People don’t know much about the ocean, really. Google finishes “the ocean is” with “scary”.
An American tourist—just yards from Ocean Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean in California—asked a waitress, seriously, “what’s that big lake over there?”
So, I understand that many don’t really get why the recent deaths of most of the world’s coral reefs matters so much. You don’t like cruise ships or filet-o-fish, so what?
But if anyone intelligent survives in the future to study the history of our time, they will begin by describing the importance of the coral reefs.
Oceans are not like land, but if they were, they’d be like huge deserts with tiny oases and a few fertile river valleys. A few big species swim across oceans, but most thrive in small corners. Coral reefs are like those tiny oases, only 0.1% of the ocean, but holding ¼ of all fish species.
Tropical rain forests are known to be diverse, and they include creatures from 9 different Phyla. Coral reefs include 32 phyla, and earth only has 35.
A lopsided % of all species live in concentrated clusters around coral reefs, where sun, shelter, nutrients and waves create the perfect environment for the largest variety of marine life.
There may have been up to 10 million undiscovered organisms living in or around reefs..., but now we’ll never know. Because we’re almost done killing them.
Since we live on land and eat farm grown food, we assume that farms have everything we need to survive. But our survival is affected as the abundance of life is diminished.
Our farms do not exist in a vacuum; they rely on pollinators, bacteria, stable temperatures, rain, a healthy atmosphere, soil, and, also critically, periodic introduction of new genetic characteristics of plants and animals. Diversity is critical in growing new crops and breeding new cattle to adapt to changing conditions. Without diversity, crops and animals become vulnerable to disease, parasites, or environmental changes.
We think we’re at the end of a short, simple chain, but we’re actually in the middle of a hugely complex web of ecosystems. Cut enough threads, and the whole thing will collapse, taking us down too. We might never know what critical thread was the one we can’t live without.
Bear with me for one classic word problem.
You are driving over a 1 mile long bridge. If you drive the first ½ at 30 mph, how fast do you have to drive the second half to average 60 mph?
Human moral failure is often due to time constraints. We’re short-sighted and paint ourselves into a corner. We assume that we have enough time to solve the problem, so we waste and run out of time to solve it. By the time you’re halfway across, it’s already too late to meet the goal.
And that’s an easy problem. Evolutionary time scales defy our understanding. We assume that nature will simply bounce back from whatever problems we cause, and that plants and animals will adapt.
I found a snail on my doorstep, so I threw it across the yard. A year later, I found the same snail there again, and he said, “hey, what did you do that for?”
We adapt quickly, but almost all other plants and animals can’t. Unlike natural climate changes over millions of years, we’re changing the climate so fast, that it’s impossible for the rest of the species to adapt. Coral doesn’t migrate. Most coral reef creatures can’t swim or float to another reef. They can’t change their metabolism to adapt to more acidic and warmer water every year. And if their food dies first, then they’re next.
So when the Great Barrier Reef dies in just 30 years—all along a distance greater than New York to Dallas—along with other reefs around the world, then the abundance of life has been diminished affecting our survival.
The web of life on earth has begun to collapse in this first mass extinction event. And it happened within just 0.3% of our 10,000 year history, in just the last blink of time—a single generation—over the 200,000 years since we last evolved.
The frog is not being cooked in the slow-rising hot water. After evolving millions of years ago, many species are being simultaneously executed by humans, for our temporary convenience in burning fossil fuels. And by making key roots of our own food webs extinct, we may yet win the ultimate Darwin Award.
Of course you should care about climate change news if you own Florida real estate, buy California produce, or have children who might have to fight in future wars over habitable lands. But you should also care that we’ve killed the coral reefs and crossed the threshold into mass extinctions, if you live, breathe or care about anything that living creatures have ever been or done on Earth.
So let humanity unite at last, albeit too late for many beautiful coral reef species, and let’s defeat anyone who denies climate change.