yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Fisherman With No Fish | Years of Living Dangerously


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Through frequent dive trips to Appo Island, Renee has befriended many of the locals. Come over here, John Zenan is a third-generation fisherman who has spent his entire life on the island, living off its resources. He and his son Jory make daily trips to spear fish for the family. Renee tells me there's no better way to understand the importance of the reefs to the people here than to watch them at work. With the simplest homemade equipment, Zenan and Jory dive to depths of several meters, holding their breath for minutes at a time. It's beautiful to watch; this father and son are so in tune with the ocean, they almost look like they belong underwater.

But the fish they're hunting for are nowhere to be found. After a day in the water, Zenan and Jory have invited us back for a meal. Appo Island has a small population, and there are few resources beyond what the sea provides. There are no cars on the island, and most people eat what they catch or grow. Appo Island is not unusual; the Philippines is made up of more than 7,000 islands, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos live just like this.

Zenan usually serves up what he finds on the reefs, but today it's canned fish.

“Josh, yes please! This would be a typical amount for four people, right?”

“A bit more than four, maybe even a bit more than four.”

“This actually yummy.”

“Yeah, this is very yummy. Today when we were watching, we saw that there wasn't really much for you to catch there.”

“Yeah, so this is not fresh fish; these are canned fish. Does that happen a lot?”

“Nights, days out of a week, sometimes no catch; three days out of a week there are meals that they don't get. They just don't eat.”

“Has it always been like that?”

“Oh no, no. Lots of fish used to be. Lots and lots of fish. Um, so then can they still exist off of what remains?”

“They should.”

“So in his best case scenario, what does he want for today and what does he want for tomorrow?”

“He's out fishing every day while you're in school.”

“Yes, when you finish with your studies, are you going to stay on the island?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“So then is he happy that his sons and daughters are finding different opportunities and moving off the island, or is he sad that that way of life is broken now?”

“Oh, he wants them back. He'd rather have them; he wants them together.”

More Articles

View All
An Island On the Brink of Collapse Makes a Huge Comeback | Short Film Showcase
[Music] Kakuta is a tiny islet in the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. [Applause] For centuries, Cotton’s have prospered by making a living off the land, and safe it is not the kind of place you’d expect to find people innova…
Warren Buffett's Advice for the 2023 Economic Recession
Are we through the banking crisis at this point? Failures, the orders of banks may have lost a hell of a lot of money. The people who want the debt of the holding company, they may lose a lot of money. People can, they can lose a lot of money, uh, but the…
Definite integrals of sin(mx) and cos(mx)
In the last video, we introduced the idea that we could represent any arbitrary periodic function by a series of weighted cosines and sines. What I’m going to start doing in this video is establishing our mathematical foundation, so it’ll be pretty straig…
Queens of the High Seas | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Did you ever play a video game that sucked you in and took over your life? I mean, if you have, you can relate, but if you haven’t, it’s similar to that feeling of reading an amazing book and staying up late to read just one more chapter. And then before …
15 Ways to Create GENERATIONAL WEALTH
By the time 65 rolls around, only one in 100 people will be well off financially. 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and more so around 90% of families lose all wealth by the third generation. So, even if you make a fortune…
Determining the effects on f(x) = x when replaced by f(x) + d or f(x - c) | Khan Academy
We’re told here is a graph of a segment of f of x is equal to x. That’s this graph right over here. And they say that g of x is equal to f of x minus 4. Graph g, and we can graph g with this little widget here. Now I would normally ask you to pause this v…