[Coral-List] Battling climate change versus coral reef restoration: widening the discussion

Kaufman, Leslie S lesk at bu.edu
Thu May 3 13:38:08 EDT 2018


Dear Colleagues,

Colin Foord and I have been having a digital conversation that might be of interest to a wider audience.  Colin wrote an interesting and provocative blog addressing the dialectic that is emerging over the best strategy for bettering the lot of coral reefs in this era of anthropogenic climate change.  The divide is between those who underscore the need to battle climate change, versus others investing heavily in manual coral reef restoration.  Of course, we have also been debating this issue here on Coral-List.

Colin’s blog can be found here:

https://medium.com/@coralmorphologic/on-super-corals-and-where-to-find-them-or-a-cautionary-tale-of-using-memes-in-science-1b4f6a9ace3c

A wider discussion could be very valuable, especially in light of the National Academy study, and particularly given that some of us are in the midst of planning a second international workshop on coral reef restoration for December of this year.

***

Dear Colin,

Dialectics are useful in communication, but can also undermine our understanding of a complex world.  Terry Hughes may be in shock from what has happened recently on the Great Barrier Reef but he is not wrong about the importance of addressing anthropogenic climate change.  If we bet on manual restoration as an exclusive tool for maintaining coral reefs we will fail; and if we bet on restoring the climate of 200 years ago there will be no coral reefs by the time we succeed.

As you yourself point out, in Miami something is “super” if it is way above other things in magnitude.  The magnitude we are interested in in the case of reef-building corals, is their survival.  Interventions to ensure the survival of a living system always have two components.  One is stabilizing and centering the environmental envelope over the reaction norms of the system, so that it can feasibly adapt.  I suppose we could call this achieving a super environment.  Terry wants us to pay attention to achieving a super environment.  The other is ensuring that that adaptation occurs, and also continues, allowing life to continue adaptively tracking its environment in perpetuity.  Any organism that can do this is pretty super in my book.  Those are our two super duper strategic options: ameliorate the environment, and accelerate adaptation.  Environmental amelioration itself is hierarchical, ranging from how we steward our watersheds, to how we steward the biosphere.  All of these pieces must be attended to and in place for us to succeed, and all have a limited scope within which they can be manipulated.  When they align, then all the necessary elements fall back into place and a coral reef re-emerges.  Or a forest, or a city, or an entire vanua…or a world.

In other words, seeing the whole at all times is more important than being super.  Let’s keep our eyes on the whole.  That, after all, is the goal in attempting to heal the world: to restore wholeness.  People had this figured out a very long time ago and it is a core mythology of all the world’s great religions for a reason.  So, may you have wholeness, and may we have coral reefs.

Les

Les Kaufman
Professor of Biology
Boston University Marine Program
Faculty Fellow, Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future
and
Conservation Fellow
Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science
Conservation International
lesk at bu.edu<mailto:lesk at bu.edu>





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