The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
Page 31
Yet even now Charlie feels that the full acceptance of reticulate evolution within the scientific world has been slow. More than a decade on, young marine scholars refer to it as “the final frontier,” rather than a proven approach for understanding the evolution of corals. The high degree of difficulty of working with genetic continua and the challenge this poses to some versions of natural selection make for strong forces of resistance.38
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Charlie was conscious that the seeds of a different and graver problem also shadowed Corals in Space and Time. His realization of this new conundrum had personal as well as intellectual roots. In the midst of his long, testing labors on coral evolution, a family tragedy drove him to think intently about mortality and survival. Just as Charles Darwin, struggling to finalize his theory of evolution, had been shaken by emotional loss, illness, and domestic strain, so it was with Charlie Veron.
Charlie’s tropical equivalent of Down House—Darwin’s residence in the peaceful hamlet of Downe—was Rivendell, named after the elves’ abode in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling, or just sitting and thinking best.” Charlie’s Rivendell was situated on a five-acre bush block with tree-edged river frontage, twenty minutes’ drive from Townsville. He and Kirsty had bought the place in 1976, and their effervescent little daughter, Noni, had hammered a stake into the ground thirty-two feet from the riverbank to mark the house’s future entrance. It was an ideal environment for a free-spirited, dreamy, nature-loving child like Noni. Charlie built her a tree house in the branches of a large eucalyptus that overhung the river. They called it Gum Leaf, and Noni, at the age of six, resolutely insisted on sleeping there alone on the first night. For her, Rivendell’s relative isolation was compensated for by the pleasures of books, dogs, horses, a piano, and, after 1978, a little sister, Katie.39
Yet much of Charlie and Kirsty’s domestic life had proved grindingly tough, just like it had been for the Darwins. Among other problems, Katie’s infancy was haunted by acute respiratory and feeding problems. For eight months, as her life guttered, she had to be watched continuously. For six of those months Charlie and Kirsty slept only on alternate nights. Inevitably, Noni felt the brunt of her parents’ distraction and exhaustion, and began to show bursts of discontent at home and school. Yet “always [she] would respond to reason and always she would accept what was just.”40
But nature knows nothing of justice. In April 1980 Charlie was working in Hong Kong when he received a phone call from Kirsty to say that Noni had drowned while playing in a creek with a friend. A light went out in Charlie’s life. Somehow he got himself back to Townsville the next morning to see Noni lying in her coffin. “I kissed her face, it was frozen. This is the worst memory of my life.” She was cremated on her tenth birthday.41
One hundred and twenty-nine years earlier, almost to the day, Charles and Emma Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie also died. Desperate to keep her with him, Darwin wrote: “Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running downstairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving.” With tears streaming down his face, he concluded his short memoir of Annie in utter desolation: “We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.”42
Similarly stricken, Charlie Veron survived in a haze of sleeping pills, and Rivendell became a refuge for memories. He was frantic to keep those memories alive: “I was always talking to Noni, even when I was actually talking to someone else.” Over time, though, these vivid conversations grew muffled and Noni’s voice began to fade. For Charlie, this was “almost a second dying.” As always in his life, he found consolation in the redemptive energies of nature. The spot where Noni had kept her ducks and geese became a memory garden filled with plants and trees donated by friends. In it was one special tree: “at the edge of the garden is a tall umbrella tree, the last present that Noni ever gave to me. It was for my birthday, and was decorated with coins stuck to the leaves with sticky tape to show me that ‘money grows on trees.’”43
Weighed down by “such unrelentingly bad times,” life for Charlie and his wife dragged, and although they remained close and supportive of each other, they eventually agreed to divorce. “I think the death of a child is the biggest thing someone can live through, it takes away almost everything,” Charlie later told a friend. And it is surely true, too, that when you have faced the death of someone inconsolably dear, nothing else can defeat you. Charlie survived this dark night of the soul thanks to Rivendell, the solace of diving on the Reef, and his much loved dogs. Sometimes he simply took the phone off the hook and lived the life of a recluse and an automaton. Looking back, he sees himself then as “a cot case.”44
He was redeemed by the chance of a second romance, with Mary Stafford-Smith, the scientist who edited Corals in Space and Time. Mary was working on Lizard and Orpheus islands, on the effects of sediment on corals, and became the companion of his heart as well as his mind. She left behind her birth family in England to revitalize Charlie and Rivendell with her own energies and values. As well as being a stepmother to Katie, she and Charlie started a new family. Two young children brought life, laughter, and love back to the house on the river.
