Coral Reefs Quotes

“Carefully avoided in many scientific discussions, conferences, government reports, and papers is the issue of human population. Indeed, in many conferences it is deemed to be a subject that is out of bounds. Rising numbers of people, and their desire for higher standards of living, put increasing demands on natural resources. More people are chasing a fixed or declining stock of reef resources: the area of the planet on which coral reefs can grow is limited, after all. In one sense it is really that simple. Some places have a human population doubling time of only 15 years, which reflects medical advances and its highly desirable accompaniments such as increased survival of people, especially infants. However, this means that current scientifically calculated solutions for a particular section of reef shoreline, for example, are negated when the population doubles. Thus the solution is no longer a scientific one, but has become largely a social and political one, and one of planning or zoning reefs and other resources as noted above. Human numbers are a part of the equation, and if we ignore any part of an equation then we cannot solve it.”
― Charles Sheppard, Coral Reefs: A Very Short Introduction

“Coral reefs are a good example of threshold and step-change behaviour. Reefs are subject to a wide variety of natural disturbances, from hurricanes to episodic outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. Over the last several decades human stresses - nutrient and sediment loadings from adjacent coastal areas, fishing and tourism - have begun to interact with natural disturbances to put reefs under increasing stress. Global change is adding even more stresses of a quite different nature. Increasing atmospheric CO2 is changing the carbonate chemistry in the surface waters of the ocean, making it more difficult for reef organisms to form their hard shells. At the same time, warming of the upper ocean is leading to widespread bleaching events. These new, global-scale stresses operate everywhere, and are both persistent and inexorably increasing in severity. Given sufficient pressure from these interacting local to global stresses, coral reefs can cross a threshold with widespread death of the coral and a rapid change to colourless algal beds.”
― Will Steffen, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: Executive Summary

“For the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative... and either these are part of the island, or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan