Exploring, and Saving, an Underwater Eden

I had the great good fortune to work with Dr. Gregory Stone of Conservation International and the New England Aquarium and Dr. David Obura of CORDIO East Africa (Coastal Oceans Rearch and Development in the Indian Ocean) on a splendid book, being published by the University of Chicago Press in December.

Underwater Eden: Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth details the story of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, or PIPA. In 1999, dive-boat operators Rob Barrell and Cat Holloway chanced to dive the waters off the remote Phoenix Islands. Located in the middle of the central Pacific, these low-lying coral atolls belong to the island nation of Kiribati. They are home to a tiny settlement of i-Kiribati on the island of Kanton, and hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds on the island of Rawaki. They have been home to a NASA listening station and an airstrip for PamAm's Clipper service. They may even be the final resting place of aviator Amelia Earhart.

In fact, Barrell's boat had been chartered by a group looking for evidence that Earhart's plane had gone down off Nikumaroro Island in the Phoenix chain. Anchored off Nikumaroro while their charter clients explored the island, Barrell and Holloway decided to dive the reefs. What they saw astonished them: spectacular coral reefs, schooling fish in mind-bloggling numbers, and healthy populations of sharks and invertebrates. Barrell and Holloway were experienced divers, used to seeing spectacular wildlife on charter dives in Fiji. Yet they were totally amazed by the Phoenix Island corals and their wildlife. It was a true underwater wilderness, seemingly untouched by human activity.

Barrell and Holloway surfaced, exhilarated and stunned by the health and beauty of the Phoenix Islands' reefs. They were convinced they had to act fast to preserve the pristine coral oasis, to prevent it from the overfishing and degradation common throughout the Pacific. They reached out to Stone, then with the New England Aquarium, explaining what they had seen, and inviting him to see it for himself. The result was the first New England Aquarium expedition to the Phoenix Islands in 2000. That first expedition set in motion a chain of events with profound consequences for the Phoenix Islands as well as the people of Kiribati. After additional expeditions in 2002 and 2005, the government of Kiribati moved in 2006 to protect the islands, establishing the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, within which most commercial fishing is banned. PIPA now protects over 408,000 square kilometers of ocean waters, as well as the islands, atolls, and seamounts within its borders.

More expeditions have followed. In 2010 PIPA was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first marine park to be so designated. Now the establishment of PIPA is sending ripples through the central Pacific. Other island nations are looking to PIPA as a model for their own protected areas, and a chain of new marine wildlife preserves is beginning to dot the map, an expanding oceanscape of hope. 

You can read the full story in the participants' own words in Underwater Eden and hear Stone's account in his 2010 TED Talk and follow the latest PIPA news on the Aquarium's PIPA blog.

The Curious Tactile and Conceptual Enchantment

I'm late to this party, because the crochet coral reef, brainchild of sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, has become something of a YouTube phenomenon. Since it began as a  project in L.A. in 2005 to recreate the Great Barrier Reef in wool, the crocheted reef has spawned sister reefs around the world, works of communal art combing hyperbolic forms, non-Euclidean geometry, grass-roots environmental activism, and feminine handicraft. I can't recall a case of science meeting art with such outre, outsize, and instantly captivating results. When I first saw these images, I gasped at the astonishing profusion of sponges, sea urchins, corals, anemones, and nudibranchs, knitted by girls and women from around the world, in forms  ever evolving, just like the real thing.

Here is Margaret talking about the project at a TED conference:

I once asked the mathematicians why it was that mathematicians thought this structure was impossible when sea slugs have been doing it since the Silurian age. Their answer was interesting. They said, "Well I guess there aren't that many mathematicians sitting around looking at sea slugs." And that's true. …We started out, Chrissy and I and our contributors, doing the simple mathematically perfect models. But we found that when we deviated from the specific setness of the mathematical code that underlies is the simple algorithm, crochet three, increase one. When we deviated from that and made embellishments to the code, the models immediately started to look more natural. And all of our contributors, who are an amazing collection of people around the world, do their own embellishments. As it were, we have this ever evolving, crochet taxonomic tree of life. …. So this project really has taken on this inner organic life of its own. There is the totality of all the people who have come to it. And their individual visions, and their engagement with this mathematical mode. … We live in a society that completely tends to valorize symbolic forms of representation -- algebraic representations, equations, codes. We live in a society that's obsessed with presenting information in this way, teaching information in this way. But through this sort of modality, crochet, other plastic forms of play, people can be engaged with the most abstract, high powered, theoretical ideas -- the kinds of ideas that normally you have to go to university departments to study in higher mathematics, which is where I first learned about hyperbolic space. But you can do it through playing with material objects.

The Wertheim sisters run a "play tank" (as opposed to a think tank) in Los Angeles. Margaret is a science writer who has written about the history of math and physics. Christine is a professor of art at California Institute of the Arts. Their Institute for Figuring is dedicated to the idea that we can gain surprising insights about intellectual puzzles in math and science by actually setting aside symbols and data sets for a moment and making a model we can handle. "The conceptual enchantment," as Margaret Wertheim told the New York Times, "is open to everyone."

For more about the crochet reef, see the links above. For a different but equally interactive and evolving model of the tree of life, visit the Encyclopedia of Life online or read up on the  blog of the latest New England Aquarium expedition to the Phoenix Islands to save one of the last remaining pristine reefs.