Holy moly, this deadline came up fast! Here's my third quarterly report for the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, one of the few requirements asked of fellows. If you like, you can revisit my first and second quarterly reports here. Without further ado...
Third Quarterly Report
Date: April 27, 2018 Countries you were in: Indonesia, Malaysia Countries for next quarter: Indonesia, Malaysia, Scotland, England, Canada Current location: Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Dear Watson Foundation,
I am sitting at a kitchen table inlaid with green and blue tiles, under a leaky thatch roof in the town of Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Water is billowing in through two windows and pooling in an aluminum pot. The splatter occasionally coats my laptop screen with mist. I know the storm is directly overhead because the thunder is almost simultaneous with blue-white flashes of lightning, and every clap sounds as loud as an old-growth tree crashing into the kitchen. I love these nightly tempests because they keep the rainforest steamy and damp. They also turn my yard into a mud puddle.
A Sukadana scene: concrete swiftlet house (the bird's salivary nests are a Chinese soup ingredient), drying coconuts, rainforested mountain and brewing storm.
Last I wrote, I was beginning my month with Reef Check on Bali. Although I did produce some documents – a fish identification guide, an infographic on Bali’s 2016 coral bleaching event – the work was unsatisfying. Many days, I arrived at the open-air office to find no tasks. I came to expect the phrase, “Why don’t you take the day off?” with disappointment that this organization was not utilizing my potential. On reflection, I realize most of the blame was my own. I should have invented tasks and been vocal about my strengths, respectfully reminding my supervisors that I can be an author, grant-writer and marine ecologist. Instead, I presented myself as disposable, and that led me to feel disposable.
I found this Cerulean kingfisher (Alcedo coerulescens) behind Bali's garbage dump on an unplanned day-off.
I also found this temple with walls of dirt and moss! If I were spiritual, this would be my place.
For my Reef Check capstone I joined a gathering of Pokwasmas, a fishermen’s cooperative in the village of Penuktukan, to present on reef resilience to climate change. I was honored to speak, but because I presented in English with no translation, only a handful of the audience understood. Since then I have learned to advocate for my language needs. Now when I present, I directly ask one bilingual person to translate for me, and I pause between each sentence to make sure my meaning gets across.
Shaumi, a marine science student from Udayana University, mops to prepare for the Pokwasmas meeting. Posters about marine conservation decorate the open-air room.
After the meeting, I spoke with Nyoman Sugiarta, a tourism-operator turned full-time conservationist. He pours concrete hexadomes for coral substrate and canoes the marine preserve to discourage poaching. On his forearm, an inky ecosystem of turtle, coral, fish and sea grass entwine the word “Conservation” in newspaper font.
Photo credit: Nyoman Sugiarta.
“Why do you feel strongly about coral conservation?” I asked Nyoman.
“I used to think corals were rocks,” he explained. “Then Reef Check came here and told us they were animals.” Nyoman became a diver and began paying attention to the strange, gelatinous lifeforms. “Now that I know they’re alive, there’s so much to learn! I can’t let them die.”
I was surprised that Nyoman’s explanation contained no economics. As an environmental biology student, my training often implied that wealthy Westerners can afford to conserve an ecosystem for beauty and curiosity, but subsistence resource-users conserve ecosystems for practical reasons, like increasing the harvest of fish. How quickly Nyoman dispelled that myth. Driven by his urge to learn, he traded his job for unpaid conservation and occasional scuba-dive guiding. Two summers ago, when I was a wilderness educator in Alaska, I tried to cultivate curiosity for slimy things: marine invertebrates, microbes, slime molds. In Nyoman I found an example of how powerful curiosity can be.
Corals and echinoderms I photographed in Indonesia.
In mid-February I moved to the Malaysian metropolis of Kuala Lumpur. My boyfriend Collin and I converged for a marvelous two weeks diving the corals of Perhentian Kecil, celebrating the end of Chinese New Year with 40,000 revelers in Penang, and visiting our friend Marra during her English-teaching Fulbright in Melaka. We tried to understand the threads that weave Malaysia’s tapestry of religions, genders, and races.
My three favorite postcards before I sent them: a street-art girl from Penang, public buses from Kuala Lumpur, and a stone plant from Melaka.
