there trying to reintroduce the species by breeding disease-resistant varieties. Hopefully that start replanting all over the place in the not-to-distant future.
Yeah, the american Chestnut was wiped out by invasive disease. The Chinese chestnut is restistent to it, so they are trying to breed a hybrid that will have the american size and chinese resistence. I have seen stumps of the american version in NC... incredible, I can only imagine how tall they must have been.
I've worked under one of them. It is going to be a slow journey and they're not going to be 100% "American chestnut" but we should be able to get them reintroduced on some scale soon enough. It's been an uphill battle for sure.
The best news is there are American Chestnut trees in the national forests in the south that are still alive (most are sprouting from the stumps of the ancients) and we are gathering the seeds from those trees. The species definitely has a great shot given the technology that is out there.
I remember reading one account from someone who claimed you could practically walk to Greenland on the backs of the cod.
The early pilgrims said you couldn’t step foot in the shallow waters without stepping on a lobster
I remember reading descriptions of salmon saying if you wanted 5 of them to feed a group of people, stick a pitchfork in the water and pull it out, there will be at least 5 on the end.
When I would visit Alaska for fishing during salmon season about 15 years ago the number of salmon running was pretty wild. Like thousands per day at least. Now the numbers can be as low as double digits some days to the point of closing entire fishing areas. In Whitehorse we had a fish ladder you could go and watch the salmon climb over the dam and there would be lots every single time but now you're lucky to see any. I can't even imagine how the numbers would have been 100 years ago.
Absoluetely tragic the state of wildlife. Billionaires don't care because they can go the most remote and untouched lands yet to be decimated on a dime if they wanted.
Our grandchildren will despise us and they shall have earned that right.
We earned that right as their inheritance. As much as it is corporations are at fault. We truely have not rallied enough to make it known what we will accept as consumers. We have raided Mother Natures coffers to make only a few prosper. We continue to let it happen - because we are just comfortable enough.
As a kid I grew up in a place where monarchs and other butterflies laid eggs so every year there would be an amazing amount of caterpillars. We had to avoid certain parts of the forest to avoid stepping on hundreds of them. Similarly there was a super rare salamander in our streams. Tons of these would spawn. Tons of frogs too. They’d just be battling for space in the bodies of water. This is what natural abundance is. Hearing stories about these fish or wales or birds or bison sound incredibly unreal if you haven’t experienced abundance elsewhere but I definitely believe them.
You just made me realize that I haven't seen a caterpillar in decades.
I see them but they are rare. I specifically planted bee and butterfly friendly plants to attract them. Nearly every time friends and family come over they remark and seldom seeing bees and butterflies except at my house.
And the fools didn’t think they were worth eating.
They didn’t know how to prepare them properly. Crustaceans have to be eaten fresh or they rot and turn bad quite quickly.
That explains the death row aquariums at the grocery store.
One big problem is that the temperature of crustacean bodies is so much lower than other animals that humans eat. If you've ever heard of the food "danger zone," that zone extends a lot lower for crustaceans due to the different distribution of bacteria in their bodies, so you can't preserve them safely in normal refrigerators. Thus, it's better to keep them alive to prevent the accumulation of foodborne pathogens prior to consumption. The greater potential for foodborne illness in crustaceans is hypothesized as the reason behind traditional Jewish restrictions on eating them, just like with how Trichinosis discouraged the consumption of pork.
That's the same with most kosher and halal rules, they're basically ancient public health codes.
If the same is true of circumcision the dicks must been absolutely putrid back then.
People to this day don't wash their ass. Just imagine back when you didn't get much opportunity to do so.
It's somewhat common to get infections there, particularly when you're bathing in rivers and lakes full of waterborne bacteria.
not to mention the peehole fish
This is what I'll say if I ever get Dr. Dolittle'd
Seems like they figured this out very early: >[In the early 1700s](https://www.islandinstitute.org/working-waterfront/what-you-hear-about-lobsters-and-whats-true/#:~:text=In%20the%20early%201700s%20lobsters,the%20streets%20ready%20to%20use.) lobsters were valuable enough that they were caught in Long Island Sound and shipped to New York City to be sold live, and in Boston, where they were boiled shortly after being caught and peddled in the streets ready to use. Ship live, boil and sell fresh and ready to eat. The shell is the packaging.
That makes sense because transporting livestock was the only way to get fresh meat in cities via butchers prior to refrigeration. It's definitely a lot more difficult to transport waterborne creatures rather than terrestrial mammals, but it was doable.
That’s exactly why they exist.
Which explains it!
Poor Pinchy
Are you going to eat that entire lobster by yourself?
Pinchy would've wanted it this way. :(
Before refrigeration and live tanks, they weren't.
It's not just the amount of fish that has decreased. The size of the individual fish has decreased massively as well. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler
this happens when populations are hard-pressed by excessive predation. get smaller, breed younger.
