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Originally posted by Moiraine:
Though I seem to recall a recent post of yours replying to me, when I said that I bought fair trade bananas because of the unfairness of the big banana companies towards the producers and the ecological damages of their intensive methods of farming, that "taking jobs from Nicauragua rather than the Mediterranean is trading 6 of 1 for a half-dozen of the other" ... 
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When I said that I was only speaking of the jobs issue, not the ecological ones. Believe me, I am no fan of those companies and organic bananas are only $0.30/lb. more at my supermarket so that's what I buy.
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Because that is what will be objected to you on the overfishing issue, you know that. Fishing companies will whine that extra efforts will cost money and hence people will lose their jobs ...
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On this overfishing issue, that is true. But I think we SHOULD be willing to trade jobs where extinction and resource depletion are concerned. Their jobs are already being destroyed anyway, it's just the death is currently slow and painful.
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Ni[c]e gesture, becoming a vegetarian because of the damages done to the oceans. But if you can't eat meat and you can't eat fish and you can't eat veggies ... what is left ?
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I didn't say don't eat meat and don't eat veggies. I kill veggies with great aplomb, in fact.
While factory farming of animals has its issues, I think they do not rise to the extinction and resource depletion level of concern that exist for commercial ocean foods. As well, I am okay with eating animals that are organically farmed -- my problem with eating farm animals is factory farming (1. rampant animal abuse, 2. mistrust of the chemicals, hormones, and other farming methods), not my place in the food chain.
As a side note, there is a 100:1 ratio between the amount of people you can feed using the same amount of land for crop farming rather than animal farming. Many vegetarians advocate the lifestyle based on the fact it can support a greater population and avoid starvation. So, while all types of farming have ecological issues, veggies certainly have the least based on this fact alone. I won't even bother with a lengthy comparrison of whether pesticides/herbicides outweigh the harm done by pig farms. Of course, I don't advocate this stance -- I think I've made it clear that for me the population problem has only 1 solution -- FEWER PEOPLE. In fact, since using plants only would support more people, I see it as an argument for animal farming -- I want the world to face the tough choices of overpopulation sooner rather than later.
Chewie, it looks like "farm fish" a/k/a aquaculture is going to be the only route to go. Unless people quit eating fish, of course. Actually, aquaculture is already widely practiced. As with all farming, it has environmental issues. The greatest of these is alien species invasion. For instance, Nile River Trout were transplanted in Lake Victoria, Africa, in an aquaculture attempt. Through predation and resource competition between the trout and the native cichlids, we have now lost 14 GENUSES (not species) of cichlids to extinction (they lived nowhere else on Earth). Other species invasions have occurred in closed systems, where holding ponds of aquaculture fish were washed out in a heavy rain, ultimately contaminating nearby streams with the new alien species. So, the problems with aquaculture can be grand.