[quote author=nash link=topic=2557.msg26440#msg26440 date=1194248810]
I always wonder about this. We all talk green but I know most of us run MH for 6-8 hours or more.Pumps 24x7x365.I remember someone who commenting to me that I should think of the environment since I have so much trouble keeping one type of coral. I thought to myself I any of us care that much we should not be keeping corals or fish.
Oh Boy, there I said it. :
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Everyone should say it and everyone should know it. For 95% of reef keepers out there there is only one justification for keeping a reef tank: "I like it". Anything else is rationalization. The one that chaps me the most is the idea that someone's home reef is 'educational'; A home tank really doesn't qualify.
This hobby/industry is terrible for the planet. The stuff you listed is amazing, but IMO, the biggest is the use of jet fuel to get corals from the wild to our country, and of course the mountains of styrofoam and plastic and wax covered cardboard that they are shipped in. Next comes the amazing amount of other packaging involved in the industry, and of course the massive amount of dead animals. Possibly more important is the fact that this hobby has become cheap. Tanks are cheap and livestock is cheap. This generally leads to people thinking all of it is disposable, which is terrible.
The impacts our hobby has can be considered small compared to other impacts, however, it is important to keep in mind the idea that what we do does have impact. To ignore our impact because others have bigger impact seems like a meaningless proposition. If we want the hobby to continue into the future, its important that we try to minimize our impacts, as well as impacts of others. Believing Golbal warming or not doesn't really need to enter the picture, beacause at the very least poor collecting practices damage the reef, and if we want to make sure the reefs stay around, we need to find ways to to minimize the impact our hobby has on the reefs.
Does all that mean that we shouldn't partake in the hobby? Maybe. I know I could easily see myself out of the hobby at some point, and more and more long time reefers are leaving for the reasons being discussed in this thread. On the other hard, "I like it" matters, and we do lots and lots of things because we like to do them, and there should be room in the world for that.
I have actually been thinking about this a great deal since I finished up in Tonga a year or two ago, and I have been trying to figure out ways to express it and propagate the ideas. I have a couple articles and a website in the works - maybe they will actually happen!