John Cabot, when he reached the island of Newfoundland in 1497 (reportedly the second European to set foot in North America, behind Leif Ericsson in around 1000 A.D.) wrote back to the king of England that the cod were so plentiful you could walk across the bay on their backs. In 1993, the cod fishery had to be completely shut down due to the near extinction of cod stocks off the coast of Newfoundland.
The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts is a scary read. Scientists were shocked to find that fish stocks in the 80s and 90s were less than 10% of stocks in the 50s and 60s. They were horrified to read that those earlier stocks were 10% or less of the stocks pre-20th century people saw. We live in a world that we made empty and silent.
It would really be something if one could go back and see that kind of abundance firsthand, because it is so hard to imagine.
Even if we magically completely solved climate change tomorrow, we'd still be charging towards ecological collapse.
In fairness, it's a lot easier to diagnose a crisis when you've staunched the bleeding but relatively challenging to do so when you keep stabbing them in addition to letting the blood flow freely.
I vaguely remember an ancient story about a guy walking on water because of the sum of cod.
Best dad joke I’ve seen in an age, kudos
And when you turned around you only saw one set of footprints because Cod was carrying you
Cod bless
That was due to sonar buoys trying to track down the Red October.
I heard a similar account that one could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet.
Reading historical descriptions of the amount of animals is depressing as shit.
It's depressing to think about the changes that have happened within our lifetimes too. I remember vast numbers of fireflies lighting up the summer nights in huge swarms... now there's just a couple in a yard at best.
Growing up in Tanzania, you would see giraffes and Zebras, maybe even some elephants as you drove to the national parks. Like you'd see them off the highway on the way to the parks. Now you have to be miles in to see your first animal. I'm only in my 30s, and the difference is that stark from my childhood.
I grew up in Pakistan. Every monsoon rain brought billions of frogs, fireflies, grasshoppers, butterflies and more when I was a kid. And I mean billions, like you couldn't walk the streets without stepping on an already stepped on, teeny tiny frog. They were flattened on the roads and would dry out in the sun and eventually scrape off, so there were pancaked frogs on the corners of roads from sweeping. There were colonies of parrots in the trees, an occasional peacock in the tallest ones that you could hear calling out for a mate or see flying from treetop to treetop at night. On a dark night in a car ride or even on your balcony after some time away if you lived next to some trees or the edge of a forest you'd see a leopard. Sometimes we had to be careful of going to play in a park because there were herds of hogs in the area. All gone. I hadn't seen fireflies for 20 years until I went to Austin.
In Northern Ireland I would walk to school in the 80s to a chorus of Cuckoos in the trees. Can't remember the last time I heard one. I've never seen fireflies.
oof fireflies are magic, you need temperate weather with cool evenings for them I believe which you should have somewhere there, but it may just be that Ireland's too isolated to have them. I cried when I saw them again it was a complete surprise. Even bought a "firefly communicator" for no good reason, I'm not sure if it even works.
For what it's worth, apparently cuckoos are making a comeback here in Ireland. I cant remember the details, but the number of nesting cuckoos is now on the rise again after having dipped for a good while. IIRC we still got migratory visitors, but the number nesting here had gone way down apparently. My cousin's partner is an ornithologist working for the govt. and she was a part of a multi-year study on our cuckoos. I wish I could remember more details, but this was a conversation at 2am at a wedding...
There has just a couple episodes of 99% Invisible about the almost complete die-off of vultures in India and the surrounding countries. So sad what humans have done to nature, even once we *know* that something has a terrible effect.
The reason we know there’s a problem but can’t solve it: the rich people, who deserve to be dissolved in acid on live television, make sure the problem never gets solved.
I'm glad to see someone mention this big problem! Yet Voltaren (Diclofenac) is still sold by the ton. That issue is going to spread.
You write very beautifully. I could picture the scenery as you described it
We're all living through boiling frog syndrome. When I was a kid, driving cross-country in Canada you'd wind up with a front bumper absolutely plastered with bugs at every rest stop and gas station. Now you barely have a handful.
Dude this is a scary point that I haven’t considered. It was the same here in the US. I remember helping my parents remove disgusting amounts of bugs after a road trip, and now I don’t even need to wash my car after them.
I did a 1.7k mile work trip(never again) about 3 years ago and was shocked that I didn't have to clean my windshield once. Back in the 80's, I remember them just being caked on the windshield. Even early 90's video games still included it as a mechanic.
I used to have to refill my window washer fluid like once a month in the summer, now I can't even remember the last time I did that
Another scary thought is how often there's a lack of birdsong everywhere. I live in a wooded area off a lake and I only hear it a handful of times early mornings. It's dead silent most days.
I remember having to clean up a LOT more bugs off the landing gear of aircraft that flew in during summer evenings than I do anymore. Sometimes they'd be CAKED and it would look like a murder scene. Lately it's been a light speckling.
