wlaw15 22 minutes ago

Sometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.

pingou 22 minutes ago

"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams."

That doesn't sound right.

  • deadbunny 19 minutes ago

    I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?

  • cannonpr 6 minutes ago

    You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…

epolanski 25 minutes ago

We truly deserve to get extinct. There's nothing but selfishness and greed from Wall Street to San Francisco to the Indonesian fisheries and Indian farms.

  • voakbasda 24 minutes ago

    Amen. Humanity had its chance. We have blown it. Let the cockroaches get their turn.

    • karim79 22 minutes ago

      Let's not forget the scorpions. They also deserve a turn.

      • timcobb 15 minutes ago

        The scorpions and cockroaches will have to fight it out. Life will go on.

    • 21asdffdsa12 4 minutes ago

      Ahistoric defeatism. Embraces our nature, instead of fleeing for the hills of utopism. Learn to steer it, change it. We accomplished wonders- humanity is calm and peaceful compared to what it once was.

      The gaming industry and cellphones alone have pacified a species whose footprint is ever shrinking. Literal monks with hypnotic glowing stones, this whole industry is a miracle and has given nature a breather it would not have had without it.

  • quietsignal 6 minutes ago

    Note that the selfishness of the farmer or fisherman may in certain light differ from the greed of the capitalist, if one’s family endurance depends on it.

bcjdjsndon 32 minutes ago

Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to

  • paimapi 10 minutes ago

    blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]

    [0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...

    >Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.

    [1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...

    >The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.

    • Poacher5 7 minutes ago

      That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.

      • mushi_shi 5 minutes ago

        Yeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.

heyitsmedotjayb 12 minutes ago

I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!

  • kubb 7 minutes ago

    I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%