Once Collin left, I enjoyed the resources of a big city by touring One Health labs and giving a lecture at Monash University on “monsters and microbes.” I reunited with a great friend from high school, Nithya, who is loving her life as a solar-energy firmware engineer in Cambodia. Seeing Nithya’s drive and joy about her career got me thinking hard about my own. Compared to Nithya’s startup – young, efficient, impact-driven – my environmental nonprofits seemed ineffective and bureaucratic. I struggled to reconcile the fundamental difference between engineering, a building science, and ecology, a science of observation. Nithya had been trained to solve problems; I’d been trained to study them.
For her last night, Nithya and I tracked down the last cendol cart open in KL and enjoyed a midnight bowl of shaved ice, canned corn and green jelly (hold the durian, please).
With that mixture of inspiration and apprehension, I returned to Bali for Anuar Abdullah’s course in coral propagation. Anuar had an intense face, tan and deeply lined. His black T-shirt bore the skull-and-crossbones of Sea Shepherd, an organization of vegan pirates famous for sinking whalers. Coral gardening and piracy might seem like odd partners, but it makes sense: both groups have a take-no-prisoners attitude toward conservation. The first words out of Anuar’s mouth were, “Big things are happening. Corals are dead. We don’t have time to mess around. This is too urgent.” Anuar taught me details, like how many drops of superglue to use when attaching a fragment of Acropora to aragonite rock, but I was more interested to uncover why Anuar is successful (his fever-pitch drive to save the ecosystem he calls home) and why he is not more so (he works alone). I was daunted by Anuar’s stance that purely-academic careers are unethical in this critical moment of our planet’s health. Is a life of solitude and heartbreak the only way to fight for an ecosystem? I wondered.
We piled rocks to create an underwater nursery for coral fragments.
Before I left Bali, I met up with my ultimate frisbee team, UB7, for the tournament they host every year, the Nusantara Cup. Our team leader Alex invited me to be Spirit Captain, a uniquely-ultimate role that entails holding the team accountable for high integrity and leading a conversation after each game to discuss our opponent’s sportsmanship. I am proud to report that UB7 was the first Indonesian team in history to win the Nusantara Cup!
No mark!
The following morning had an inauspicious beginning. I was exhausted as only frisbee players will understand. My lungs burned, my hips flexors ached, the skin on my lower lip ballooned into painful blisters, and I wheezed with a nasty cold. The next ten hours in planes and cars were miserable. Little did I know, I was en route for the best month of my year.
ASRI staff jump on the beach, and I'm a bit late to the game.
That evening I arrived in Sukadana, a village nestled on the edge of Gunung Palung National Park in Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. This lowland dipterocarp rainforest is home to 3,000 of the last Bornean orangutans. I’m volunteering here with Yayasan Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), roughly translating to Healthy Balanced Nature, a pathbreaking Planetary Health hospital with a mission to “save the rainforest with a stethoscope.” The model behind ASRI is simple: orangutans are expected to go extinct by 2050 due to habitat loss; most illegal loggers wish to stop but cannot because timber is their only source of cash for healthcare; to save orangutans, we need a human hospital.
A photo I took of a reforested orangutan corridor posted to the ASRI Instagram.
Over the past month, I have worked on education with Amad and Etty, communications with Oka, grant-writing with Monica, and reforestation with Dika. I’ve gotten to share a house and meals with ASRI’s founder, Kinari. All day I feel respected and productive. In the afternoons, the clinic staff becomes a riotously fun group of friends. We watch the sun set over the ocean, sip kelapa coklit susu (fresh coconuts filled with iced chocolate milk), watch horror films and play cards. I’ve taught the staff to bake chocolate-chip cookies and buttercream cupcakes. They've taught me to speak Bahasa Indonesia and slow down my pace. I leave tomorrow, but on no account am I ready to bid this place goodbye.
One day I baked Tollhouse cookies for the ASRI staff. It's a family recipe, the first one I learned as a kid, and Natalia asked me to write it for her. On my last morning, she pulled out a tupper of fresh-baked Tollhouse cookies! They tasted just like home.
Kelapa coklit susu on the beach.
For the past few years, I've been seeking an interdisciplinary lens through which to approach my work, one that embraces complexity. The Anthropocene Epoch demands a reckoning with entanglement; we will not find success by inspecting any one element in isolation. Initially, I titled my Watson project "One Health" because that movement -- the intersection of human, veterinary and environmental medicine -- seemed like a good stab at integration. But here at ASRI, I’ve learned that I identify even more with "Planetary Health," the recognition that solutions for human and ecological health must be integrated. ASRI does not draw a line between trees and bodies. It delivers babies, provides dental checkups, plants rainforest saplings, and buys back chainsaws from loggers to facilitate a regenerative economic spiral. With this lens, I have a new goal for my PhD. I want to identify and implement win-win solutions in which human health problems are addressed by restoring ecosystems.