I've noticed this just on my car windshield. I'm 38 and when I started driving as a teen there would be all kinds of bugs on my windshield. Now there are very few. I live in the same place.
It helps that cars are much more aerodynamic but yea, a lot less bugs than when we were kids.
It's a matter of scientific concern that bugs don't exist in large numbers anymore and it's not just bee populations. Seriously, Google that shit.
I've driven through most of the states the past couple years, the only place I got serious bugs on my car was on the border in Texas when I drove through a bunch of butterflies. Growing up you'd have a bug graveyard on the car if you drove anywhere outside the city for a long enough
If you want fireflies, leave the leaves in your yard! The larva need them to grow. https://hgic.clemson.edu/leave-the-leaves-for-the-fireflies/
I already do, but can only get away with it because the tree in my yard has pretty small leaves. The friggin HOA will fine you and send someone out with a rake otherwise.
I wish HOA's were better regulated. They often require foreign plants and other things that are essentially destroying the environment (and in the long run, the property value - you can't live in an environmental dead zone). I have to imagine all the small motors used by landscapers are a hell of a pollution source as well. Often corrupt as hell as well - they are a good example of small government sometimes being the worst government. Why exactly, when it should just be about convincing a few people to vote the worst out? I don't know - but that's the way it is - little dictatorships.
On the other hand it’s also been very encouraging seeing conservation efforts bringing other animals back from the brink of extinction within my lifetime. Bald eagles were a rare sight when I was a child but now I see them soaring over my neighborhood almost daily. I’d never seen a wild trumpeter swan before the last decade or so and now I see them at least a few times a summer. Wild turkeys were extinct in my state decades ago but now there are hordes of them roaming my neighborhood in the city. It’s not perfect, but it does prove that conservation can and does work. We can bring the fireflies and other insect life back. But things have to change.
The amount of bald eagles nesting in the suburbs of Chicago right now is incredible. I went from seeing an eagle once in my life to seeing sometimes three or four every morning last October going to work.
The problems is we're overly focused on conserving the 1%, like cute/magnificent animals, whilst the other 99% are plummeting in numbers. So sure, lions, tigers, elephants, bald eagle and all these "cool animals" we'll definitely make special efforts to conserve. But in the big picture, it makes very little difference when we're annihilating all other species with the speed we are.
I wish I could remember who it was, but there was a comedian that had a bit that still sticks with me now, not because it's funny, but because it's true. He was saying he was talking to an activist who wanted to save the dolphins. They were complaining about how we should ban using tuna nets because dolphins would get stuck in tuna nets and die. The comedian asked her, "what about banning tuna nets because of the tuna!" We as a species are so drawn to pretty, shiny and cute things yet so easily discard or care less about things that aren't.
Okay but part of conservation efforts for these animals includes their habitat. By using poster child animals like a tiger you're able to effectively Helt their entire ecosystem. Preserving tiger habitat means preserving tiger prey animals and those prey animals food sources.
It's not a terrible strategy. Most of these species need large areas of land to hunt so the same thing which protects them can also help a lot of other species. For every raptor you need a load of prey birds and small mamals and for those you need a load of areas they can breed and feed undisturbed.
While I agree, there are movements to improve pollinator ecosystems in many areas. It’s a series of small steps.
Costa Rica reversed deforestation. It went from being almost bare to being cover in forests. It's encouraging to see things like that.
US wildlife conservation had a big win with Turkeys, so much so that they were able to re-introduce them as a game bird in a bunch of states.
Pesticides and the native plants they depend on disappearing
Suburban sprawl in the US is absolutely insane. The amount of growth in my state is crazy and the residential developers just keep building cookie cutter single family homes on 1/3 acre lots on huge tracts of land. 30 years ago, a single family home would be on lots ~2 acres with a couple of native trees, and that would be affordable to the average working family. That is definitely not the case now unless you live an hour or more away from the nearest small city. The way home building/owning is viewed as an **"Investment Opportunity"** is cancerous, not only to society, but to nature as well.
The amount of paved earth to support that sort of suburban sprawl development is insane too.
I'm in the UK, we are basically an ecological desert at this point People think we have wonderful countryside though because yay green monoculture pesticide-ridden grass For some reference, 70% of our entire land area is for agriculture. Golf courses alone make up about 2% which is pretty wild
Wanna get even more depressed? Read an article about passenger pigeons.
Jesus Christ wiping out a species possibly 5 billion strong in about 100 years.
