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sc94597 on 03 August 2017
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Final-Fan said:
sc94597 said:

Considering I said proportionally I stand by it. More people out of the total population likely fished in their daily lives in 1790 than 2017, because the 1790 population was almost 99% agrarian and rural. 

If I was talking about absolute numbers, that would be a different matter. 

That doesn't address nor explain the fact that you clearly used the wrong number, but I'll move on. 

In that case, since the only realistic comparion in terms of environmental impact (the context in which these figures were used) compares the number of people to the area of land on which they lived in each time period, and not percentage of total population engaged in that activity then and now, how do you explain your misinterpretation? 

I supported one part of my statement with regards to hunting, and didn't feel like supporting the other part because it was off-topic from the original discussion. Since you inquired, I supported the other part of my statement. The effects of hunting and fishing are different. I didn't use any wrong number. I just supported one portion of my statement. 

The number of people who hunt or fish, and the area of a particular region are not the only variables. They just happened to be sufficient variables to justify that the burden of hunting is not necessarily more today than it was in 1790. How often people hunt and fish is also important. This can be gleaned from considering how much people depended on hunting and fishing in a particular period of time. In 1790, a higher percentage of the population required fishing and hunting for subsistence. Today, such activities are more often recreational, and therefore it can be assumed that it happens less often per hunter/fisher and in limited portions. A lot of fishing doesn't even entail taking the fish home. They are thrown back into the lake, river, or ocean. 

To support my point, suppose that the average number of fishermen today take home 10 fish/year. Suppose that in 1790 the average number of fish taken home per year, per person, was 52 fish (once per week.) 

So 44.7million fishermen * 10 fish/year/fisherman * 1 year = 447,000,000 fish. 

Compare that to 4 million * 50 fish/year/person * 1 year = 200,000,000 fish. 

Then we can make the hand-wavey area comparison to discover that the effect of 4 million people fishing 50 fish/year on average in a much smaller area is much larger than 33 million people fishing 10 fish/year on average in a much larger area.