On Saturday I hung out with my 84-year-old ecologist great uncle and he stopped in mid-conversation (abt the return of the whooping crane) and very seriously told me that "you can go one of two ways, as a naturalist"; either you keep sight of the hopeful possibilities, or you don't. I'm one of nature's wretched little pessimists but when an old ecologist literally holds your hands in his and tells you, "don't despair," you have to try, I feel.
I'm immune to a lot of the "hopepunk" narratives about ecology but...
The Karner Blue butterfly was extirpated from Canada the year before I was born. He donated to one of the projects to bring it back for years, and even though the project he was working on fizzled out, I told him about the branch in Toronto, still going strong. They save every lupine seed they can harvest and germinate them carefully so that in 20, 30, 40 years we might have enough habitat to bring the Blues back. He was part of the first wave of that effort.
Fuck!!!! What do you do with that kind of care? You have to at least try to believe that better things are possible!
LORD not to get into my feelings but this got me in my feelings. Coral conservation is....to put it inadequately...a bummer. One field scientist phrased it to me as a bunch of people frantically throwing tracks in front of a runaway train when we only have a vague idea of how the train is built and what kind of tracks it needs.
Conservation work is like always feeling this doom, seeing it, knowing that you can't just force the policy changes to help stop it but also you can't just do nothing. That's how I describe it to people who ask how I feel about it. What I can do is small, I don't know if it will help in the end, but I can't just do nothing when I have the ability to try.
And there is something. Oceans are heating every summer, we keep finding more pollutants causing problems (hey btw look for certified reef safe sunscreen bc turns out fucking SUNSCREEN is toxic to coral whoopeeeeee).
And maybe one of the better things we can say is "well...people are better at keeping them alive in tanks now" (seems small but working with field scientists makes one realize that knowing about coral in their natural environment and knowing precisely how to keep them in an artificial setting are two parallel but different sets of knowledge.) But that isn't nothing. Florida waters reached hot tub levels of heat, with coral animals that are perfectly adapted to an environment that does not change more than a couple degrees. The bleaching event is catastrophic and the longer the heat lasts the less chances the corals can recover, and the greater chance they will die.
But the thing is, until relatively recently no one had kept many Atlantic coral in captivity. Ten years ago, maybe even less, they would be more doomed than they are now. Because now there's a ton of places that have kept Atlantic corals, places that have been communicating with each other and sharing information as fast as they can find it. Now there's a knowledge base to work on for the thousands of bleached corals that have just been pulled out and set in systems tailored to reduce their stress and nurse them to recovery. People who have kept Atlantic coral are heading to Florida to help teach others in research buildings and science centers and aquariums how to do it, and fuck me if seeing all this cooperation and collaboration coming together to do what we all can doesn't make me feel something that maybe isn't quite hope but it's brighter and more inspiring than despair.
Now there are more techniques for breeding, so the corals that recover fastest or bleached the least can be selected to get their genes out into the population faster than nature could do it on its own. Every year there's an exponential increase in what we know and the tools we have and what tools we can share.
And the heavy feeling still gets me sometimes of how it feels like it's just first aid. It's frantic field medicine on someone bleeding out. You can patch the injuries and limp them through it but the war still goes.
But it would be worse if we didn't try. As long as we breathe we have to try. Maybe if we just try and get better so we can try better and maybe, God just maybe, we could see it get better.
