Involvement

Crocheted Future:  Coral Reefs

 "Sea Sick" Independent Weekly, August 2012

Billions of years ago, Venus’ atmosphere was much like Earth’s but a runaway greenhouse effect boiled her oceans dry, leaving the planet’s surface waterless and its sky burning hot, thick with clouds of sulfuric acid. Sounds a little like July!

Although Venus is closer to the Sun than our Earth, this summer has felt dispiritingly Venusian: searing heat and suffocating humidity accompanied by smog alerts announcing critical levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen and sulfur oxides. Raging wildfires have charred Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Severe drought has shriveled crops throughout the U.S.’s breadbasket—the most expansive drought in more than a half-century.  And in a course of a month, the entirety of Greenland's massive ice sheet has turned to slush—the worst in 123 years.

While our planetary sister’s fate was sealed by its proximity to a growing sun—it is unlikely that Venusians aided in their planets demise as it appears that Earthlings are doing—but we can still learn something from our orbital sibling. Particularly, how changing oceans can radically transform the habitability of a planet. On Earth, coral reefs—the canary in the coalmine—have become the site for debates about the future of our planet and what can be said about that future.

In the July 13^th New York Times, Roger Bradbury wrote an op-ed titled “A World Without Coral Reefs.” About the planet’s reefs he wrote, they are “Zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory of collapse within a human generation.” Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are “unstoppable and irreversible forces” that have worked to destroy reefs. Know as “bleaching,” corals expel their symbiotic algae when stressed by the environment. Bleaching events have become global phenomena, and in some instances are so severe that corals cannot recover.

Coral are the largest biological structures on Earth. As “foundation species,” they literally create habitats for a phenomenal diversity of marine species. They provide nearly half a trillion dollars a year in resources and services, and reefs relied upon by over 500 million people for food, coastal protection and livelihoods. The effect of their collapse will not be insignificant.

But as troubling as this catastrophe is, Bradbury is equally concerned that environmentalists, scientists and government agencies are unwilling to accept that there “is no hope in saving the global coral reef ecosystem.” Hope, he argues, has enabled us to misallocate resources by wishing for a future that will never come to past, while people around the globe are already suffering from ailing coral ecosystems.

Is hope an unsustainable luxury?

In 2005, sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim created the Crochet Coral Reef Project. Responding to the plight of the Great Barrier Reef, they collaborated to create artwork that would provoke communities to ask: What can we do about dying coral reefs?  Through yarns, the sisters pulled loops through loops, wrapping and knotting, building out a fibrous reef: woolly polyps stitched to other polyps in large fabricated colonies. Like the Great Barrier Reef, this knotted entanglement harbors loopy sea lilies, curlicue sponges, crenelated sea slugs, fringed anemones and hooked starfish. The project has succeeded in generating involvement.

Starting in Los Angeles, the crocheted reefs have now grown to include satellites across the U.S., and to Japan, Australia, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, South Africa and Latvia. Working in a traditionally feminine handicraft, these artists have built beautiful objects that examine the troubled future of coral reefs through meaningful and sustained collaboration.“Toxic Reef” is one such example: “The point of the Toxic Reef is to focus attention on our daily consumption of plastic and how much of it we discard” much of which goes into oceans. The material for this reef is "yarn" made from cutting up used plastic shopping bags—which mimic jellyfish and are often ingested by turtles—as a synthetic analogue to the delicate fiber forms. The plasticized effect looks slick, as if it were glistening in slime—a foreshortened horizon of oceans to come.

Instead of giving up on sick and dying corals, as Roger Bradbury proposes, the Crochet Coral Reef project stitches through ecological disaster, neither denying desperate conditions nor proposing cataclysm, but rather mobilizing creative action at local and global scales. The future these projects are helping to create is in the form of a question: How do we remain responsible in the face of potential disaster?

I am not optimistic that corals will survive another fifty years. But, call me a prisoner of hope; it seems to me that humble hope—hope without denial—is necessary in refining our sense of responsibility as we confront the possibility of catastrophe. When we press close to these problems, even in woolly ways, we encounter our indebtedness to other organisms through our shared life on Earth.  Corals remind us that bodies are dynamically formed in relation to their habitats and other cohabitants. Like corals, the relationships that make us up in the flesh constitute our debt, our responsibility; through our shared emergence we owe each another.

But here is the snag. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are acidifying the oceans, inhibiting the growth of coral skeletons and weakening the calcium-carbonate bones of reefs worldwide. In the Caribbean, high water temperatures and disease outbreaks have already killed 80 percent of the region’s coral, reducing reefs to ruin. The relationships that make coralcoral are now unmaking coral, are killing them. If coral teaches us about the reciprocal nature of life, then how do we stay obligated to environments—many of which we made unlivable—that now sicken us?

I don’t know how to answer these questions, but it seems to me that the Wertheim sisters’ crocheted coral reef gets us started. Their project instructs us on the role perception has in the constellated processes of coral decline. From the creative experience of crocheting a furbelowed coral to gestating satellite reefs around the world, being inside the problem is the condition of problem solving. These crocheters stitch into the crisis in an effort to materialize both our culpability and our responsibility to coral ecosystems. They are not solving the problem of coral collapse, but they are fabricating alternate ways to understand our relationship with these ailing systems.

   It may be that in half a century oceans will look Precambrian, as Roger Bradbury predicts, with jellyfish and algae colonizing all warm, oxygen-deprived waters. Perhaps Earth will follow Venus, becoming uninhabitable due to a rampaging greenhouse effect.  Or maybe, we will rebuild reefs, terraforming damaged habitats or constructing alternate homes for the ocean’s refuges. Whatever the conditions of our future, we remain obligate partners with oceans. Even at the end of oceans.