[Coral-List] Seasoned perspectives

[Dennis Hubbard]

Hi Steve. All good and thoughtful questions. Being a scientist does nothing
to make me immune to all the emotions of sport divers watching their
favorite dive sites in "decline". However, as a geologist, I have the
advantage of seeing this as part of the larger evolutionary process; we are
just one more natural perturbation that the rest of nature has to deal with
or disappear.

Reefs of varying types have come and gone over millennia. If we think of
ourselves as just one more geologic-scale threat, it's hard to imagine our
impact being anything akin to the asteroid impact at the end of the
Cretaceous. Our impacts are unique and probably faster than most past
geological phenomena. And, it is likely that reefs will not return to their
former glory until we are gone. But - we will be gone and something will
return to take the place of scleractineans - and us as an ecological
factor. Early reefs were something akin to pond slime but they put the
oxygen into the atmosphere that eventually allowed *Homo stupidus* to
evolve - in the words of Samuel Clemens, "no good deed shall go
unpunished". Initially we had rugose corals and other smallish morphologies
that were likewise replaced by forms that were replaced themselves... all
without our "help". The loss of myriad species due the the K-T impact
cleared the way for scleractineans - was that "good" or "bad"? In all of
this, we are a blip that will disappear. If there is any justice, it is
that our demise will be of our own doing and thinking of ourselves as
anything other than a species competing with others leads to all the angst
that is our just price for what we do.

Best for the holidays,

Denny

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 1:18 PM Steve Mussman <sealab at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi Dennis,
>
> Do you suppose science allows for some level of emotional involvement?
> The term “ecogrief” comes to mind.  I’m suffering from it and I imagine so
> are multitudes of others. Scientists can try to shield themselves against
> any intrusion on their objectivity, but they can’t be totally immune. I
> would think those with more well-developed baselines would have greater
> susceptibility.  I know that witnessing changes firsthand over many decades
> now has had a profound impact on my perspective. That and the time
> restraints that come with aging leads me to believe that seasoned
> researchers might be inclined to harbor somewhat of a greater sense of
> urgency.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent from EarthLink Mobile mail
>
>
> On 12/18/19, 6:30 PM, Dennis Hubbard <dennis.hubbard at oberlin.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Steve:
>
>
> I'm sure you are familiar with this but, just in case, papers by Jackson,
> Paulay and others have eloquently addressed the facts that a) reef decline
> has taken different pathways since before Columbus and b) different
> generations have different perspectives of decline (both magnitude and
> causes) because they  have different baselines than those on either side of
> them chronologically (the often discussed "shifting baseline syndrome").
> More recently, this has been complicated by advocacy groups arguing for the
> primacy of their "fix" - no tourism, vegetarianism, exclusion zones vs
> better advertising that stepping on corals is bad for them; we've had
> plenty of examples on the listserve. In the "old days", we had the luxury
> of a slowly advancing problem (in fact, most of us probably thought reefs
> were "fine" when we started out careers decades ago. I can't prove it, but
> I strongly suspect that the "pristene" reefs I worked on in the 70s were a
> lot more negatively impacted than I or my colleagues knew. Just go back and
> look at the proceedings from Bob Ginsburg's volume based on "reef status"
> studies by the major reef workers at that time. I have vivid memories of
> everyone bemoaning the declining numbers in their long-term surveys. I
> asked the simple question, "How many people in this room, when choosing the
> place they would study for the rest of their career, say "I'm going to look
> at the crummiest most degraded reef I can find?" The end result then (as I
> suspect is still the case today to some degree) is that those long-term
> sites may have has no place to go but down.
>
>
> Just think about how our approach to "reef study" has changed over the
> careers of we "geezer scientists". The first two ISRS meetings were
> dominated by advancing our scientific understanding of ecological processes
> on modern reefs. Then, as we started to see things changing, we invented
> monitoring and session after session in meeting after meeting were
> dedicated to advocating the best way to create data on quantify  the
> changing state of reefs (most of these focused on counting corals) - point
> counts versus quadrats versus chain transects... and on.... and on).
> Increasingly, we have shifted from broadly describing reefs to measuring
> specific communities, to monitoring how they have changed and now
> "management". We argued over "no take" zones versus "management schemes"
> and have now broadened the discussiion to argue for specific management
> scenarios as we realize that by the time we figure out how to quantify how
> bad things really are, there will be no reefs left to manage.
>
>
> So, to answer your question ("do you suppose that there is some measurable
> difference in attitude and approach between the more “seasoned” veterans of
> coral reef wars and those just entering the fray?"), "just look at the
> liastserve over the past 3-4 years". To fittingly quote "Firesign Theater"
> (for the younger crowd, that's the early Holocene version of Saturday Night
> Live", "we're all bozos on this bus.
>
>
> Denny
>
>
>
>
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>
>
> --
>
> Dennis Hubbard
>
> Chair, Dept of Geology-Oberlin College Oberlin OH 44074
>
> (440) 775-8346
>
>
>  "When you get on the wrong train.... every stop is the wrong stop"
>
>  Benjamin Stein: "Ludes, A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream"
>


-- 
Dennis Hubbard
Chair, Dept of Geology-Oberlin College Oberlin OH 44074
(440) 775-8346

* "When you get on the wrong train.... every stop is the wrong stop"*
 Benjamin Stein: "*Ludes, A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream*"