Charlie’s intense personal reminder of the contingencies and fragilities of life found echoes in his research. Writing Corals in Space and Time, he was forced to investigate the fate of the world’s corals in the past and present. He studied paleontological analyses of previous reef extinctions and accrued more and more evidence of the effects, on the Great Barrier Reef in particular, of changing sea levels, temperature stresses, predation by crown-of-thorns starfish, and human-influenced changes in nutrient levels. All this sharpened his long-gestating concern about the health of the Great Barrier and other world reefs.
In the aftermath of the book’s publication, he and Mary began discussing the idea of a glossy, coffee-table book about world corals for a general audience, “not just to produce another book, but to open the eyes of the world to what was emerging as an urgent need to conserve corals.” It was the crystallization of a new joint mission: “to win some hearts as well as minds.”45
The project gathered enormous momentum with the enthusiastic support of like-minded scientists. Around seventy underwater photographers gave their work for free, and illustrator Geoff Kelly produced a series of exquisite drawings and paintings. Charlie supplied most of the encyclopedic thumbnail analyses and took overall control as general editor, while Mary edited the science and produced the book. AIMS covered the printing, and in October 2000 the three-volume Corals of the World was launched to great acclaim at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Bali, where its message of reef fragility and degradation added to a rising global alarm.46
An instinctive conservationist, Charlie had been troubled way back in the 1970s by the extent of the damage caused by coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish. He’d become convinced that numbers of the latter were soaring due to overfishing of the starfish’s natural predators, and that survival of the millions of larvae expelled annually into the ocean currents was enhanced by the growing levels of chemical pollution. (Crown-of-thorns larvae thrive in polluted waters.) What provoked him to fury, though, was the way in which the vested interests of tourist developers and politicians, combined with the craven behavior of government bureaucracies, worked deliberately to discourage scientists from studying the problem. It was the onset of a process, ubiquitous today, whereby scientists were no longer free to pick their own questions or seek their own answers. Politicians of various kinds set self-interested agendas based on money and voter appeal, instructing bureaucrats to herd the scientists into yards like cattle. Concerned scientists were purposely deflected from working on the crown-of-thorns starfish problem, even though it had in no way receded.47
Two weeks after Charlie photographed this reef, its lone guard fell ill and local fishermen moved in with bombs made from diesel and garden fertilizer to explode swathes of coral and scoop up the dead fish for a meal or two. Any corals that survived the bombs would die anyway, because, as fishermen well know, coral reefs need fish to keep algae under control: “if you removed fish, within months the reef would be smothered with algae.” There were few, if any, samples of sharks and large fish among the corpses; they’d been fished out long ago.48
Charlie had seen his first patch of coral bleaching off Palm Island in the early 1980s, a tiny, four-inch clump of white skeleton that he photographed as a curio. “And then I saw a whammy, a mass bleaching event … where everything turns white and dies. Sometimes it’s only the fast-growing branching corals, but some of the others are … horrible to see—corals that are four, five, six hundred years old, they die too. It’s a very recent thing.” The first recorded global mass bleaching occurred in 1981–82. At the site where Charlie was then working, a beautiful embayment off Orpheus Island, seventy miles north of Townsville, 60 to 80 percent of the corals bleached. Within the Reef region overall, around 66 percent of inshore and 14 percent of offshore reefs registered moderate to high levels of damage.49
The next major spate of mass bleaching, in 1997–98, hammered reefs in more than fifty countries, through the Indo-Pacific, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, and even among the hot-water corals of the Arabian Sea. On the Great Barrier Reef the bleaching coincided with the warmest sea temperatures ever recorded. In an even worse mass bleaching event in 2001–02, the global damage also confirmed a close connection with El Niño weather cycles. Catastrophic global warming had arrived.50
Up until the 1980s, theories that the earth’s climate was changing because of human-engendered greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane seemed remote from Charlie’s concerns as a reef scientist. Like any properly cautious researcher, he was initially wary of some of the startling claims of coral scientists—those of his friend Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, for example. But the more Charlie immersed himself in the torrent of papers and data on the subject coming from all over the world, the more convinced he became that Ove was right, and that corals were “the canaries of climate change.” In the same way that the deaths of those tiny yellow birds had alerted nineteenth-century miners to the presence of poisonous gases, so reef-growing corals, which seemed peculiarly susceptible to increases in heat and light, were now alerting scientists to climatic changes.
Charlie’s research told him that during El Niño weather cycles the surface seawaters in the Reef lagoon, already heated to unusually high levels by greenhouse-gas-induced warming, were being pulsed from the Western Pacific Warm Pool onto the Barrier Reef’s delicate living corals. When corals are exposed to temperatures two or three degrees hotter than their evolved maximum of eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, along with increased levels of sunlight, it’s lethal. The powerhouse algae that live in the corals’ tissues, providing their color and food through photosynthesis, begin to pump out oxygen at levels toxic to their polyp hosts. The corals must expel their symbiotic life supports or die. Row upon row of stark white skeletons are the result.