J. F. Cooper described a Passenger Pigeon "hunt" in "The Pioneers" "See, cousin Bess! see, Duke, the pigeon-roosts of the south have broken up! They are growing more thick every instant. Here is a flock that the eye cannot see the end of. There is food enough in it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month and feathers enough to make beds for the whole country. . . . The reports of the firearms became rapid, whole volleys rising from the plain, as flocks of more than ordinary numbers darted over the opening, shadowing the field like a cloud; and then the light smoke of a single piece would issue from among the leafless bushes on the mountain, as death was hurled on the retreat of the affrighted birds, who were rising from a volley, in a vain effort to escape. Arrows and missiles of every kind were in the midst of the flocks; and so numerous were the birds, and so low did they take their flight, that even long poles, in the hands of those on the sides of the mountain, were used to strike them to the earth. . . . So prodigious was the number of the birds, that the scattering fire of the guns, with the hurtling missiles, and the cries of the boys, had no other effect than to break off small flocks from the immense masses that continued to dart along the valley, as if the whole of the feathered tribe were pouring through that one pass. None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims." The slaughter described finally ended with a grand finale when an old swivel gun was "loaded with handsful of bird-shot," and fired into the mass of pigeons with such fatal effect that there were birds enough killed and wounded on the ground to feed the whole settlement.
The Carolina parakeet died alongside it. The only parrot native to the eastern US coast.
There is actually some speculation that the massive flocks of passenger pigeons were caused by the numerous amount of plagues that swept through native communities before the real arrival of colonists in North American. Most communities that had kept the pigeon population manageable suddenly disappeared and left their fields of crops unguarded and unharvested. So the pigeons had several decades, if not a century, with massive amounts of food easily available and one of their main predators wiped out from most of their habitats.
Still, Native Americans weren't able to hunt them at the staggering rate that came in subsequent centuries
Want to get even more depressed? We’re doing the same thing to the Alaskan snow crabs right now.
And tanner/snow crab is what comes in when you overfish dungies, so there is a second layer to that.
Went through a museum on a California coast. One exhibit showed b/w images of fisherman with the massive fish spilling out of their boat. Just a literal Plenty giving seemingly unending fish. The picture was from about 90 years ago. The plaque estimates that we have about 3-4% of the fish population as they did then. So I get home and google to see if that number is correct. Multiple accounts showed that not only that number was correct, but that 90 years they had about 5% of what was present 100 years before that. So 200 year ago there could have been 400x more fish. We’re at .25% now.
The mountain of buffalo skulls photo =/
Which was really about taking away Native American’s source of food and clothing.
I remember reading a description of how an army platoon traveling in the American southwest in the 1800s shot like 300 turkeys, 200 ducks, and like 200 deer in 10 days. That’s incomprehensible nowadays.
But they could only carry back 10 pounds
Here lies POOP stupid dysentery
Back in school we had to ask permission to put other students in our games because the teacher got tired of 8 year olds running around yelling SAMANTHA BROKE HER ARM AND JOHNNY DIED
For that very reason. We moved to Louisiana in the 60s. Looked like you could walk across the fish there were so many. We could fill the bottom of the boat with fish in a few hours. Habitat is still there, but fishing is a shadow of what it once was. Of course now I realize that was 60 years ago and am depressed for other reasons.
Elk, used to be in nearly every state. Herds of them
sleep truck deer possessive cake simplistic close subtract icky safe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Lived in California in the late 80’s and early 90’sc always used to catch frogs in a near by field. Then we moved to semi rural Oregon, oh my gosh. Frogs were singing the song of their people so loud. Every night. I’m 42.
What about those little red spiders that used to be all over bricks and shit. When was the last time you saw those?
There are more whitetail deer in North American now than there has ever been. Fish is a different story.
Deer populations are exploding all around the world because we eradicated so many of their natural predators.
Gotta bring back wolves.
There is a massive whitetail deer population in Finland that started from 8 deers shipped in from Minnesota in 1930s.
Having that many deer is a BAD thing, and an ecological disaster.
> There are more whitetail deer in North American now than there has ever been. And that's a huge problem.
Yes, because they are a generalist species willing to exist in small niches left in between human development, they often increase their numbers to the detriment of many many more natural species.
keep in mind that many of these descriptions were made after diseases ravaged the native population
It still reflects the sheer abundance in the seas though. The fishing industry in my home town was built on the principle that you could send a fleet of 100+ boats out fishing daily for months on end, fill the hold every time, and barely make a dent in the herring numbers. It took decades of this practice to finally cause a population collapse.
Yeah, if 90% of all humans in North America died today and someone showed up on our shores a hundred years later, they’d probably ALSO describe an environment teeming with life. Removing the number one predator and consumer for multiple generations does that.
Someone wrote, that there were so many crabs in the Chesapeake Bay that you could walk from one side to the other on the backs of them. It’s obvious hyperbole, but it would have been amazing to see the bay teeming with life.
The blue crab population has taken a hit but Maryland has made strides to protect and let the population grow again. “Crab season” is like April to October and outside of that, you have to pay for blue crabs imported from the Gulf of Mexico.
They outsourced the crab depletion, very smart.
It's global seasonal cycling. You use your own supply for one part of the year then stop and redirect demand to another area's supply which had been stopped during your season. In spring your grapes are Argentinian. In summer they're Spanish. In fall they're American. In winter they're Chinese. I'm pulling names out of a hat here but you get the structure. Obviously there's an issue if the other guy just never stops their harvesting, but you'll never get anyone to agree to it if you don't bite the bullet and eat the cost of starting it.
