Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 11
WHERE IT9S WILD
The Line Island Archipelago
includes some of the most
remote islands on the planet.
what a baseline coral
reef could look like. We can recognize a healthy reef by
looking for big fish and big corals. But when people are
in the equation, we often see fewer big fish and we see
less coral. Now, to me, this set a standard, which was
that human habitation led to a decline and we could
only find “wild” in the absence of people. While the
basic narrative worked, there was something nagging
me, maybe a fish nipping at my ear. The underwater
world was telling me something different, that this
binary view of resource management wasn’t quite correct and that the absence of people wasn’t the only way
we would see “wild.”
The northern islands in the chain are the two uninhabited islands, Kingman and Palmyra. And there are
also two islands farther south that have small populations of the islands’ indigenous people, the I-Kiribati,
who are living off subsistence fishing and growing copra
to make coconut oil.
More recently, we have continued our efforts to
search for “wild” with a campaign called the 100
Island Challenge, which began in Micronesia working alongside some partners from the Micronesia
ER I K O BE RG / I S L A ND CO NS ER VATI O N
WE WERE THERE TO IDENTIFY
My binary view of “people bad,
no people good,” was kind of
blown up a little bit.
Challenge. We went to the island of Pohnpei and then
went offshore to the neighboring large atoll, Ant Atoll.
And on Ant Atoll, we swam underwater, and we took a
bunch of images to create landscape views of the coral
reef. What we saw was an intact, what I would call a
wild, coral reef. When we looked at the fish, the fish
were big, and we saw predators all over the place. But
this reef was one that was used, and is used, by Micronesians, by Pohnpeians, and has been for generations.
My binary view of “people bad, no people good,”
was kind of blown up a little bit. And the story came
down to something as straightforward as this: with
engagement and stewardship from a community
that cares about the natural resource, it is possible
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