Iain McCalman > Quotes

“Finally, on October 26, 1981, the Great Barrier Reef received what two of its finest historians, James and Margarita Bowen, have called a 'conservation climax' - World Heritage listing 'as the most impressive marine area in the world.' The Reef met all four of UNESCO's 'natural criteria.' It was an outstanding example of the earth's evolutionary history, an arena of significant ongoing geological processes and biological evolution, a superlative natural phenomenon, and a significant natural habitat containing threatened species of animals or plants with exceptional universal scientific value.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“. . . most humans were not so good at grasping aspects of nature that couldn't be clearly defined or placed into hierarchies, even though nature's products were 'seldom organized into species at all.' Now [Charlie Vernon] saw that, considered over vast geographical space and long swathes of geological time, coral species were malleable and temporary units, fluidly interlinked by their genes to other units, and forming ever-changing patterns. Corals had to be treated as continua, not as fixed, isolated units.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who've seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia's east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it's only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“When corals are exposed to temperatures two or three degrees hotter than their evolved maximum of eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, along with increased levels of sunlight, it's lethal. The powerhouse algae that live in the corals' tissues, providing their color and food through photosynthesis, begin to pump out oxygen at levels toxic to their polyp hosts. The corals must expel their symbiotic life supports or die. Row upon row of stark white skeletons are the result.

These damaged corals are capable of regeneration if water temperatures return to noral and water quality remains good, but the frequency and intensity of bleaching outbreaks is now such that the percentage of reef loss from coral deaths will increase dramatically.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook’s bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John “Charlie” Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“It was clear that the greatest coral diversity in the world was centered on a roughly triangular area within the Central Indo-Pacific, known ever since as 'The Coral Triangle.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“There are many corals that are not algae-assisted, but all reef-growing corals are. They need the extra energy generated by the algae's oxygen and sugars to grow fast enough to combat all the forces that work toward reef destruction.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

“Reefs, [Charlie Vernon] points out, are nature's archives and historians. They are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change