Coral reefs have been here for millions of years. They have built underwater cityscapes out of calcium and highways for fish and all forms of undersea life. A diverse ecosystem of stationary sea anemone, schools of fish, and spiny shrimp defending their territory; a scene where any city-goer would easily feel at home amongst the hustle and activity.
Yet, here in cities, we often feel disconnected from these reefs in far-off warm waters, perhaps because of our considerable distance from the issues they are facing. When we look into what’s going on with coral reefs in the media, we cannot avoid hearing that “corals are disappearing,” that reefs are facing a “widespread dieback,” and ultimately that “we no longer live on a planet with temperatures that can sustain warm-water coral reefs.” We are sucked into a black hole, where we can’t see a future with one of Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Oftentimes, as we are left to grapple with our own uncertainty about the time in which we live, our actions stall.
But we need these ecosystems to survive. Without these underwater metropolises, some as long as the East Coast of the United States, our lives would change drastically. 25% of all marine life is found on and around coral reefs, providing one billion people worldwide with sustenance, medicine, cultural value, and revenue from tourism. Global warming from fossil fuel emissions is quickly exceeding the Paris Agreement’s goal of preventing the Earth’s temperature from increasing by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. As water temperatures continue to warm, corals are forced out of their comfort zone and don’t have the necessary evolutionary mechanisms to survive.
A couple of weeks ago, a dramatic conclusion was reached by a report authored by more than 160 scientists: coral reefs have reached a point of no return. This perilous point in history is known as a tipping point, which an article in Grist defines as a point in time where an ecosystem changes dramatically and is damaged irreversibly. Coral reefs now need peoples’ intervention to survive. Like most of Earth’s ecosystems, humans and reefs are interdependent, forming a network of connections that make up the world around us.
Coral individuals are animals, made up of thousands of small structures called polyps; each polyp has a circular mouth surrounded by tentacles. Millions of these animals can combine across a single structure. Although we couldn’t appear more different, corals and humans share many similar genes and are similarly dependent on skeletal systems for survival. In the Netflix documentary Chasing Coral, scientist Ruth Gates states that as the coral animal grows, it is growing over a hard surface and depositing its skeleton underneath.
This process forms structures that vary in appearance from massive, boring rocks to delicate branching corals, which resemble the human brain cells, which are responsible for what we think and feel. Although corals lack a central nervous system, they function based on a nerve net through which they sense and respond to each other and their environment. This controls moments such as when they expand their tentacles and come alive at night, catching food that floats near them in the water column and revealing their relation to jellyfish. Coral reefs are immensely complex. Only 840 species of corals represent a living habitat for millions of species of animals.
To put it into perspective, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, a structure made by corals, is the only living structure that can be seen from outer space. This visibility and the immensity of coral reefs is made possible by a symbiotic relationship corals have with algal plants living inside their tissues. Imagine having tiny food factories living inside your body, providing you with 90% of the nutrients you need to survive. The conversion of sunshine to energy that happens within a coral’s tissue is from a partnership more than 210 million years in the making. However, coral bleaching disrupts this evolutionarily established collaboration. As water temperatures warm, corals expel their algal helpers, but they are then left to face the changing climate without their primary food source.
Coral bleaching is a phenomenon that was first observed in the 1980s when water temperatures first reached above the threshold that corals need to function. When the water becomes too warm, the algae begin to produce an excess of toxic chemicals. This ultimately leads to the corals rejecting their lifelong algal partners, revealing their white skeletons through their now transparent tissue, a devastating process.
Research by Jamie Reaser shows that without their primary food source, corals stop growing, stop reproducing, and many die unless waters return to a survivable temperature. After corals die, their skeletons are colonized by seaweeds and algae, although their structures remain and continue to provide crucial protection to marine life. And when coral larvae are released by remaining corals, colonies can begin to rebuild on these exposed spaces. However, oftentimes coral structures are eaten by parrot fish, sea urchins, and other marine life, and they break down, no longer able to support fisheries, and reefs lose the structural complexity which creates nurseries and a haven for marine life.
Four global coral bleaching events have occurred since 1998, following a trend in more extreme weather events like floods, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and even unprecedented snowfall. Even though reefs are dynamic and coral communities have the ability to re-grow as new larvae settle on the reef, 84% of reefs have been affected by coral bleaching.
