Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.
While there are a lot of bad practices out there, I believe you can do a search on it for actual statistics and see that the actual hobby trade effect compared to the commercial fishing and other things that are destroying reefs and so on, the hobby trade doesn't even come close, i could be a bit off on this, but i read somewhere that it was almost negligible compared to the others.
i agree, and (as you all know) there are steps being taken to Aquaculture and captive breed corals and fish in an effort to reduce our impact on the wildlife.
but there is some merit to this as i do see the point on where these articles and documentaries are coming from. in short, not every hobbyist can be compared to members of this club in a sense where we actually care and go above an beyond for the lifeforms that we keep in our "glass boxes"