[PrestonSturges]

Yep. I've had Orange Roughy maybe 5 times in my life and yet it was so good I would say it was my favorite fish. Your post made me do a search. Where have all the Orange Roughy gone ?

Orange roughy was the name created by marketers for a deep water trash fish called "slime head." That was an early example of an overlooked species going on the chopping block. I would assume that they are being netted when they gather to spawn, which is the quickest way to drive something to extinction.

[Sixstrings]

@dino
So what did the now-extinct orange roughy slime head fish taste like? How was it "so good?"

[Ibon]

From what I see in Asia things are starring to improve, with most countries having at least put laws in place towards animal welfare & habitat preservation. The bigger problem is in enforcement, which is very expensive over large areas, especially when things go over the line into military style operations being required.

I sincerely hope so as this is the region with unfortunately the most lopsided set of pressures working against it. The convergence of the following factors make SW Asia the region with the highest existing levels of extinction:

1) Smallest geological area of all the tropical biodiversity hotspots (compare the size of equatorial Africa or Latin America)
2) Highest level of endemic species due to geographic separation on Archipelago
3) Some of the highest density of human population of the planet
4) Fastest growing economical region of the world with corresponding resource appetite
5) Close to the largest vacuum cleaner the world will ever know (China)
6) Low level of environmental education about preserving the commons
7) Corruption of forestry ministries allowing exploitation of commons unchecked. As Sea Gypsy mentioned, lack of enforcement. Worse actually, those whose job is to enforce are the very ones who often enable poaching.
8 ) European and North American universities had much better success in training and helping corresponding universities in Latin America and Africa set up national biodiversity studies. Today in Colombia and Brazil and Ecuador for example, not mention Costa Rica, local trained ecologists are carrying on the work of identifying and protecting biodiversity hotspots in their countries and setting these aside for preservation. SE Asian countries have very few nationally trained ecologists doing this work.


I want to be hopeful that enough refuge populations of biodiversity will remain to re colonize native ecosystems once the plunder goes into reverse as SE Asia is the area on the planet most under pressure of losing its biodiversity.

What this illustrates once again is that the consequences going forward are not going to be homogeneous. There will be some regions of the world disproportionately affected by human overshoot.

[Lore]

There will always be some old wealthy Chinese fart that believes rhino horn is better then Viagra.

[dohboi]

Ibon, great list, and quite accurate from my limited knowledge. You seem to know a lot about the area. Have you been there at some point? I though you were more of a Central America kind of guy.

[ennui2]

And China intends to do exponential growth with coal fired plants, that's going to crank up carbon emissions like no tomorrow.

Not to derail the thread, but not so long ago there was a lot of hand-wringing over how Obama (of course--all our ills are his fault) has somehow "allowed" China to become the new world's superpower, and that this is terrible, that we deserve to stay as king of the mountain. This above is why the whole geopolitical dick-wagging threads piss me off so much. If you've taken the red pill, why does it even matter who has the most power on the world stage? The Chinese people are killing themselves first and the rest of the planet with pollution. Sure, a lot of it is us offshoring industry to them, so we're part of the problem, but they're doing it gleefully, when they should know better what the end result's gonna be. And we're supposed to ENVY their power and mourn the passing of American hegemony? How can people be of two minds, still clinging to old-fashioned notions of American exceptionalism, and also a red-piller who gets limits to growth? It's cognitive dissonance in the extreme.

[dinopello]

@dino
So what did the now-extinct orange roughy slime head fish taste like? How was it "so good?"

Not extinct yet, just reduced in number and endangered. I liked it for the typical reasons anyone likes a certain fish - taste and texture. I had it first in a small village in Crete (Almyrida I think) and it was simply prepared probably with a little olive oil and lemon cooked probably on a hot grill. To me, it has the perfect texture - firm but not too firm and almost a crab taste but very subtle on that account. At the little place they took me back in the kitchen to pick out the fish I wanted and then you pay by what it weighs. I've made it once or twice too and it was delicious. There are lots of other nice fish too - Spanish mackerel I remember liking quite a bit. We would catch them down on the Outer Banks and grill.

The grocery store these days is just packed to the gills with Tilapia which is edible but that's about it.

[Ibon]

Ibon, great list, and quite accurate from my limited knowledge. You seem to know a lot about the area. Have you been there at some point? I though you were more of a Central America kind of guy.

My wife is from the Philippines. I lived there two years. I am still a junior partner in an eco villa development in southern Thailand where I lived for 4 years before I purchased this land in Panama. I traveled extensively throuh SE Asia. I have a very good Chinese American friend from my youth who studied psychology and sociology and he now runs a Confucian center and makes many trips to China. I have fascinating discussions with him from time to time about the Chinese zeit geist. His recent summary to me, as follows: The Chinese have a pathological relationship with money and they have taken some Confucian principals like delayed gratification and twisted it in how they are saving for a future to amass ever greater and greater wealth. My friend concludes that it is lights out for the planet during this century if China does not develop an environmentally benevolent authoritarian regime during this century. Sea Gypsy and I have maintained a cyber friendship outside of PO.com due to similar values, lifestyles, history in the region and wives of the same nationality. Quick synopsis.

[dohboi]

Cool. I'm remembering now you mentioning your Filipino wife. I lived in Manila for a couple years as a small child...earliest memories. Dad was in the first wave of the Peace Corps there.