These damaged corals are capable of regeneration if water temperatures return to normal and water quality remains good, but the frequency and intensity of bleaching outbreaks is now such that the percentage of reef loss from coral deaths will increase dramatically. Charlie predicts that the widening and deepening of the Western Pacific Warm Pool through climate change will mean that “every year will effectively become an El Niño year as far as the corals are concerned.”51
It’s Charlie’s hope that some as yet unknown strains of symbiotic algae, better able to cope with a heat-stressed world, might eventually form new partnerships with the corals. Or that the adaptive energies of fast-growing corals like Acropora might somehow outpace the rate of bleaching. Or that pockets of coral lying in shadowed refuges on cool, deep reef slopes, or in recently discovered deep waters, might survive to become agents of future renewal. But heat is not the only problem corals face.52
Charlie’s multidisciplinary investigations of the significance and impact of reef extinctions over time show that other destructive synergies are already in motion, and may be impossible to stop. Reefs, he points out, are nature’s archives and historians. They are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present. Imprinted in fossil typography are the stories of the mass-extinction events of the geological past, including their likely causes. These archives tell us that four out of the five previous mass extinctions of coral reefs on our planet were linked to the carbon cycle. They were caused by changes to the ocean’s chemistry brought about by absorption of carbon dioxide and methane, through a process of “acidification.”53
Today’s culprits are the same gases—carbon dioxide and methane—though their increased presence is not due to the massive meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions that caused earlier catastrophes. We humans are doing that work, knowingly pumping these gases into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. Already the oceans, the planet’s usual absorber of these gases, have reached a third of their capacity to soak them up and balance them chemically. Stealthily, the oceans of the world have already begun the process that scientists call “commitment,” which in this case refers to the “unstoppable inevitability” of acidification that presages destruction long before it is clearly visible. Eventually—possibly as early as 2050—we will have reached the point where coral skeletons become soluble in seawater. Carbonate rock, including reefs, will start dissolving, like “a giant antacid tablet,” as Charlie describes it.54
If, as AIMS tells us, the Great Barrier has already lost half its coral cover during the last twenty-seven years through bleaching, cyclones, pollution, and crown-of-thorns starfish, what will happen to this figure as the effects of acidification take hold? Reef corals will be among the first organisms in the oceans to be affected by this alarming process, stricken, in effect, with a fatal form of “coralline osteoporosis.” Their aragonite skeletons will either stop growing altogether or become too brittle to resist the eroding effects of waves. Needless to say, they will crumble more dramatically before the lashing cyclonic events that are now on the increase. Rising sea levels caused by the melting of the ice caps will probably also compound the inability of corals to grow, by diminishing their exposure to light.55
Phytoplankton, the food of tiny krill, a key element in the food web of the southern oceans, will be equally affected by acidification. And who knows what terrible chain of ecological consequences will follow? We could face something like the great K-T extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, around sixty-five million years ago, a disaster that put an end to most life on our planet for millions of years. Long before this, we Australians, at least, will “see a meltdown in coastal economies with devastating cost to natural environments and human societies.” But eventually a remorseless domino effect, beginning with coral reefs and their marine communities, will presage a succession of ecosystem disasters. The earth’s sixth mass extinction event will have arrived.56
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So, Charlie Veron, a man who has lived and worked o
n the Great Barrier Reef for most of his life, finds himself in the agonizing position of having to be a prophet of its extinction. We can’t wonder that he feels “very very sad. It’s real, day in, day out, and I work on this, day in, day out. It’s like seeing a house on fire in slow motion … there’s a fire to end all fires, and you’re watching it in slow motion, and you have been for years.”57
I know of few more poignant sights than the closing moments of that speech Charlie gave in July 2009 to the hushed room of scientists and citizens at the Royal Society. Tossing aside his notes he apologizes to the audience in a strained, faltering voice for having delivered such a miserable talk. He urges his listeners to think about what they’ve heard. The implications of what he’s revealed do, literally, “beggar belief.”
“Use your influence,” he pleads. “For the future of the planet, help to get this story recognized. It is not a fairy tale: it is reality.”58
EPILOGUE
A Country of the Heart
THE DEATH OF THE REEF and the onset of a new epoch of mass extinction—it’s a chilling message, and a depressing note on which to end. I share Charlie Veron’s dilemma about this. As a scientist, he’s told the story of the Reef’s past, present, and future as truthfully as he can, in the hope that people will confront its likely demise. At the same time he worries, as I do, that the grimness of this will provoke fatalism, despair. I’ve heard even well-meaning people say they’re sick of misery stories about climate change, and if the death of the Reef is inevitable, what’s the point of worrying? Why not get on with living and just enjoy the place while we can?