Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 13
E NV IRO NM E NT
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RE W I L D I NG
I started to think more about the human legacy of our
relationship with the ocean.
Our current scientific endeavor has been finding
a lot of great evidence that these changes on land are
propagating in the sea. There’s a big benefit to having
seabirds—that brings more nutrients into the ocean.
There’s a big influence of watershed management—
preventing soil from just filling the ocean ecosystem
and sedimenting what is living nearby. And even diseases can be propagated from cats to seals in a really
dramatic form of epidemiology that transcends both
land and sea. There’s a lot that we know is happening
that connects the land and the sea and we’re in the
midst of a really exciting scientific period as we try
to think about how those connections scale up from
individual dynamics to entire community transitions.
between land and sea. Imagine our restored reef again
and now, pop your head out of the water. The once-bare
island looks like we expect it to look; the vegetation has
grown back and the watershed is functioning the way
it did in its wild state. And there are a lot more of the
seabirds and other animals that are the connector species between the land and the sea.
Yet I want to remind us all that the story is not so
simple. We can’t guarantee that every island will see the
same change if we eradicate invasive species. Natural
history is an art form. Understanding the variability of
coral reefs, or any natural ecosystems, is an art form.
They’re all different; they all have a story to tell. And
that’s why we need different communities to come
together, in different environments and across different
islands to work with scientific communities and other
stakeholders to make a new community committed
to island stewardship. We need to recognize that each
of these islands and reefs has its own story, and needs
its own level of support and caring to restore it to a
wild state.
So let’s look underwater. Let’s share our experiences
together and use technology much in the same way we
use satellites or drone imagery to see the land, to see
underwater and experience it together. Fishermen say
they know what the fish are telling them. But the reef
doesn’t have a voice. Technology that helps us see the
reef and know its history gives it a voice to tell its story.
We have to have that voice, we have to let that fish nip
us in the ear and make us think about things. We need
to hear the story together.
I THINK ABOUT ISLAND RESTORATION visually. Imag-
ine an island that’s been denuded because of invasive
species. We have very little vegetation, very few seabirds, and our watersheds are filled with dirt. And when
it rains, the deluge fills the nearshore environment,
with, in this case, red sediments that could bury reefs.
Imagine that we dive underwater, and let’s see what its
coral reef looks like. In this case, at this point in time,
we may see that there’s very few corals, we may see that
there’s algae in the place of where you would have calcifiers—the things that are building the island itself. And
in this case, we may not see what we envision as “wild.”
But now, let’s fast forward. We can imagine what
this island can look like as we transition over to a more
intact ecosystem. What do we care about underwater?
We care about these wild characteristics, we care about
there being more coral growing there, we care about
there being habitat for the food that we care about—the
fishes. And we also care about resilience: The resilience
in the face of climate change.
We’re talking today about the local impacts that
people can have. Let’s recall that there is this existential threat that we have of climate change. We can’t
fight it alone. And we have to consider the connections
Stuart Sandin is the Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and
Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San
Diego. His research focuses on community ecology, investigating
how organisms interact in complex marine communities.
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