A logger revs his chainsaw one last time. Today, he will sell it to ASRI's Chainsaw Buyback program in exchange for a micro-loan and training to launch a small business.
Working at ASRI is emotionally exhausting in the best way. Every day, I find myself revising my place in conservation and developing hope that real change is possible. Since 2007, ASRI has recorded an 89% decrease in logging households and a 25,000 hectare increase in forest cover. The end of illegal logging in Gunung Palung National Park is within reach.
An organic farmer, recently trained by ASRI, takes fastidious care of his black-pepper trellises. With tools like homemade compost and crop rotation, farmers can move away from slash-and-burn agriculture.
In Brazil, I learned how humans, pets and wildlife are connected by disease across a rapidly-changing landscape. In Madagascar, I probed that connection to find out whether forest fragmentation directly contributes to zoonotic spillover of viruses. Now, in Indonesia, I am seeing how the upward spiral of integrated human and ecological restoration really works to create health.
My housemate Bella, a medical student from Jakarta, tests out Marmelade (my backpack). She didn't believe all my things would fit inside.
Though I’m still in denial about leaving Sukadana, I will fly tomorrow to Tanjung Puting National Park to witness rehabilitated orangutans in their wild habitat. I then cross to Malaysian Borneo for two weeks of coral propagation and one of hornbill research. At the Planetary Health Alliance Annual Meeting in Scotland, I’ll present on Malagasy sand-flea season and climate change. I have tickets to visit a bird observatory on a northern Scottish isle and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In mid-June, I helicopter in to the most extreme leg of my Watson journey, the Arctic. In lieu of my original plan to visit anthrax-infested caribou carcasses in Russia (which is now on the do-not-travel list), I will volunteer with Dr. Emily Jenkins to test Arctic foxes and mosquitoes for emerging pathogens at Karrak Lake, a remote outpost in Nunavut, Canada.
Amad stole my camera and captured this candid moment. I am lost somewhere deep in thoughts.
I can’t decide if I’ve learned more about myself or the world these past nine months. I suppose it hardly matters. As I prepare to leave Asia for three Western nations, I’m starting to sense the Torschlusspanik (an excellent German term for “the panic one feels as gates are closing or an end is nearing”), but I can hardly imagine August as an ending. Every day, the world feels larger and richer with beginnings than before.
It was the end of one era, and not quite the beginning of the next. After my coral propagation class on Gili Trawangan, I dove into a strangely familiar netherworld that transcends time and space. I'm talking about ultimate frisbee.
Tuesday Beach Ultimate the week before I left Bali for Malaysia. That's me kissing Ari on the cheek!
After a midnight coincidence in a Balinese bar, in which I overheard the word "frisbee" and procured a ride the next morning on the back of someone's motorbike to a game of pick-up ultimate, I was hooked. I played as often as I could, from windy beach-litter-clean-up/frisbee combos to high-level mini games to mandatory practice each Sunday. Yes, I managed to try out for a competitive team, UB7, within my first week. The captain, Alex, convinced me to come back to Bali after my month in Malaysia to play on UB7 at the international tournament, Nusantara Cup.
Alex (front) and I set in a team circle during a Sunday practice.
Warming up before practice in my Balinese neighborhood, Sanur.
I made new friends, both Indonesians and ex-pats, on the field. Sweating and diving and nursing grass-cuts over dinner is, universally, the fastest way I have found to make friends. But frisbee also brought old friends to me, even as I lived in relative isolation here in an archipelago of Southeast Asia.
Ari Lozano was my high-school Fryz teammate and my got-your-back-no-matter-what co-captain for our college team, the Whitman Sweets. She swung by Bali to visit me after winning gold with the USA Under-24 Worlds Team in Australia (GO ARI!!!) We played plenty of pickup and dabbled in scuba diving, Ari's newest hobby.
For the Nusantara Cup, I convinced two more Fryz to visit! Here's Jessie Thoreson, one of the ladies who inspired me to play frisbee in sixth grade, and has continued to inspire me ever since. She brought her guitar and leftie backhand, and it was like no time had passed.
Unreal! Here I am with Jessie and Henry Phan (and my Balinese teammate Naja photo-bombing), another of my lifelong friends and inspirations. Henry was one of the first men to take me seriously as an athlete, and he was the same intentional, kind baller I knew in middle school. Fryz will be my family always.