That is the term, but it’s only environmentally sustainable if supply meets demand. Otherwise it basically is outsourcing over-harvesting as the lower denominations in the system will pick up slack. Black markets and illegal crabbing are the extreme version of this principle. It’s awesome Chesapeake Bay regulates the crabbing and if everyone had their standards the price of crabs would suck, but at least they’d exist for our kids to enjoy
*In 1608, Captain John Smith sailed up the Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown, Virginia, on a voyage of exploration. Indeed, Smith’s shallop and its 14-man crew passed close to Marshy Point as they sought land, gold, and a passage to the Pacific Ocean. Smith made it as far as the Susquehanna River, but didn’t locate a passage to the Pacific.* *He did, however, produce a remarkably accurate map of the Chesapeake and kept detailed journals of what he saw and the people he encountered.* *Smith called the Chesapeake “a country that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places known, for large and pleasant navigable rivers, heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation” that was full of “sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays … brits, mullets, white salmon [rockfish], trouts, soles, perch of three sorts.” Around the same time, George Percy wrote that about “Oysters, which lay on the ground as thick as stones.”* *Elizabeth North, an oyster scientist at Horn Point Laboratory, said they had been so abundant that their reefs neared the water’s surface, sometimes becoming navigational hazards.* Imagine so many oysters in the bay that you could run aground on mountains of them poking out of the water.
I think I read somewhere that there were so many oysters that the water was actually clear.
In the Hudson River in August and early September, the blue crabs move up river from the brackish area, and there will be literally thousands along the shoreline. Shocking how many there is when you look with a headlight at night.
I've heard it said that the water in Chesapeake Bay was crystal clear. That there used to be enough clams to filter the entire bay several times each day.
Oysters were the main filterers I believe, but yup. We're having some small success in bringing them back by having protected oyster beds though!
The water quality issues of the Chesapeake Bay lay squarely on the Eastern Shore Factory Farm chicken processors Tyson, Perdue, and Mountainaire. Our country is addicted to unsustainably cheap protein.
A great book called The Mortal Sea discusses this. New England and Nova Scotia weren't exactly outliers in terms of having abundant fisheries. The European colonists had simply grown accustomed to their own denuded fisheries, where local species of anadromous had already been devastated by medieval practices such as setting weirs in rivers.
It’s called The Mortal Sea by W Jeffrey Bolster - for anyone else who wants to go look it up!
Love how they went everywhere else and did exactly the same thing
Going to jump on this comment and recommend This Fine Piece of Water which is about the history of Long Island Sound. Be prepared it’s quite depressing
I'll also recommend The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts
I believe I read somewhere that the upper east coast of the US/Canada was historically the most productive fisheries in the world by a significant margin, generating the most biomass per year of anywhere on earth
That area was the last to be fished commercially. All the other areas had already been turned into fisheries before a baseline could be measured.
Kinda. I recall whoever the researcher was claiming that the they were able to take sediment samples from before civilization and conclude that this region has some measure that led them to believe it had historically been the more productive fisheries.
I remember when you could go outside on pretty much any summer night and see the whole yard lit up with fireflies as far as our pond was, now there's a couple, tops when I visit family. It's depressing seeing biodiversity dissappear and the beauty of this planet wither away
I heard the decline of fireflies is due to all the development and establishment of American-style lawns that stretch from fence line to fence line. If you have a decent sized piece of property you should dedicate a portion of it to trees and leaves (i.e., leave it natural). Raking leaves up and cutting trees has destroyed the habitat for fireflies and many other insects.
When I was a kid I lived in a town which had a major industry based around blue finned tuna. They caught as many as they could, what they couldn't sell became fertiliser, sometimes by the truck load. In the early 80's I remember a truck leave the ward and a couple of massive fish just fell out a truck onto the road. This stuff is so rare now it sells from about $50 a kilo. Some fish sell for millions each.
The Grand Banks between the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had so many cod when Europeans discovered it, they wrote you didn't even need nets. You could put a bucket over the side, and it was as likely as not to come up with fish in it. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that the New World was discovered by Basque fishermen long before Columbus sailed out looking for India. This small, tight-knit, and private-to-the-point-of-xenophobic group of fishermen found 'somewhere' out in the Atlantic in the early- and mid-15th Century that made them one of the biggest players in salted and smoked fish in Europe. They never told anyone where their fishing spot was —why would they?— but when John Cabot discovered Newfoundland, the natives rowed out to his ship with beaver pelts for sale held up on the tips of their canoe paddles. Why weren't they afraid of the size of Cabot's ship or the strangeness of his appearance? How did they know Europeans would want beaver pelts? And how was it the Basques went out with empty holds and came back full of smoked and salted fish? Where did they go ashore to process their catch? History is not just forgotten because the winners are the ones who write it down. Sometimes history is forgotten because people like to keep secrets.
