David Alexander Baker - The Lost Continent: Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration in the Age of Extinction

THE TIDAL SWING between elation and desperation that comes from documenting the struggle of the worlds coral reef ecosystemsa flood of grim statistics followed by brief surges of beauty and hopecan take a toll on a person. In the past eight years Ive heard more people utter the unlikely phrase I cried into my dive mask than I care to recount. But those words best describe the experience of people who study and work on the problems facing reef-building corals and the vast and magnificent habitats they construct in the clearwater deserts of our tropical seas.

It hasnt helped that I set up a feed delivering news to my in-box every morning, harvesting stories with the keywords coral reef decline. The dire headline Climate change could kill all of Earths coral reefs by 2100 is followed by the more promising How seaweed-munching crabs could help save coral reefs. The idea of silver bullets and unlikely saviors in the face of enormous odds is tantalizing. It is the plot of ancient legends, blockbuster movies, and entire religions. It is an understandable temptation to imagine that salvation lies outside of ourselves. But in the case of saving coral reefs, it most certainly does not.

If you dig past the headlines into the social media fray or research listservs, youre likely to find inspiring tales and cranky critiques. A new discovery offers promise; its not enough. One patch of reef shows surprising resilience; a drop in the bucket. A team of volunteers restores a swath of coral the size of a football field. Someone chimes in to remind us that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), which has experienced mass die-offs due to unprecedented coral bleaching from global warming, is the size of seventy million football fields.

If you follow the plight of the worlds corals, hope and despair engage in a sort of tug-of-war for the soul. Every time you submerge on a reef, beautiful or scruffy, you ask yourself what it looked like a generation ago, or even five years ago. The baseline is shifting below our feet, reefs are declining, and even when you come across rare beautythat healthy stretch of reef completely encrusted with vibrant stony coralsyou cant help but wonder if it is the last of its kind.