6 May 2022. Coral | Utopias
Saving coral from climate change. // In search of real utopias.
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1: Saving coral from climate change
Coral covers 1% of the oceans, but is home to a quarter of all marine life. Like so much else on the planet, it is threatened by global warming and by disease. Half of the world’s coral has disappeared. In some places, such as Florida, a much higher proportion has gone.
So far, so depressing.
But Benji Jones at Vox has an encouraging story about how marine biologists are helping coral to rebuild:
a growing number of organizations are racing to plant corals in damaged reefs, just as conservation groups plant trees in degraded forests. And so far, it seems to be working. They’ve restored hundreds of thousands of corals in places like Florida and Indonesia, and groundbreaking scientific research is helping to fortify these creatures against rising temperatures and other threats.
So first, some coral biology:
Each one is made up of hundreds to thousands of animals — yes, animals — living together in a big community, like a densely packed apartment building. Known as polyps, the animals have tentacles armed with stinging cells and a mouth, and they work together as one superorganism.
Polyps ingest algae, which provides sugar in exchange for nitrogen, carbon dioxide. They grow by cloning themselves, but this is a slow process, sometimes only a few metres per year.
(Coral off the coast of Malaysia. Photo Nazir Amin, via Wikipedia, CC BY SA 2.0)
But it turns out that if you break the coral into small pieces, it grows a lot faster—one of those helpful scientific discoveries that we learned by accident. The scientist who discovered it thought he’d accidentally killed a rare coral when he was cleaning out a tank.
(David Vaughan) checked the broken pieces again two weeks later, and his eyes widened: Each fragment had grown into a dime-sized colony of its own. What would normally take two years took only two weeks.
Vaughan later tried this approach — known as microfragmentation — on nearly 20 species of Atlantic coral. “It worked on all of them,” said Vaughan, who has since pioneered the approach for restoration. He began growing 600 corals a day (instead of in six years) at Mote, where he led the International Center for Coral Reef Research and Restoration. “We started running out of tank space.”
Vaughan now runs a non-profit called Plant A Million Corals.
Of course, there’s a catch. When you break up the corals, you’re effectively cloning them, so they have no genetic diversity—which means that they are more vulnerable to disease.
If you can get coral reefs to breed, you can regain genetic diversity. In the wild they do this by spawning, which remains one of those mysteries of nature:
Corals have no eyes or brains (not even the brain corals!) yet they’re able to synchronize spawning across large swaths of the ocean, like cicadas that somehow know when to erupt in unison from the ground. Perhaps even more remarkable, spawning tracks along the phases of the moon.
But—and you knew that there would be another but: because of their declining numbers, coral reefs are now sometimes so far apart that spawning doesn’t work very well. The egg and the sperm are just too far apart.
So researchers have been helping:
At nighttime during spawning season, scientists will actually boat out to sea and drape a mesh tent over a colony to capture that individual’s sperm and eggs, and then mix it with the spawn of another individual, either in a lab or in a container at sea.
But even then, you can miss it: spawning can last just 20 minutes.
Fortunately, researchers have also discovered that if you can recreate the right conditions in the lab—mimicking the conditions of the wild reef, “from the moonlight to the water temperature”, corals will spawn. The Coral Restoration Foundation also grows new coral in nurseries in the ocean.
But—and you knew there would be another but:
It’s not enough just to help the coral breed more quickly. They also need to be helped to adapt to changing ocean conditions, in which the water gets warmer and the more acidic, and diseases spread more quickly. So the scientists are doing that too. There’s different approaches, but they seem to be working. The result is that there’s been huge growth in the number of coral restoration projects:
Planting and nurturing coral to save the world’s reefs is an imperfect solution. It’s expensive, challenging to scale up, and does nothing to address the most important problem: climate change.
Yet it seems clear these efforts are helping oceans heal, and they’ve only just begun. A decade ago, you could count restoration initiatives on one hand, according to Miller, and now, there are hundreds. “It’s just been a tremendous explosion,” she said.
Funding is following. I’ve skated over the top of this piece here, and it’s well worth going and looking at it directly, if only because the photos are just plain lovely and there’s some magic video—including one by marine biologist Hanna Koch of the moment that coral spawn—and the marine scientists the writer meets are enthusiastic and engaging.
We’re going to need lots of these initiatives, on land and sea, if we’re going to contain the worst effects of the Sixth Great Extinction. But at least, reading this piece, I had the feeling that this other world might be possible.