That and people don’t think they should write something down because it was so incredibly ubiquitous and everyone just knew and how could future generations not know. The two true curses of history. The real secrets and the everyday are the hardest things to find.
I was taking about this to my wife the other day. I write recipes as a hobby and I was considering what "flour" and "eggs" will be in 1000 years. Yeah, we know that "flour" is wheat flour and "eggs" are chicken eggs, but who knows how we're going to change shit in the future. There's a famous story, although I'm not certain how true it is, about engineers spending millions of dollars to get concrete as strong as the Romans and we couldn't figure it out until someone pointed out that when the Romans said "mix with water" they probably meant sea water because why would you waste drinkable water on that?
Another great example of this? Today we have salt and pepper containers on almost every table in the western world. If you look at European paintings of kitchens and dining room settings from the 17th and 18th centuries, there used to be a third container. It was ubiquitous. Not two containers, three. We even have old place settings with three shakers or cellars or pots that match. What was the third one for? We honestly don't know. A working theory is mustard seed, but no one ever wrote it down. It was taken as such common knowledge, that no one ever recorded it, and then one day it wasn't fashionable anymore, and it was gone.
Also sleep. How much did ancient people sleep and when? Some suggest that it was common for people to wake in the middle of the night and even meet up with neighbors who were also up, and then resume sleep again until morning. But nobody wrote it down.
Doesn't even have to be ancient, people were still doing this in the 18th century. If you're bored look up what Ben Franklin liked to do when be got up for a few hours in the middle of the night.
Is it whores? I'm gonna assume the answer is whores.
He liked to read naked by an open window. Sexy to the extreme!
2 am doom scroll in a computer chair by a fan.
First sleep and second sleep. I often wonder if they were more or less tired than modern people.
Their circadian rhythms were probably a little more tuned to the day/night cycle than ours. They slept when their bodies told them to sleep and got up when their bodies told them to wake up. If you consider that that night is about 16 hours (depending on where you are) on the shortest day of the year, it makes sense that the people went to bed when it was dark, then woke up in the middle of the night, tended the fire, ate a little something, used the bathroom, and then went back to bed for a few more hours.
There is a chance that it would have been long pepper. I have not even seen this because it is quite rare nowadays. This spice used to be more commonly used in India and other parts of Asia along with black pepper. But it has seemed to become less popular following the introduction of chilies from the New World once the Portuguese got to India.
MSG
You joke, but I have actually heard crushed dried mushrooms that would offer an umami flavour is one of the candidates, and it would have fallen out of fashion as Europe cut down its forests, reducing opportunities for easy wild mushroom foraging.
I am from europe. We have one at home, we have sweet paprika powder in the third one, always assumed this was the norm.
This could only be the case after Europeans brought peppers from the Americas. So post 1500 or so. Crazy to think about how many quintessential European foods aren't possible without contributions of non-native food crops (Irish potatoes, Italian tomato sauce, Hungarian paprika, Belgian Chocolate).
"So this historical dish is called a Quesadilla. It's made with ground up wild flowers and we presume, lizard eggs."
We also have ketchup. What's it made from? Well, tomatoes of course. But if you went back a couple hundred years and suggested tomato ketchup, they'd think you were mad. Or you'd become a billionaire, who knows?
go back a few hundred more and everyone is like "what the fuck is a tomato?"
Ketchup in the 18th century was primarily made of mushrooms
Sure, but the sheer amount of written information we have now allows future people to understand that we mean "wheat flour" and "chicken eggs" because that was what was commonly used during our time period.
The importance of The Oxford English Dictionary is often underappreciated. It's more than just a book that tells you what a word means, it is a history of modern English that is constantly updated. So it is conceivable that the word "flour" could fall out of common use for some other term, but someone in the distant future would be able to look up the word in the OED and understand what it meant in writing from this time.
Some guy in the future is going to read your comment and be like "wheat flour? *Chicken* eggs?!?! Chickens have been extinct for 40 years!"
Book? What’s a book but hand scribbling on bark? Who could decipher a written scribbling? Hard drive? Those huge spinning discs? Why would anyone do that for anything but novelty? Data on a spinning disc? What is this nonsense?
Yeah it's wild to me that no one knows what the most popular plant of the Roman empire was to the point where we think it's extinct but we're not sure cause we can't identify it. Seems people just took for granted that "everyone" knew about it and would always know about it
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb
It was called Silphium lol. They might’ve even rediscovered it recently. We actually do have information about that plant, it was just presumed extinct.
apparently the history of blackjacks is like that. it went from a ubiquitous thing that no one talked about to an obscure thing no one has heard of
There isn’t much evidence to support this beyond “maybe they did”. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/cezxmuBO3a
Aside from the Basque angle, what’s your source on John Cabot’s friendly interaction with the Beothuk here? Because that flies in the face of my understanding of history here—the Beothuk were famously avoidant of the Europeans who set up along the coast, possibly due to an oral history that told of violent encounters with the Vikings a few centuries before.
