Quote:
Originally posted by AJtheReefer
I think the most important contribution of our hobby is the ecological awareness gained by the hobbyist. And hopefully this makes us more responsible with the environment, especially outside the sea.
I don't think this hobby is environment friendly, nor I think it would ever be. I have accepted this.
With that said, we can minimize the impact. By trading frags, buying tank raised stock, etc.
|
I agree completely with all these points. It's impossible to pretend that this is a green hobby. How much energy do you put into your system, pumps, lighting, etc?
How much water do you waste when you make RO water? Hopefully you have it going into a greywater system or into a clothes or dishwasher.
How much energy goes into transporting those animals from the pacific islands to your home in the middle of the US?
And those questions don't even address the environmental impacts at the level of the reef itself.
I definitely agree that ecological and environmental awareness are definitely the biggest benefits of the hobby, along with education of others who come over and are interested in what you have.
On the positive side, there is a school of thought that in some areas, where they're working to use sustainable reef fish collecting practices, they've realized that the reef is worth more healthy than dead, and so try to mininmize commercial fishing and development, which are both more damaging than our hobby. If the hobby goes away, so does any reason to continue to protect those reefs.
Aquaculturing is definitely the way we have to go longterm. I think there is a lot available aquacultured. In our current tanks, everything is aquacultured/tank-raised except about 5# of LR that we seeded with (and you could easily argue that this is still not enough).
One problem is to get the kind of people who aren't reading threads in Responsible Reefkeeping to jump onto the aquaculture bandwagon. For almost everyone, if you ask them if, all other things being equal, they would rather have wild-caught or aquacultured, they'll choose the latter. If you ask them if they'd be willing to pay more for aquaculture, fewer, but still most people say yes. But then they get to the store, and when it comes down to it, most people end up going with the cheaper option. I've seen people pass by a tank of locally raised perculas to get the cheaper wild-caught ones in the next tank. The people at the LFS say this happens all the time. They'll often go through all of their WC ones before people will by the locally raised ones. Until you get that attitude to shift (and I think it is very, very slowly shifting), this hobby will continue to do significant damage to the wild ecosystems.
Dave