Coral

Time traveling. Think about the late 1940s—seventy years ago. Nursery school: infants singing in not-quite unison. “Frère Jacques”; “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Or that farmer’s wife / sightless mice / carving knife. Melody and rhyme swaddling meaning.

A few years later, these same children could sing the tunes at prescribed intervals. A lone voice, followed by another starting as the first continued on, these two trailed and joined by a third, the initial voice arriving back at the beginning to recommence. As if all three, one behind the other behind the other, had no end in sight. Finally, however, the first two voices in turn going silent. The third, now solitary, a thin reed, quavering in the dark, leading the listener to silence—and/or to peace. Completing the cycle.

Rounds: sequences, patterns. A kind of repetition compulsion. Soothing, haunting, shared. “White coral bells, upon a silver stalk. . .” An almost perpetual canon, this round from Boston way back when, my introduction to the word coral.

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In the tropics, where I’ve spent much ocean time the last five decades, there’s always been coral in abundance. Millions—or more than many millions—of transparent animals several millimeters in diameter and length comprise a colony. Each tiny individual invertebrate, a polyp, secretes a shell, which collectively comprise a skeleton—the reef. Plants inside the polyps capture sunlight and carbon dioxide, make sugars as nutrients, consume waste the corals excrete, and color the polyps’ tissue.

If, however, the ocean gets too warm, frenzied micro-algae produce toxic amounts of oxygen. As stressed polyps react, expelling their food symbionts, they starve to death. Plate / cauliflower / antler / finger / lace coral all then reveal the bridal white of their skeletons. Bridal, but only if you think of jilted Miss Havisham’s wedding dress in Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Bleached (Middle English blechen; Old English blæcean, derivative of blāc pale). A word evoking the human-domestic (laundry); human-at-play (bleachers in a ball park); or the beyond-human (animal bones / desert sun). And, now, a kind of euphemism, the human-caused. Bleached: same linguistic root as bleak—exposed, desolate, denuded.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “We are taking carbon... sequestered in the course of hundreds of millions of years and throwing it back into the atmosphere in a matter of centuries, or even decades, as carbon dioxide. This is not just warming the planet; it’s also changing the chemistry of the oceans.”

Endangerment findings / coastal dead zones / ocean acidification. Hy poxia / oxygen deficiency / oxygen less soluble in warmer water. Deglaciation / ocean suffocation. Sky falling.

Kill life in the ocean.

Kill the ocean.

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Bleached coral: starving, dying. Along the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, photographer Levin’s home, fifty percent of the coral recently whitened and died. Caused by rising water temperatures, by man-made rising water temperatures, Wayne would say.

Wayne, age seventy-four. Much of his black-and-white work argues for what is miraculous about life in the ocean. Revealing it or “deepening the mystery,” as he’s put it. But now, weighing ambiguities—photographers gotta photograph?—Wayne has pictures of bleached corals.

Do images of atrocities produce the intended dismay or shock? Aren’t we overexposed to such representations? Each of Wayne’s photographs of coral only recently alive, in any case, is a necropsy—“autopsy of the formerly living nonhuman.”

They say “modern” humans have existed some 3,000 millennia, coral reef ecosystems more than 200 million. These reefs can be hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long, support perhaps a quarter of all marine species. The largest biological structures on earth: rainforests of the sea, they’ve been called. But how save them from us, as we seem unable to save—seem bent on destroying—the far-more-visible rainforests?

Robert Socolow describes “a limited set of monumental tasks” but doable. Humans have “wedges” that can solve the climate problem: wind turbines, solar panels, fuel efficiency, nuclear power, stopping deforestation. And it’s true that progress toward cheap wind and solar power has been remarkable. Meanwhile, some of the hyper-wealthy are...