The tournament was a huge success. I got back from Gili the night before, and Alex asked if I would be his spirit captain. That's a uniquely-frisbee leadership role involving sportsmanship, integrity, and positivity. It was my job to greet the other team's spirit captain before each game, shake hands, and ask if there was any particular aspect of their spirit on which they were working. After the game, I led our team in a consensus effort to rank our opponents' spirit in five categories: communication, physical contact, positivity, knowledge of the rules, and fair-mindedness. I was honored to be trusted by the team in this leadership role, as well as my informal contributions to team strategy, even though I was a transient through Bali. These people gave me a home in the middle of my Watson year, and for that I am deeply grateful.
I got to cut and handle this weekend, what a treat.
Throwing or faking? We'll never know.
As a bonus, we won the tournament! Our win marked the first time a Balinese team has ever won a tournament on its home island. In the finals, we beat my personal favorite team: Learning To Fly, all the way from Bangalore, India. After, I traded with one of the men for his orange jersey.
Our final photo with our second-place opponents, Learning to Fly.
The day after the tournament, I was physically exhausted, sunburned to the point of peeling, and hacking with an asthmatic cold. By 3:00 in the afternoon, Jessie and I couldn't stay away. We hopped on motorbikes and headed out to one last hurrah of pick-up ultimate in Bali. There, we found a dozen similarly-addicted frisbee players, all in various stages of injury from the preceding days, all smiling ear-to-ear because we were tossing a plastic disc once more. This sport is an addiction, a home around the world, a lasting family. I'll miss you, UB7, but know that we will meet again one of these days.
The frisbee players can't stop! Here's post-tournament pick-up.
And with that, I said goodbye to Bali. A sixteen-hour day of travel took me across several islands and channels to Java, Pontianak, Ketapang, and finally my destination of Sukadana, a rural town on Indonesian Borneo.
I must be here!
Fun fact, the island of Borneo is roughly the same size as Madagascar, but it contains three countries: parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, and the entirety of Brunei. The island is known as Borneo in Malaysian and English, but Kalimantan in Bahasa Indonesia. It's home to most of the world's remaining orangutans and hornbills, and also to some of the fastest rates of deforestation for oil-palm plantations.
Oil palms neatly criss-cross Borneo from my airplane window.
The reason for my trip to Borneo lies with an organization known as Health in Harmony. I was referred to this nonprofit by a friend of my mother's, and fate brought it all together. I'd been emailing with Health in Harmony's Director of International Partnerships, Amy, when she told me she'd be out of touch for a few weeks. Why? A scouting trip to Madagascar. At the time, I myself was living in Madagascar. Who shows up in the bedroom next to mine? None other than Amy! I spent a dinner and then some grilling the patient and knowledgeable woman about her groundbreaking work in One Health conservation. That interaction led me here, to become a monthlong conservation and education volunteer at Health in Harmony's pilot site in Borneo.
The story of Health in Harmony is very compelling. It all started when Dr. Kinari Webb, a young orangutan researcher straight out of Reed College, spent a year doing fieldwork in Borneo. She realized, as many ecologists do, that studying her beloved primates was not going to save them. She was horrified to realize that the apes might go extinct within her lifetime. She saw the illegal logging, spoke with local communities, and actually listened to what they had to say. This process, called "radical listening," taught Dr. Webb that in order to save orangutans, she would need to become a medical doctor and provide healthcare so the people living around the national park wouldn't be forced to log for their lives.
Really, Dr. Webb explains it all much better than I do. I highly recommend watching her TED Talk:
The next morning, I felt like I was dreaming as I walked through the spacious, white, outdoor halls of Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI, the hospital Dr. Webb founded. The hospital's rear boundary butts up against Gunung Palung National Park, one of the largest remaining tracts of Bornean orangutan habitat.
This triptych from the hospital's wall depicts an ASRI reforestation project in the degraded, marginal lands of the National Park. I'm interested to see the progress with my own eyes.
The orangutan poster is a popular destination for patients to take selfies.
A planetary health vibe permeates the hospital. This sign translates to, "Let's guard them now. Someday, they will take care of our grandchildren."