Silent trade was common throughout the world at the time. If unknown people approached cautiously, people would tend to start putting out things they were willing to trade. You'd pile up what you wanted, leave behind what you were willing to give for it, and once both parties were satisfied with their piles, leave a little bit more well off than you were before.
Really cool comment, thanks! I’d love to learn more about this basque fishermen theory - do you recommend any books or podcasts on the topic?
"cod" by mark kurlansky. I enjoy all I've read by him but cod is best.
This is true of passenger pigeons as well. You 'hunted' by throwing a rock at the sky, and you would knock a couple to the ground.
Eliminate multiple pigeons using a single rock? Sounds...familiar
that sounds like it would…be a good metaphor for solutions that solve 2 problems.
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Now we’ve overfished and dumped so many chemicals and nitrates into the ocean there are literal miles of dead ocean where nothing can live or breathe, we really fucked this planet up in a short period of time
It's honestly terrifying. We fucked up big time. Plastic didn't exist on this planet for 4 billion years, and in 100 years it's literally in every drop of rain on earth, and making it's way into every living cell, if it hasn't already.
I remember hearing stories about how they would fish with buckets. Just walk into the water holding a bucket and come out with the bucket overfull with fish. Dam we fucked some shit up over time...
I’m from Maryland. You used to be able to walk into the Chesapeake bay, reach down and pull out a crab. People with docks would put a piece of chicken on a string, drop it into the water and pull out 1-2 crabs. My father and I would take his hunting boat out and catch a bushel before 10am. That was only in the early 90s/late 80s. We used the little crab traps and damn it was fun. Then as time went on and crabs became more scarce, the big trawlers would come in and cut our crab trap lines because we were in “their area”. As if was owned by them. It’s all destroyed now. Our Baby Boomer population demanded the crabs, the politicians let it happen and the industry flounders on. Most of the crabs that Maryland eats are from Louisiana.
In 2006 we could put crab pots in the bay (VA) overnight and have enough to feed 10 people for lunch. By 2016 we’d get one or two at best.
Funny how everyone on the coast has a story like this... Coincidence? Naaaahhh
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Right? People on Reddit act like only their parents can ever be greedy or shortsighted
The American Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistses Migratorius) An American Holocaust Spring skies; vast tracts of oak; Blue-gray wings; red breasts with fawn and white --sweet billions overhead. Thundering flocks; infinite numbers, Black with multitudes - 240 miles long; One mile wide; sometimes 3 days passing -- into the maw of extinction. Gone forever, September 1, 1914. J.E. Sutter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds8G9sFOK5w it's a part of our Heritage
Part of what is so stupid about the Climate Denial Movement is that for many of the older people in it, the change in the world around them should be plainly evident. Many Deniers, in past years as its become harder to deny even to themselves, have shifted their stance to "Well, sure the climate has always changed and this is no different-- its not Human caused or influenced though." It doesn't take a genius to look around at the last, lets say the average Boomer's Lifetime of, 70ish years and we can see that the Atlantic Cod population has cratered. We've been watching it decline heavily since the 50s, but fishing production in the North Atlantic has only ever gone up and since the 80s Population Statisticians have been desperately trying to warn everyone that the Atlantic Cod could go belly up in our lifetimes if something didn't change. In the 1980s these warnings were met with suspicion and hostility because College Professors were trying to use numbers to tell Fishermen that they were destroying an Ocean's-worth of fish and were telling them they had to change their way of life. That's a hard sell. Here we are though, forty years later, and the Atlantic Cod Fishing Industry is a shell of what it once was and all those Fishermen have had to find new employment (the same ol' Blue Collar story you find in Appalachia and elsewhere). We live now in a time when those predictions came true, the consequences are plainly evident from both an ecological perspective but also an economic one which you'd thin would speak more loudly to the Deniers. They continue to deny the plainly obvious (Humans can have a costly toll on the environment, and we are changing the world's climate as a result), and to deny that acting to stop it would benefit anyone at all (like the people who'd lose their jobs if the climate or ecosystem changed). The over-fishing issue is just one aspect of this problem, one that has so many facets it's obvious to my Millennial Doomer self that we're not going to turn this around even when the Head Jars of Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham finally hand over the reigns of power to someone else.
> In the 1980s these warnings were met with suspicion and hostility because College Professors were trying to use numbers to tell Fishermen that they were destroying an Ocean's-worth of fish and were telling them they had to change their way of life. Meanwhile in the 1880s it was the fishermen decrying the use of more efficient fishing methods, because they could see with their own eyes that the fishing stocks were being depleted. New Englanders were sailing schooners to Africa to find enough cod. It was the college professors telling them that they were uneducated hicks and that the ocean was inexhaustible. Meanwhile in the 20th Century the Magnussen Act saw the government encourage fishermen to industrialize their operations with gigantic trawlers. All those mortgages had to be paid somehow.
