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July 25 - July 25, 2022
An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.
It is a sign of the times that the Corps finds itself increasingly involved in backward-looping, second-order efforts, like managing the electric barriers on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.
everybody was concerned about all the chemicals in the water. They weren’t nearly as concerned about non-native species, which is unfortunate.”
“Bighead and silver carp don’t just invade ecosystems. They conquer them.” On
“Many species are endangered or already extinct. And now we’ve essentially dumped the world’s most efficient freshwater molluscivore on some of the most endangered mollusks.”
The two great basins abut each other, but they are—or were—distinct aquatic worlds. There was no way for a fish (or a mollusk or a crustacean) to climb out of one drainage system and into the other.
It was a lot easier to imagine changing the river once again—with electricity and bubbles and noise and anything else anyone could dream up—than changing the lives of the people around it.
The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In
Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teenagers.
there was no there there anymore.
Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.
states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.
This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.
by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution. —
When the Mississippi flooded, they sought higher ground. When it shifted quarters, they did, too.
Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had instead washed out to sea.
dead. The authority’s official mission is to implement “projects relative to the protection, conservation, enhancement, and restoration of the coastal area of the state,” which is a nice way of saying it’s supposed to prevent the region from disappearing.
“We’re in an uphill battle against sea-level rise and subsidence,”
“The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed.”
“It’s to maximize the sediment and minimize the fresh water.”
“Pumping is a big part of the issue,” Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. “It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive feedback loop.” —
Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.
Since Billiot was a child, Isle de Jean Charles has shrunk from thirty-five square miles to half a square mile—a loss in area of more than ninety-eight percent.
In the Death Valley area alone, there were at one time eleven species and subspecies of pupfish. One is now extinct, another is believed to be extinct, and the rest are all threatened.
What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence.
Whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves.
was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.
In the brave new world of the Anthropocene, the divisions keep multiplying.
people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals.
According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents “the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the second greatest in all of North America.”
As Mary Austin observed in 1903, it is the “destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.”
“I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.”
People would often ask him why he spent so much time on such insignificant animals. “What good are pupfish?” they’d demand. “What good are you?” Pister would respond.
Two of the region’s dominant reef-builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn coral—were being devastated by an ailment that became known as white-band disease.
Over the course of the 1980s, something like half
Compounding the dangers of warming were profound changes in ocean chemistry. Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions were making the seas more acidic.
“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”
“These low hollow coral islands bear no proportion to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise,” he wrote. How, he wondered, was such an arrangement possible?
his first major scientific work, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.
light. An atoll, Darwin observed, was a kind of a monument to a lost island, “raised by myriads of tiny architects.”
evolution, or “transmutation,” as the phenomenon was referred to in his day.
“We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages,”
What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?
they realized they’d both become interested in the mechanisms corals use to cope with environmental stress. Could these somehow be harnessed to help them deal with climate change?
Terry Hughes, a coral biologist at Australia’s James Cook University, took an aerial survey of the damage and showed it to his students. “And then we wept,” he tweeted.
their symbionts that breaks down. As water temperatures rise, the algae go into overdrive and begin to give off dangerous levels of oxygen radicals. To protect themselves, the corals expel their algae and, as a consequence, turn white. If a heat wave breaks in time, corals can attract new symbionts and recover. If it’s too prolonged, they starve to death.
“All the climate models suggest that extreme heat waves will become annual events by mid- to late-century on most reefs in the world,” Van Oppen told me. “Rates of recovery are not going to be fast enough to cope with that. So I do think we need to intervene and help them.
So I see assisted evolution as filling that gap, being a bridge between now and the day when we’re really holding down climate change or, hopefully, reversing it.”
Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.
mass spawning, billions of polyps release in synchrony tiny, bead-like bundles. These bundles, which contain both sperm and eggs, float to the surface and break apart. Most of the gametes become fish food or simply drift away. The lucky ones meet a gamete of the opposite sex and produce a coral embryo.