On the Great Barrier Reef alone, more than half the reef has experienced bleaching. This incredible place is home to 1,625 species of fish, over 600 types of corals, 215 bird species, and hundreds of types of sharks, rays, whales, and dolphins, a vital ecosystem for all different types of life. Techniques like microfragmentation, cutting up small pieces of coral and “planting” them to speed up their growth, cryopreservation, deep-freezing coral sperm and eggs to preserve their genetic material for future generations, and exchanging genetic diversity amongst widespread reefs give corals the potential to continue to create abundant habitats. Tens of thousands of people around the world have dedicated themselves to saving coral reefs, a movement that I am a part of.
I didn’t grow up near these reefs. I was born and raised in New York City, a man-made metropolis as bustling as I imagine the Great Barrier Reef. Having so much distance from the natural world, though, I rarely thought about coral reefs. However, just like coral reefs, New York relies on a symbiotic network of individuals to maintain its structures and provide a home for over 8.4 million people, with a diversity that I have always appreciated.
After rising before dawn to go on a sunrise dive, I observed black clownfish rising with the sun to begin a busy day of swimming and eating while a sleepy octopus lay curled in a ring of coral, trying to get a few more minutes of sleep. Witnessing these events confirmed how I have always felt: that we are all more similar than we think and are a part of a large living family. Oftentimes, the discourse around coral bleaching does not reflect our interconnectedness with this living metropolis.
We value coral reefs for the services they provide for us without viewing them as living creatures, embodying their own unique selfhood. In a world dominated by its growth-minded economic systems, other systems of thought and non-human ecosystems are often disregarded. But imagine a world where all living beings are seen as sovereign; if their experiences and uniqueness were valued alongside human experience and shaped the world around us.
Yet within our current economic structures, nature plays a vital role. Coral reefs are important as far away as New York, the largest financial capital of the world, not only for their key biodiversity and the habitat they provide to marine animals, but also for their monetary value. Their economic value derives from two different values: direct and indirect use values. Direct use values include the pieces of coral that are used for jewelry and other objects and turned into consumer goods, alongside recreational activities like diving and exploring reefs.
The indirect use values stem from the nursery habitat that reefs provide for fish, which stock commercial and recreational fisheries. There are also indirect values associated with coral reefs, from coastal protection from storm surges and the amenity value, which can be measured by real estate prices surrounding a reef. Due to their integral role in marine ecosystems, the $276.5 billion global fishing industry depends upon healthy reefs and their losses are felt as far away as the stock markets of New York City. Equally as valuable as their economic contribution is how we choose to speak about corals.
Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the language that we use to speak about the living world and how our language is shaped by the society that speaks it. In Potawatomi, an Indigenous American language, 70% of the words in the language are verbs, whereas English is inverted and 70% of the words are nouns. In Potawatomi, living beings, including rivers, rocks, plants, and animals, are animate. Rather than a coral reef being a noun, a thing, they would be described as a verb: “to be a coral reef,” affording them the same distinction as the human species. When something is living, like a coral, and is described using noun-based thinking, it becomes stuck in a temporary framework, spoken about as if it were dead. Referring to “a coral” is only a momentary glimpse at the ever-changing nature of a living being. “Being a coral,” on the other hand, leaves space for fluidity and acknowledges the agency of the coral itself.
Although Indigenous Peoples make up approximately 6% of the global population, they care for 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. The degraded state of nature in colonialist societies worldwide is in part a reflection of our language, which reduces Mother Earth to a non-living being. No wonder prominent news articles refer to coral reefs as though they are imminently doomed; according to our language, they already are.
In recent years, there has been a global movement to acknowledge the personhood status of environments based on millennia-old Indigenous modes of thought.
In Ecuador, the rights of nature are enshrined in its 2008 constitution. Rights of nature have also been recognized in the United States among local jurisdictions, in Bolivia, where the law mandates that the population must respect the national majority view that nature is Mother Earth, and in India, where a court ruled that it is the nation’s responsibility to step in and protect it when no one else can. In India, the court enacted this ruling by arguing that a government official is a “custodian of government land” and that the government has the responsibility to act as a guardian for those who cannot care for themselves, in this case, Mother Earth.
Environmental personhood reflects the value of an ecosystem in a verb-based language. If we factor in the legal personhood of coral reefs in policy decisions and in the actions of our everyday lives, we could see a massive change in the health and abundance of coral reefs, thus opening us up to a world beyond our skyscrapers, highways and inanimate structures. We are then able to view the stationary world as something that is living beneath us, altering the ways in which we confront the issues of climate change.
We are all part of the same global ecosystem, depending on each other to grow and move through challenges. As we continue to safeguard our reefs, we must not only protect their lineages but also shine a light on their lived experience.
Lina Rehbein is a Research Assistant at USC Annenberg.
