The Reef Is Not a Spreadsheet

The plan requires that the reef be understood as a single system with a single deadline, and that what is done about it be decided from the deadline backwards. But a reef is used and known in thousands of particular places, and the knowledge of how a given reef behaves is held by the people who fish it, dive it and rest it. That knowledge does not appear in a global projection. The people who hold it were not the authors of this one.

I should be clear about what I am not saying. The warning from UN advisers and scientists, that almost every shallow-water coral reef faces ecosystem collapse by 2075, is a serious piece of technical knowledge. It comes from measurement and modelling, and it is the kind of statement that can only be made from far away. No fisherman in any of the eighty countries concerned could have produced it, and none should be asked to doubt it on the strength of what they see from a boat. The temperature of the sea is not a matter of local opinion.

What needs examining is the next step. A finding of this kind does not stay a finding for long. It turns into a mandate, and the mandate tends to take a particular form. I will offer this as an inference, not as a report of anyone’s intention, because the event itself tells us only of a warning. The form is a common purpose: a planetary project with targets, phases and an end-date, to which every reef-using community is enrolled as a member. The strongest case for this deserves stating fairly. The cause is global, the timescale is half a century, and a problem of that size cannot be met by a scatter of local customs, some of which helped degrade reefs in the first place. On this view, only an explicit, coordinated plan is equal to the scale of the danger.

I accept most of this, and it still misses the point. The heating of the oceans does call for explicit agreement among states, which is properly a matter of rules between parties, and no tacit skill will lower the temperature of the Coral Triangle. The error lies elsewhere. It is to suppose that because the cause is global, the response at the reef must be global in character as well: drafted centrally, phrased in general terms, and administered by people whose acquaintance with any particular reef comes from the report.

The word “almost” is where this goes wrong. A projection of near-universal collapse is a statement about averages, and reefs do not die on average. They die unevenly. Some patches are flushed by cooler water, some are shaded, and some recover faster for reasons nobody has yet written down. Over the coming decades the practical question will rarely be whether reefs are collapsing. It will be which piece of this reef is worth protecting this season, and from what. That is a question of particulars, and the people best placed to answer it are those who already notice when the parrotfish have moved, or when a channel has gone quiet. Much of what they know cannot be put into a sentence at all. It sits in a habit of looking, learned by following an older relative along a reef flat at low tide.

Consider a woman on one of these coasts, whose family has for generations closed a section of reef to fishing when the catch there thins. Nobody has told her the year 2075. She has a rule all the same, and it was never written down because it never needed to be. Her rule is not superstition dressed up as tradition. It is a summary of many failed and successful seasons, worn smooth by use. A programme arriving with the global deadline in hand will tend to see one of two things in her. Either she is a stakeholder to be consulted, or she is an obstacle to be compensated. It is much less likely to see what she actually is, which is the existing management.

This is the gap I have been trying to locate. The forecast brings knowledge of the whole. The response it invites brings that same kind of knowledge to bear on the parts, where it is weakest. What lies in between is the knowledge of the parts themselves. That knowledge cannot be gathered into a report without losing the quality that made it useful, which was its attachment to a place and to the person doing the noticing.

There is a quiet comedy in the arrangement, if one cares to look. The most precise global instrument we have tells us, with great confidence, that the outcome will be uneven. The institutions that receive the news then reach for a uniform reply, because a uniform reply is the only kind they know how to fund. They will measure their success by how faithfully the plan is carried out, and the reef will be measured by something else.

What the practice itself suggests is not inaction. Emissions should be handled by states, through agreement, which is where explicit rules belong. At the reef, the habits that already exist for resting, closing and watching should be strengthened, and not replaced by a design that treats them as raw material. Where those habits have decayed, they should be restored from what neighbouring communities still remember, rather than reinvented from a manual. None of this will save every reef. Nothing on offer will do that.

But in some year well before 2075, a consultant will arrive at a reef with a laminated map showing it as already lost. A woman will step past him into the water, because she knows that the coral off the far point is still alive.