Quote Originally Posted by Xei View Post
I doubt I disagree with any of your opinions, or at least your principles. Certainly mankind's activities are unsustainable. They are also irresponsible and we are the one species on Earth who does know better and should do better. We're probably going to drive many natural fish stocks to extinction. Although of course, humans are no exception to the laws of nature: no doubt if we carry on like this we'll have a population crash too, and the fish we haven't totally destroyed will soon be back.

Like I say though, beyond regulating ourselves, we should for the most part stay the hell away. This is more a mathematical issue than anything. If you've seen Jurassic Park and listened to it properly you'll know what I'm talking about. Human hubris causes a popular conviction that we can control the chaotic systems in nature; we can't. Even with extremely simple relationships like a single prey/predator relationship, we fuck up and make it ten times worse when we perceive that we need to help it. Another example: there was a year or so ago a lot of enthusiasm about a method to take affirmative action against global warming where we would synthetically create giant meshes of some organism which captures CO2. They did a test run. What ended up happening is some other organism developed a symbiotic relationship with it with the net result of releasing even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This plan was relatively mild to some other ideas about darkening the skies via chemistry and things. Such affirmative action is extremely dangerous, even though we were the ones who caused the original problem.
You're probably correct for the most part.
Although I see nothing wrong with limiting the amount of fish we eat. Or as philstoned said, eating more smaller fish. Which have less mercury anyway. Doesn't seem like anything could go wrong with that. (famous last words? haha)

Do you have a link to this coz capturing organism example?