HOT GLOBE™ CHATS WITH DR. NANCY KNOWLTON: The Coral Queen of Climate Hope, Co-founder of #oceanoptimism and Author of the Bestselling Oceans Book, "Citizens of the Sea"

"Why Do We Have Trouble Talking About Success In Ocean Conservation? Despite what you’ve read in the news, there’s still hope for a future with a healthy ocean"--and Planet

Why Do We Have Trouble Talking About Success in Ocean Conservation?

[Great News, Sharks Are Coming Back, Many of Them, I Mean, Gulp]

HOT GLOBE™— NANCY, let me ask you a harder question first. In our earlier Substack columns, Ram Ramanathan was pretty draconian in his estimate of how many years—eight, give or take three at the margins—we have left before a 1.5 degree tipping point leads to an “oh, shit!” moment in public consciousness, and Ralph Keeling in a lower-key way basically said the same thing, without putting a date to it,

so why are you, one of the most knowledgeable people on climate and oceans in the world, so hopeful?

Nancy Knowlton—I would describe myself as not Pollyanna-hopeful. I’m really well aware of the facts.  I basically consider this a race between the good and the bad, but it used to be overwhelmingly bad news with little in the way of thinking about how we could actually ever get out of this mess. What makes me hopeful is that so many of the solutions are already there, and some of them are really starting to be implemented at scale. Electric vehicles are really an amazing success story, light bulbs for that matter; the rapidly falling costs of doing things with renewable energy.

Volts

Before, I think the situation was pretty grim, when you had to envision a world in which you needed government subsidies in order to make renewable energy competitive. That's no longer the case. Renewable energy is competitive and much cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most places. That just changes the game altogether.

(Knowlton on a rock. © N. Knowlton)

“We're in a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis so this is not easy. I don't mean to underestimate the challenges, but we do have the technology already to make a huge dent in the problem. It's really a question of the political will to do it. Weirdly, the war in Ukraine has re-escalated the use of coal to get through the winter but it's also dramatically escalated the desire to move to renewable energy for energy security reasons. Things are going on all over the world which are pointing in the right direction for renewable energy, which is the key to getting us past all this.

“Things will get worse before they get better but in the absence of viable alternatives to fossil fuels we were really doomed. We're not in that state anymore. Whether we'll actually do it fast enough or not is hard to say.”

HG™—What about the oceans? As a scientist, you pioneered, along with some others, the genetic understanding of corals and reef perseverance—

Knowlton—Actually, coral reefs are probably the hardest thing to feel optimistic about simply because there's so many different things that they get upset by. Climate change—they're so sensitive to small increases in temperature and they're super sensitive to pollution and overfishing and just you name it, they're sensitive to it.

A bleached coral reef waiting at death’s door for the final indignity: alga-fication. (Source: Kathleen Haughney, Florida State University)

“To the extent that we make progress on climate that's good news for corals in the long term. In the short term, the most important thing to do while we turn this energy ship around is to continue protection and restoration efforts. Some people really poo poo restoration since it’s true people lost maybe 50% of all the corals on the planet, so there’s limits and it'll get worse, as I said, before it gets better but the move to increase protected areas is really gathering steam.

[Knowlton was a major influence in convincing the Bush 2 White House to set aside what was the world’s largest marine protected area, and is part of the push for the increasingly successful “30 for 30” movement to set aside 30 % of the world’s oceans by 2030, spearheaded by her colleague Enric Sala, the National Geographic Explorer.]

“The goal in the ocean at least for coral reefs is really just keeping all the pieces from disappearing altogether. In the Caribbean right now the biggest worry is this horrible tissue wasting disease decimating lots of corals and pushing some to the brink of extinction. The tissues just fall off the skeleton and really quickly. It’s going to have to be all hands on deck trying to minimize the damage in preparation for an eventual recovery. That's how I look at it

HG™—Other restoration successes?

Knowlton—Oysters, alewives, bald eagles, menhaden, herons, see “Once an Open Sewer, New York Harbor Now Teems with Life. Thank the Clean Water Act”; in Virginia the wildly successful return of seagrass [which sequesters carbon,] also scallops and other fisheries. Sharks in some places are starting to come back and some whales, not all of them. The North Atlantic right-whales are a disaster where I live in Maine but there are places where whales are pretty close to pre-hunting abundance, humpbacks in the Southern Ocean near Australia and Antarctica, for instance. Two-thirds of the sea turtle populations are on the trajectory of recovery. By themselves each story seems small compared to a giant article saying that we are headed towards climate catastrophe, right?

Andy @Revkin

A humpback whale leaps off the coast of New Zealand.

Two-thirds of sea turtles are on the trajectory to recovery.

Knowlton’s surprise best seller has become a Christmas classic. “The idea was always to make it just sort of broadly about cool things in ocean life. Superficially, it looks like a photo book and parents read it to their kids, but each of the photos comes with this little 350 word text, which [written by Knowlton] captures adults. This magical multilayer appeal I have to say was just by accident. This is not what I was thinking about when I was writing Citizens of the Sea.”

“The biggest challenge is that the stories of ecosystem collapse are global and seem overwhelming while the success stories are on a smaller scale, yet there are so many of them. It's almost impossible to pull them all together.”

Knowlton soon emails what she calls “a gathering storm of good news”: links to scientific papers, Ocean Optimism: Beyond the Obituaries in Ocean Conservation or Rebuilding Marine Life in Nature, then a tasty list from this week’s EuroNews.green.

Bill McKibben

HOT GLOBE™ LIQUIDITY NOTE: I spent some weeks at Knowlton’s house on the coast of Maine while I was finishing a book, BREAKPOINT: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises, with her husband Jeremy B.C. Jackson.  Knowlton would still be writing away on some scientific paper or report at 11 pm.  During the day there was always the sound of her measured voice talking on a conference call to Washington or Australia or France.  The two never seemed to stop working, and these are scientists in their 70s and 80s. (I believe Emerita is the Latin word for “Work Harder?”) Of course, the two of them would halt for a leisurely French lunch, always farm fresh organic foods sourced from local markets.  Knowlton grew up tide pooling near her grandparent’s house on Long Island.  She went to Harvard in the early ‘70’s, and graduated summa cum laude, no mean feat then or now.  Well, back to the data!

It’s like this, Knowlton finishes, suddenly climate news is “much more like medical news. Medical news is all about a balance between a new cure for cancer and the rising epidemic of diabetes. There's this kind of horrible bad stuff that's happening but then there are solutions. It’s the story of we're past those things getting worse, and they are starting to get better throughout much of the world, in terms of human health. We're not in the same place in the trajectory in terms of conservation but the news is at least starting to reflect that it's not all catastrophe, and I think that's good because people need to have a sense of what's working and why it's working so they're more inclined to help.”

Distilled

It’ll get worse, it’ll flatten out, then it will start to get better.