Coral Whisperers

Scientists on the Brink

Irus Braverman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520970830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltwissenschaft

In recent years, a catastrophic global bleaching event devastated many of the world's precious coral reefs. Working on the front lines of ruin, today's coral scientists are struggling to save these important coral reef ecosystems from the imminent threats of rapidly warming, acidifying, and polluted oceans. Coral Whisperers captures a critical moment in the history of coral reef science. Gleaning insights from over one hundred interviews with leading scientists and conservation managers, Irus Braverman documents a community caught in an existential crisis and alternating between despair and hope. In this important new book, corals emerge not only as signs and measures of environmental catastrophe, but also as catalysts for action.

CHAPTER 1

Coral Scientists between Hope and Despair

We are in a crisis that is too scary to confront and too important to ignore.

—Mary Pipher, The Green Boat¹

FIGURE 7. Wide-grooved brain coral (Colpophyllia natans) near Jupiter, Florida, September 2012. Courtesy of Coral Morphologic.

THE PENDULUM EFFECT

I had just returned from the International Coral Reef Symposium in Hawai‘i, where some 2,500 coral scientists, managers, and policy makers from seventy countries convened, as they do every four years, to discuss the present and future of tropical coral reefs. The conference was overwhelming. Waves of coral people from around the globe and dozens of simultaneous sessions made it a frenzied affair. One of the scientists I was trying to trace wrote in an e-mail, “P.S. yes I am at the symposium, running around like a headless chicken like everyone else.” I took a moment to reflect on how unsettled I felt. More than the usual hustle and bustle of gigantic conferences that academics both despise and thrive on, the International Coral Reef Symposium was exceptionally exhausting. What was it about this particular conference that left me so discombobulated?

The answer came in a flash: what I experienced at the International Coral Reef Symposium was the bipolar oscillation between the extremes of hope and despair. Some of the sessions were dark and depressing and left me gasping for air, while others were either hopeful or altogether oblivious to the impending catastrophe that their co-sessions were predicting. It was like living in a split reality. This oscillation was made that much more severe in light of the “tsunami of urgent and life-threatening planetary changes”² that coral scientists, like all of us, have been bombarded with—what scientist Will Steffen calls “The Great Acceleration.”³ But coral scientists are probably worse off than most of us in the face of such acceleration. Spending their entire lives studying organisms who are in the fast lane to massive death has been exposing them to the harshest dimensions of these challenging times.

This chapter is an exploration of the extremes of despair and hope. In many ways, it is a microcosm of the entire book, which will also swing between these extremes, but will strive to examine them more deeply. I will start the chapter by exploring the book’s central argument regarding the relationship between hope and despair. I will then move to introduce coral restoration’s hopes for the future, followed by an account of the depressing state of corals as evident from the recent monitoring of coral bleaching events. Next, I will discuss assisted evolution and experiments with “super corals,” identifying what some argue is the genomic turn in coral conservation. In its final sections, the chapter will complicate the story of hope and despair, first by discussing the tensions between global and local in coral conservation and then by turning to a specific debate between two groups of conservation scientists, which I will refer to as the Cinner-Bruno debate. I will conclude with Ben Halpern’s story, which exemplifies the central argument of this book that although hope and despair seem like diametric opposites that cannot exist simultaneously, and are indeed perceived as such by many of the scientists I interviewed, close-up explorations reveal their interconnectedness. I am particularly interested in these scientists’ demonstrations of hope that are more rooted and less transient, and in what distinguishes them from mere wishing or passive expectation. These expressions of hope on behalf of many of the coral experts I interviewed are arguably deep enough to encompass despair and even draw on it as an inspiration for action.

“DARKNESS IS YOUR CANDLE”: INITIATING HOPE

I will say up front that only after many transcriptions and observations, and upon reading and rereading the polarized narratives, did I begin to notice that each extreme contains the other, even as they are perceived by many coral scientists as mutually exclusive. As this chapter documents, certain coral scientists who were initially hopeful but then fell into the depths of despair seemed to eventually emerge with a more sustainable and empowered sense of hope than the one they had started out with.

