It is possible to cultivate corals in the sea like growing a nursery of trees to restore a burned forest. Cultivated corals grow faster than wild corals and can be outplanted to increase the healthy area of damaged reefs. Incorporated in projects of citizen science and ecotourism, this activity promotes environmental awareness about coral reefs, the marine ecosystem that is both the most biodiverse and the most threatened by global change.
When I finished by undergraduate studies in the 1980s, I met several top Spanish marine biologists to prospect my first job ever in academia. In all one-to-one interviews I had, I was asked what my interests were. And when I described that I wanted to study ways of modifying impacted marine ecosystems to restore their biodiversity, a well-known professor judged that my proposition was an inviable form of jardinería marina (marine gardening) ― those words made me feel embarrassed and have remained vivid in my professional imagination since. Neither the expert nor the young researcher knew at the time that we were actually talking about ecological restoration, a discipline that was being formalised exactly then by botanists in their pledge to recover pre-European conditions for North American grasslands (1).
Today, the term coral gardening encompasses the suite of methods to cultivate corals (tiny colonial jellyfish with an external skeleton and a carnivorous diet) and to outplant them into the wild to boost the growth of coral reefs following perturbations (2). In the face of the decline of coral reefs globally, due to the combination of climate change, pollution, and overfishing (3), this type of mariculture has gathered momentum in the last three decades and is currently being applied to more than 100 coral species in all the main reefs of our seas and oceans (4-6).
Read the rest of this entry »
The very worn slur of “neo-Malthusian”
7 09 2021After the rather astounding response to our Ghastly Future paper published in January this year (> 443,000 views and counting; 61 citations and counting), we received a Commentary that was rather critical of our article.
We have finally published a Response to the Commentary, which is now available online (accepted version) in Frontiers in Conservation Science. Given that it is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), I can repost the Response here:
In their comment on our paper Underestimating the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future, Bluwstein et al.2 attempt to contravene our exposé of the enormous challenges facing the entire human population from a rapidly degrading global environment. While we broadly agree with the need for multi-disciplinary solutions, and we worry deeply about the inequality of those who pay the costs of biodiversity loss and ecological collapse, we feel obligated to correct misconceptions and incorrect statements that Bluwstein et al.2 made about our original article.
After incorrectly assuming that our message implied the existence of “one science” and a “united scientific community”, the final paragraph of their comment contradicts their own charge by calling for the scientific community to “… stand in solidarity”. Of course, there is no “one science” — we never made such a claim. Science is by its nature necessarily untidy because it is a bottom-up process driven by different individuals, cultures, perspectives, and goals. But it is solid at the core. Scientific confluence is reached by curiosity, rigorous testing of assumptions, and search for contradictions, leading to many — sometimes counter-intuitive or even conflicting — insights about how the world works. There is no one body of scientific knowledge, even though there is good chance that disagreements are eventually resolved by updated, better evidence, although perhaps too slowly. That was, in fact, a main message of our original article — that obligatory specialisation of disparate scientific fields, embedded within a highly unequal and complex socio-cultural-economic framework, reduces the capacity of society to appreciate, measure, and potentially counter the complexity of its interacting existential challenges. We agree that scientists play a role in political struggles, but we never claimed, as Bluwstein et al.2 contended, that such struggles can be “… reduced to science-led processes of positive change”. Indeed, this is exactly the reason our paper emphasized the political impotence surrounding the required responses. We obviously recognize the essential role social scientists play in creating solutions to avoid a ghastly future. Science can only provide the best available evidence that individuals and policymakers can elect to use to inform their decisions.
We certainly recognise that there is no single policy or polity capable of addressing compounding and mounting problems, and we agree that that there is no “universal understanding of the intertwined socio-ecological challenges we face”. Bluwstein et al.2 claimed that we had suggested scientific messaging alone can “… adequately communicate to the public how socio-ecological crises should be addressed”. We did not state or imply such ideas of unilateral scientific power anywhere in our article. Indeed, the point of framing our message as pertaining to a complex adaptive system means that we cannot, and should not, work towards a single goal. Instead, humanity will be more successful tackling challenges simultaneously and from multiple perspectives, by exploiting manifold institutions, technologies, approaches, and governances to match the complexity of the predicament we are attempting to resolve.
Read the rest of this entry »Share:
Like this:
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: commentary, complex adaptive system, consumption, critique, human population, Malthusian, neo-Malthusian, over-population, overshoot, Population
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, climate change, demography, economics, education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, food, governance, human overpopulation, poverty, science, societies, sustainability