Material and Energy Flows in Industry: Aquaculture

Chapter Overview

In our final module, we turn our gaze explicitly to ourselves -- to the flow of matter and energy characteristic of our industrialized way of life. We examine the choices about resource use that are implicit in the way the developed world lives

Such an analysis is often insightful. Do we use more fish than we produce in aquaculture? Are there patterns in the kind of materials we chose that differ in significant ways from the materials that prior societies and other animals use?

Much of what we cover in this section will be familiar to people who have studied industrial ecology or the tenets of green chemistry. However, our focus is again on helping our students find ways to frame issues. Towards the end of this section, we read a recent Science article with our class examining levels of persistant organic pollutants in farm raised v. wild caught fish and it is rewarding to see that, by the end of the semester, students are able to identify key methodological issues that arise from the presentation of units and the nature of the comparison.

We return again in this section to the ecological footprinting idea that we introduced at the beginning of the course.

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