This is confusing. Just as English lacks words for different kinds of snow, our vocabulary is inadequate for expressing the different types of hope evinced by life in the Anthropocene. Accordingly, several prominent scholars have chosen to abandon the term altogether in search of a more apt vocabulary.⁴ But when browsing the current literature on the environment, I was able to find alternative interpretations of hope and of the relationship between hope and despair. One book in particular refers to the deeper type of hope as “active hope.” Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone write in that book: “The word hope has two different meanings. The first involves hopefulness, where our preferred outcome seems reasonably likely to happen. If we require this kind of hope before we commit ourselves to an action, our response gets blocked in areas where we don’t rate our chances too high.” Unlike this type of hope, Macy and Johnstone focus on active hope, which they define as “identifying the outcomes we hope for and then playing an active role in bringing them about.”⁵ Literary scholar Teresa Shewry asks along similar lines: “Could hope be a mode of facing rather than of mollifying or forgetting environmental loss?” Drawing on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, Shewry encourages intellectuals to move beyond their resignation to the current state of globalization and degradation toward recognizing the passions and dreams of justice that can fuel the struggles for more viable forms of environmental life.⁶ While this type of hope is not naive, it also does not require optimism.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Before reconciling hope and despair, I would like to take a long moment—a book-long moment, in fact—to examine the ways in which these juxtaposed approaches underlie and even circumscribe the divergent projects in coral conservation. One of my earlier observations, which surfaced at the International Coral Reef Symposium, has been that many coral scientists do not experience hope and despair simultaneously, but rather choose one over the other for extended periods in their scientific careers or alternate between the two for shorter time spans.⁷

I also noted my own oscillation between the extremes. As I already mentioned in the Introduction, I spent the summers of my teenage years scuba diving in the Red Sea in Sinai, Egypt. But life took me away from the ocean, and so much happened to coral reefs in the meantime. I started to realize the extent of the change during my visit to a coral nursery in Culebra, Puerto Rico, in January 2015, when Edwin Hernández-Delgado showed me around his underwater coral nursery and spoke about his efforts in outplanting Acropora species from the nursery onto the devastated reefs (figure 8).

FIGURE 8. Edwin Hernández-Delgado and his colleague tie coral fragments to a metal structure using dental floss. Coral reef nursery, Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by author, January 12, 2015.

This firsthand realization that all is not well underwater inspired me to find out more about the state of corals. How have I not heard that they were in trouble, I remember asking myself, feeling like I had somehow betrayed their trust. Hernández-Delgado was able to put me in touch with Australian scientists when I visited the Great Barrier Reef in May 2015, and then with Israeli coral managers during my June 2015 visit to the Red Sea. Unfortunately, the sites at which I scuba dived in the northern Great Barrier Reef have since either bleached or died in what has been the most acute global bleaching event on record. Diving in the Red Sea was not very uplifting either. The sites I knew well have been closed to the public because of their degraded condition.

The process of writing this book has therefore not been easy. Overwhelmed by what I learned, I sometimes questioned the importance of the entire project, wondering if writing is an act of hope or a form of despair and whether my readers would even care. But the awed expression on my older daughter’s face when she emerged from her first scuba dive in the Red Sea, as depleted as it already was, alongside the courage of so many of the scientists I have interviewed, have inspired me to go on. Writing emerged as an act of healing with the intention of making a difference—however small—for the sake of my two daughters, and for the awestruck child that still remained in me. In the tougher moments, I found solace in Sufipoetry from the thirteenth century: “Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest. . . . You must have shadow and light source both. Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.”⁸

My struggles to cope with the massive death of corals reflect the situation for many coral scientists, who deal with this slow-motion catastrophe even more intensely, and at the same time must also make difficult decisions about what to do to protect them. When reading the barrage of depressing reports from the Great Barrier Reef, I wondered how, in the face of such devastation, these scientists find the motivation required to proceed with this hard work. “What’s the point in saving corals if they will eventually die of global warming and ocean acidification anyway?” I remember asking Nilda Jiménez-Marrero, my first interviewee in this context and an employee of Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources.

This was just before the third global bleaching event had started. Jiménez-Marrero’s daily labor included tying corals together with dental floss to affix them to the ocean floor in an attempt to restore them from white-band disease, distinguishable by the white band of dead coral tissue that it forms. This disease has bee...