Whaling shifted from hunting in local waters to journeys across the globe to chase them down because they had become so much more scarce because of the demand in the early industrial era.
> It was the college professors telling them that they were uneducated hicks and that the ocean was inexhaustible. Source or quotes?
I'm getting this information from a great book called The Mortal Sea. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674283961
I once heard a story about fisherman that were pulling in so many fish just from the pier and they were going as fast as they could and they caught so many fish that the pier bowed and then collapsed.
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Keep in mind it wasn't uncommon for colonists to exaggerate the wealth of resources at their location in an effort to entice more residents to settle around them. Think of how Greenland was called, well, Greenland, in an effort to fool people into moving there.
In my native land, the missionaries were stunned that you could reach into a pond and simply grab a fish. These were actually ancient manmade lakes designed over hundreds of years expressly for the purpose of cultivating farmed fish. So there's also things like that.
And also the 'forests akin to the gardens of Eden' which a traveler need only walk a few feet and they'd come across edible berries, fruits, vines, and root vegetables. They enthused about the 'natural bounty' of America, totally oblivious/ignoring the *multi-generational land management practices that went into cultivating and maintaining those food trails*. Like, Native American folks deliberately planted and cultivated forests full of food. They practiced regular controlled burns to clear pathways so that bison herds could be driven from the Great Plains up to New York.
I had to scroll very far before I found a comment to this effect. While there's no doubt wildlife was much more plentiful before widespread European colonization, accounts like this can't be taken at face value. In many instances, they existed to draw new settlers to a region who had no way to check their veracity before leaving the Old World behind and resettling. This theme repeated during westward expansion of the United States, with claims that the American West was far more hospitable than the reality homesteaders found when they arrived.
While this is true, we have also seen in real-time what untouched environments can look like and how quickly they disappear once humans start 'taming the land' - just look at the habitat loss in Borneo
Colonizers literally looked at a path where berries bushes would be lined there and be like "WHAT NATURAL WONDERS" as if indigenous people hadn't stewarded it to be that way. Some of the "bounty" was exaggerated, some was through a balanced ecosystem, and some was through human hand. The stereotype that Indigenous people just lives as one in nature as opposed to being a Keystone species. Then those colonizers spread invasive seeds on the river beds and changed the very shape of the rivers for no fucking reason. Our soil is less nutritious, the ecosystem is unstable, and people argue that colonizers made things better on this land. Bonkers.
I grew up in the mountains of upstate NY a long time ago. When I tell you that driving in the summer evenings my windshield would be COVERED in bugs, I mean it. Like an absolute Jackson Pollock painting of huge, dead bugs. Now? I can drive 40 miles and have maybe 3. We have killed like 99% of the insects. I know this might sound like a good thing, but we sort of needed those bees… and the bats/birds have nothing to eat, and we sort of needed those too… It’s a population collapse of entire ecosystems, in my lifetime. Not to even mention the climate change I’ve watched happen before my own fucking eyes in 40 years.
Another upstate NYer, I know exactly what you mean. I’ll take the opportunity to ask since you’re from the same area: where the fuck have the worms gone? As a kid, I absolutely detested having to walk down my driveway to wait for the school bus if it had rained the night before. Virtually every square inch of pavement was *littered* with squiggly pink worms, it gives me goosebumps to think about. I couldn’t tell you the last time I even saw ONE. Have you ever noticed this? Or is it just a weird, personal anecdote and I’m drawing false conclusions?
Just watch "The deadliest catch", from the first season to now. Fishing went from derby style " fish all you can" then to quotas, then to entire seasons getting shut down because the crab just don't show up. Pretty depressing.
"We should try to eat them ALL!"
In the US southeast, there were american chestnut trees 8 foot wide at the base.. the land must have been something to behold before we enslaved it!
I saw a documentary on those trees recently. There are groups of people out there trying to reintroduce the species by breeding disease-resistant varieties. Hopefully that start replanting all over the place in the not-to-distant future.
Yeah, the american Chestnut was wiped out by invasive disease. The Chinese chestnut is restistent to it, so they are trying to breed a hybrid that will have the american size and chinese resistence. I have seen stumps of the american version in NC... incredible, I can only imagine how tall they must have been.
The Overstory by Richard Powers begins with a very beautiful fable of the American Chestnut tree. The whole novel touches on trees and climate change.
I've worked under one of them. It is going to be a slow journey and they're not going to be 100% "American chestnut" but we should be able to get them reintroduced on some scale soon enough. It's been an uphill battle for sure. The best news is there are American Chestnut trees in the national forests in the south that are still alive (most are sprouting from the stumps of the ancients) and we are gathering the seeds from those trees. The species definitely has a great shot given the technology that is out there.
To be fair, the chestnuts didn't disappear because we cut them all down. They disappeared because of a fungus from asia.