I have a longer post about this in the works that I might even finish, but this video is worth your time, and I’ve had a tiring day. TL:DR, media are still being criminally negligent in their reporting about climate change and its effects.
Oceanoxia
Exploring an increasingly strange new world
I was stationed in Alaska in the early 1990s. There were some great people there–very environmental, off-the-grid, live-and-let-life, mostly self-sustaining. There were the average folks going to work and getting by like many of us do everywhere. But there was a shocking amount of people who had the same mindset Sarah Palin so successfully aped: the “use it ALL UP, burn, baby, burn!”, anti-education, ain’t-never-gonna-change-my-mind mentality. A lot of it was tied up in toxic Christianity: where humans are dominant over all and free to exploit whatever they see. The “turn the heat up to 80 degrees in the house when it’s 10 degrees outside” folks, because Jesus is coming to Jerusalem to kill all the Jews and bring on the End Times. The folks who gleefully overfish (yes, I know that’s not the cause of the snowcrab collapse) because that’s what the fish are there for–human profit.
Obviously this mentality isn’t limited solely to Alaskans.
I ran into some USian “ex-pats” in Belize a while back. They were running a sort of seaside motel thing with little cabins people could rent, and they were trying to get permission to log a section of forest because they believed that that’s what trees were for.
The cod fisheries collapse that wrecked the economies of Newfoundland and Labrador has lasted three decades and the cod stock has still not recovered. We can’t measure these impacts in years, because it’s likely the crab population will take much longer than that to recover, if ever. But hey, the fishing folk can just take Ben Shapiro’s advice I guess, “Well if climate change kills all the crabs, it’s not a problem because people can just sell their fishing boats.” (I’m repurposing his “just sell your flooded house” big brain moment.)
Yeah, at this point if the projection is “a decade to population recovery”, it seems unlikely to me that recovery will happen at all, absent an end to the fishing industry. There’s too much ecological change going on for populations to also cope with the constant pressure of fishing for profit.
In the late 1990s, striped bass (rockfish) were becoming scarce in Baltimore waters, so the state put a ban on fishing for them. There was so much whining and pouting and “nobody gunna tell ME what to do” from the general population, but enough people stopped fishing for that one species that it was able to bounce back.
@K – conservation efforts absolutely do work. The reason I’m pessimistic about this case, is that the primary cause of the population collapse doesn’t seem to be fishing, but rather climate change. Canceling the season will certainly help, but if the main cause is still there, I doubt it’ll be enough.
PZ Mtyers gives the Snow Crabs and more a good mention here too :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/10/26/humanitys-imminent-mysterious-extinction/