Let’s rewind a bit, to the week Trump won. At that moment, I was reeling from witnessing not one catastrophe, but two. And I don’t think we can understand the true danger of the Trump disaster unless we grapple with both of them.
As I mentioned, I was in Australia for work, but I was also very conscious that, because of the carbon involved in that kind of travel, I might not be able to return for a long time. So I decided to visit, for the first time in my life, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, a World Heritage Site and the earth’s largest natural structure made up of living creatures. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
I spent a lot of time underwater as a kid. My father taught me to snorkel when I was six or seven, and those are some of my happiest memories. There was always something amazing to me about the intimacy of the interactions with ocean life. When you first swim up to a reef, the fish mostly scatter. But if you hang out for a few minutes, they stop seeing you as an intruder and you become part of the seascape to them—they’ll swim right up to your mask, or nibble on your arm. As an anxious kid, I always found these experiences wonderfully dreamlike and peaceful.
As the Australian trip approached, I realized that my feelings about seeing the Reef were tied up in my being the mother of a four-year-old boy, Toma. As parents, we can sometimes make the mistake of exposing kids too early to all the threats and dangers facing the natural world. The first book about nature that a lot of children read is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, which is all about pollution and beautiful places being turned into garbage and all the animals dying and disappearing and choking. It’s really scary. I read it to Toma when he was two and watched the terror cross his face. And I thought, “No, this is completely wrong.” Now we read stories about fast-talking squirrels and books that celebrate nature’s beauty and wonder. Even if I know these books are about species that are on the brink of extinction, Toma doesn’t need to worry about that yet. I figure that my job is to try to create as many positive experiences as possible that will attach him to the natural world. You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it.
I also wanted to go to the Reef in my role as a journalist. Over the previous two years, something unprecedented in recorded history had happened. Because of record-breaking temperatures, more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been impacted by what’s known as a “mass bleaching event.” It’s hard to stress just how cataclysmic the bleaching has been. When coral is bleached, those beautiful, intensely colored creatures—an ecosystem as rich and teeming as the Amazon rain forest—turn ghostly and bone-white. Bleached coral can recover, if temperatures quickly go back down to normal levels. This time, they hadn’t gone back down—so almost a quarter of the Reef has died.
It’s worth underlining how little warming it took to bring about such a radical change. Ocean temperatures went up just one degree Celsius higher than the levels to which these incredible species are adapted, and that was enough for a massive die-off. Unlike many other climate change—related events, this wasn’t some dramatic storm or wildfire—just silent, watery death.
When we got to the Reef, there was still an air of unreality about the whole thing: the Port Douglas boats packed with tourists were still going out, the surface of the water was blue and beautiful, there were stretches of spectacular turquoise. But the ocean has a way of hiding humanity’s worst secrets, a lesson I first learned covering BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, and seeing how quickly the spill disappeared from the headlines once the oil began to sink, though the damage below continued unabated.
We went out on the Reef with a team of extraordinarily dedicated marine biologists (all of whom were emotionally shattered by what they had been documenting) and a film crew from the Guardian. We started filming the parts of the Reef that are still alive and we managed to get Toma to put on a snorkel. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to focus on the coral at all; he had just learned to swim and was wearing floaties. But the scientists were incredibly patient with him, and there were about five solid minutes when he really was able to pull it off and have a flash of true wonder—he “saw Nemo,” he saw a sea cucumber. I think he even saw a sea turtle. These parts of the Reef, the ones that are neither bleached nor dead, are only a fraction of the whole, but they are still glorious—a riot of life, of electric-colored coral and fish, sea turtles and sharks swimming by.
We didn’t take Toma on the boat when we filmed the dead and bleached parts of the Reef. And it was a graveyard. It was as if a cosmic switch had been flipped and suddenly one of the most beautiful places on earth had been turned into one of the ugliest. The coral bones were covered in a goo of decaying life—a brown goo. You just wanted to get away from there. Our wetsuits stank of death.
We chose to film the Reef in this state because, for many people, there is a sense that climate change is a distant crisis, that there’s still a bit of time to procrastinate before we get serious. We wanted to show that radical changes to our planet, including parts we count on to be brimming with life, are not far off in the future—they are happening right now. And the impacts are enormous, including the fact that roughly one billion people around the world rely on the fish sustained by coral reefs for food and income.
And I wanted to try to show the disaster through Toma’s eyes too. Because one of the most unjust aspects of climate disruption (and there are many) is that our actions as adults today will have their most severe impact on the lives of generations yet to come, as well as kids alive today who are too young to impact policy—kids like Toma and his friends, and their generation the world over. These children have done nothing to create the crisis, but they are the ones who will deal with the most extreme weather—the storms and droughts and fires and rising seas—and all the social and economic stresses that will flow as a result. They are the ones growing up amidst a mass extinction, robbed of so much beauty and so much of the companionship that comes from being surrounded by other life forms.