My bro is something of a Sinologist--directed the China branch of WWF for a while. He also did graduate work tracking the earliest beginnings of an environmental consciousness among the technocrats over the Three Gorges Damn project. He says that a lot of times the locals are far ahead of the national gov and Red Army in enviro consciousness. There are some areas with ancient laws against deforesting hills, but the national gov and capitalist cronies come in and roll right over these local traditions and laws. The Chinese game warden in Tibet turned out to be the main threat to the local crane species there--my bro, there to help in a study of local crane populations, was invited to dinner at the wardens house and was served a bird that they said was chicken but tasted a bit different. Later Jim discovered the bones of a recently killed crane in the back yard of the compound.

He said there is some indication that some of the nouveau riche are starting to have a environmental consciousness, but it's hard to know how deep it is. What many people don't know is that there are thousands of protests across China every year, often turning violent, many being protests against destruction of some beloved local ecosystem.

[KaiserJeep]

I have often regarded China with concern. However look at what they have done:

Population: In 1957, they had 600 million people, and a popular saying was that "Every third person in the world is Chinese...". (The actual figure was around 31%, but close enough.) Then came the "organizational actions" of Mao Tse Tung (which really were planned famines that killed tens of millions) and a bit later, the "one child" policy. Today there are 1.37 Billion Chinese, more than twice as many as before, but they are only 20% of the world population - progress of sorts. Of course, they today have the same problem as North America and Europe - an aging population - and another problem unique to them, which is too many males and not enough females.

Technology: They have transformed themselves from mainly Agrarian to mainly Urban and Suburban, with mechanized food production and an unfortunately voracious consumption of coal and oil, and a terrible terrible environmental record.

Medicine: While regrettably consuming many species of megafauna to near extinction, they have enjoyed approximately the same success rate as Western Medicine based on petrochemicals and surgery and Big Pharma, at only about half the cost per patient.

Now the Chinese seem of less concern than that crazy dictator in North Korea, or the Mullahs in Iran.

[Newfie]

It's no good blaming the Chineese or any other ethnic group, we are all of the same DNA under the skin.

The problem is the Kudzu Ape.

[KaiserJeep]

Yes, I do understand that. But I do worry specifically about nuclear proliferation. The North Korean Bomb and the Persian Bomb are extremely likely to be deployed in a proactive attack scenario, IMHO. The Chinese have made the transition from a dangerous rogue state to one whose interests seem to be with keeping the peace.

By the way, dohboi, the wife gives our money to the WWF and took time to visit the Wolong Panda Reserve on her trip to China last year. She is a true Panda aficionado.

[dohboi]

Cool. My bro's advice though is to give to the International organization, not the US branch. He thinks the US branch has priorities wrong (but then, that's true of most everything else in the US, so why wouldn't it hold true for that otherwise fairly good org).

[Keith_McClary]

And China intends to do exponential growth with coal fired plants, that's going to crank up carbon emissions like no tomorrow.

And China will export their own environmental standards into other countries, with the TPP and China Bank, and if we don't agree to TPP they'll just create their own TPP -- with Chinese factories all over Asia, spewing smoke into the air. (don't buy Obama's nonsense that the TPP has eco provisions, it doesn't)

So you are helpless to do anything but sell coal to China and buy their products? You are always going on about the US bringing democracy to other countries, but Americans don't seem to have any say on how their own government ignores their interests.

[ROCKMAN]

"...but Americans don't seem to have any say on how their own government ignores their interests." Of course we do: we have exactly the govt the majority of the votes wanted to have. Folks can babble on about campaign contributions all the want but when the vast majority of Americans go into a voting booth they pull the lever that will provide them with what they expect to be the most beneficial to them personally. And that will still be true in 2016.

IMHO folks should stop blaming the bogey man for our problems: we have the country that’s been created by the voting public. For instance if the American people as a whole didn’t want the record breaking expansion of US coal exports going to China or didn’t want any more Deep Water GOM wells drilled and were willing to have those issues dictate their voting choices neither would happen. But as it turns out those issues and many others don’t rise to a level of importance sufficient to motivate the majority of the public. It’s not so much a case of the public supporting such efforts but more a matter of just ignoring what isn’t very important to them.

[dohboi]

"don’t rise to a level of importance"

That's an important point. Something like 85% of Americans tell pollsters that they are environmentalists and care about these kinds of issues. But when asked to rank environmental issues against terrorism, the economy and other (mostly minor imho) issues, environment almost always ranks last.

So you end up with a congress only about half of which, if that, would consider themselves environmentalists even though most of their constituents identify that way.

But sorry, I'm not going to give up my 'boogie men' yet.

Yes, people are partly responsible. But vast sums of money are being and have been devoted to manipulate peoples fears and ignorances. We're all responsible, but some of the players have particularly deep shades of blood stains on their hands.

[dinopello]

[ROCKMAN]

dohboi - Fair enough: I'll split the difference with you. We have bogey men and bogey men enablers. Not a very different scenario then we see with alcoholics and their families who readily see the damage done but will continue making excuses enabling the destructive behavior to continue. I've lived that with a step father with the family letting him actually drink himself into an early grave rather then exert any effort to stop the process. Which is also why I think many who proclaim to be climate change deniers really do see the potential problem but by refusing to acknowledge that potential it frees them (in their minds) from making any effort to change the situation.

I'll let you decide which is more responsible. OTOH that seems to fall into the category of asking a woman how pregnant she may be: you're either pregnant (or a source of the problem) or you're not. LOL.

[dohboi]

Yep, seen the same kind of sad dynamic wrt alcoholism in my wife's extended family.

[Newfie]

Just ruminating over this thread, thought about suggesting a title change.


"We have so TOTALLY F'D!"