Crocheted Future: Coral Reefs
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 13th 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 coral coral
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.
