“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” People could either “assist” corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die. Anything else, in her view, was wishful thinking. “A lot of people want to go back to something,” she said. “They think, if we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was.