2: In search of real Utopias
Over the past year or so the researcher Malaika Cunningham has been writing a series of posts called ‘Collecting Real Utopias’ on the Artsadmin and CUSP blogs inspired by the late Erik Olin Wright’s idea of ‘real utopias’.
Olin argued that ‘argued that optimism is necessary for the world to be transformed’, and that the idea of ‘real utopias’ carried within it a tension between dreams and practice. Cunningham also quotes the work of Ruth Levitas on utopias:
because of their practical impossibility, their purely imaginative existence, they make a useful tool with which to re-imagine society. The impossibility of utopia allows us to think beyond practical considerations and focus on radical visions of possible futures. For Levitas, utopia is an aspiration – never reached and always changing – which challenges us to be constantly working towards more just versions of the world.
The posts that follow from this introduction are accounts of such real utopias, whether practical or (in at least one case) literary. They walk through things like participatory politics, land justice, food, and so on. There’s quite a few art projects in here. I’m going to pick up a few stories of these from her blogpost series.
(Illustration by Hannah Roastm via Artsadmin)
Jennifer Farmer and Zoe Palmer, and their piece, the dream(ing) field lab is... a key project I want to discuss in relation to land justice. This work brings together a group of women and femmes of African heritage to gather in a ‘rural idyll’—to embark on collective dreaming, ‘to sit in the space of imagination’ and envision the world they want to live in. This project draws on Jennifer and Zoe’s experience as ecologists and herbalists, as well as their work as artistic facilitators, playwrights, and directors—blending these two fields of expertise to create a simultaneously land-focussed and artistic space. The symbiotic relationship between ritual, artistic practice, and land is complex and ancient… No utopia is an island, and this work emerges from, and contributes to, African cosmologies, ecowomanism, and afrofuturism() (also see Octavia’s Brood).
And from land to food:
There are also many, many wonderful real utopian projects working at these issues, particularly exploring the intersectionality between social and environmental injustices in this field. Some projects of varying scale which are worth highlighting and celebrating, include: the May Project Gardens in London, Land In Our Names(or LION) across the UK, the Guerrilla Grafters (worldwide), and Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (in English—the Landless Peasants Movement) in Brazil. Each of these projects are challenging the current extractivist and unequally distributed food system – often using some arts-based methodologies—and, in so doing, modelling alternative ways of doing things.
Cunningham also celebrates some intriguing small projects during residencies in Scotland and the north of England. The smallest of these was in Thurso, on the northern tip of mainland Scotland—the Thurso East Honesty Box.
This tiny project is led by a woman called Amanda who has fallen in love with plants, foraging, and herbalism. Outside her house, she has set up a small honesty box housing seasonal wares – elderberry shrub, meadowsweet cordial, and rosehip syrup. She has designed labels for them. The box has a tendency to blow away in a strong gale. Locals pay-as-they-can to cover the costs of jars, non-foraged ingredients, a contribution to Amanda’s time... You could hear the excitement in her voice at realising the hawthorn hedge just outside her door was both edible and medicinal. Her desire to share this excitement with her neighbours is why the honesty box exists.
The series is continuing, and the latest edition was written in March. She acknowledges the difficulty of writing about utopias in such times, but turns to a passage she found in Rebecca Solnit’s recent book about George Orwell, and the English writer’s love of gardening. Solnit writes:
Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed.
Of course, Orwell was critical of the programmatic utopianism of the totalitarian governments of the 1930s, and these have given utopias a bad name. But our modern understanding of utopias is different:
I want to argue that utopias as they are understood in this blog (i.e. riffing from Wright’s concept of real utopias, and Levitas’ utopia as method), may be more like Orwell’s roses. They are imperfect, they are imaginative, they are joyful and wild, they are shamelessly emotive, and they are growing up through the cracks in extractivist capitalism.
It’s striking how many of the ‘real utopia’ projects she mentions in these posts come from arts projects of different kinds, testing for the cracks and the edges. The posts carry an echo of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote. But maybe the second half of that quote about utopia is more relevant here:
”(W)hen Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Update
I wrote here yesterday on Jill Lepore’s historical perspective on the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on abortion. Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter Letters From An American also had a historical perspective on the draft:
This moment seems to echo the days after the 1857 Dred Scott v Sandford decision took away voters’ ability to stop the spread of human enslavement. Like the draft decision we have seen this week, that decision was clearly political and drew on appallingly bad history to reach a conclusion that gave extraordinary power to the country’s wealthiest men. Horace Greeley, the prominent editor of the New York Daily Tribune, wrote that the Dred Scott decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”
j2t#310
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