I spent my first afternoon acquainting myself with Sukadana, my home for the month of April. I am living in a breezy house once occupied by Dr. Webb herself. The roof is half thatch and half corrugated-metal. Insects, rats, and cats enter at will, but the mosquito net over my bed keeps the worst at bay. My only complaint are the twitchy yellow wasps that live in two nests daubed to our kitchen's rafters. These curious buggers buzz against my net all night, and they often wander right through the seams of the net into my personal space. It's unnerving to hear the buzzing get closer, then stop, and suddenly feel the tickle of a wasp's feet across my arm in the dark. I've killed a dozen between sturdy books so far. Maybe, if I keep at it, I'll get them all!
The central monument of Sukadana is this space-age salute to durian. Could anything be more Indonesian?
I parked my bicycle for a quick tour of the outdoor market, specializing in fish and vegetables.
The long, toothy, saltwater eels caught my eye (and nose.) I asked if I could take a photo with them, remembering how such requests to photograph without purchasing were met with angry glares in Madagascar. Not so here!
Not only did the fish mongers welcome my photography, they all requested selfies with me and their fish.
Here are just two of our fish-selfie album.
The marine-invertebrate-monger was not to be outshone. Here he displays a prawn and a slipper lobster.
In this highly Islamic town, you would be silly to direct anyone in relation to "the mosque," because there seem to be mosques on every block. But if you were to mention the "big mosque," there could be no doubt about the direction you meant to indicate. This glorious white structure looms above the horizon in a powerful silhouette. Its call to prayer can be heard echoing through the streets five times a day -- including right now, as I type. It's lucky I am a sound sleeper, because my poor housemate is awoken every morning at 5:00 am by the sacred Arabic songs coming through the loudspeaker.
The Big Mosque.
Already, Sukadana feels like a home. I don't have the ready-made community of a frisbee team, but the ASRI staff have the same loving camaraderie. I've heard there is an avid Zumba community, a swimming pool for Saturdays, and an early-morning bike crew, so I won't be lacking for exercise. Maybe I'll be able to teach my coworkers to throw a disc, too, and start a frisbee club. I imagine our name would have a nice ring to it: Sukadana Spirit, a team for ecosystem health.
I was reading cross-legged on my bottom bunk when a tattooed man came into the room. It was 11:00 pm, and he was just getting in from a long day fighting for an Indonesian visa extension. So it goes when you stay in hostel dorm rooms. I liked this hostel because I could pay the dorm price but, owing to the volcano and record-low numbers of tourists, I usually had the room to myself. Not tonight.
My new roommate made the usual small talk. His name was Federico. He was a dive instructor on Gili, one of the tiny, sandy, dive-and-party islands between Bali and Lombok.
“Where are you from?” I asked, unable to place his vaguely European accent and deeply tanned skin.
“Argentina,” he answered.
That got me excited – probably more energetic than my roommate would have liked as the clock neared midnight – because I love any opportunity to practice Spanish. I explained that I had lived in Ecuador for a year. Here, the conversation took an eerie turn. After a bit of back-and-forth, we realized that we had both lived in the same country (Ecuador), in the same town (Puerto Lopez), in the spare room OF THE SAME HOUSE!!! (The house belongs to our mutual friend, Pablo.)
Federico, my Argentine roommate in a Balinese hostel, and I take an excited midnight selfie to send to our mutual friends in Ecuador as proof that the world is small.
Now we were old friends. I told Federico about my Watson project on coral reef disease.
"You simply have to meet Anuar Abdullah," Federico told me. "He is a guru of coral propagation. He's the Man. You'll see what I mean when you take his class. You just have to meet him."
I am always happier to take personal recommendations than find random connections over the internet, so I looked up this Anuar character the next day. I found his organization, Ocean Quest Global, and a pretty inspiring video about his life's mission. I messaged Anuar on Facebook and signed up for his coral propagation class, two months down the road on Gili.
Gili Trawangan is a tiny circle of sand in the ocean. Motors are prohibited, so bicycles and mini-horse taxis prevail. You can walk around the whole island in two-and-a-half hours.
My hostel bathroom on Gili was home to one of the largest cockroaches I've seen (Madagascar Giant Hissing Cockroaches notwithstanding.)
Luckily, the bathroom also came equipped with an enormous gecko!
A tokay gecko, Gekko gecko, to be exact. Look at that gorgeous red polka-dotting.
Fast forward. I've finished my work on Bali, moved to Malaysia for a month, returned to Bali, made my way by plane and van and boat to Gili... and here I was, ready to learn from the legendary Coral Man himself.
We met up for dinner, and immediately I was hit with the same impression as Federico: this was a person to know. Anuar didn't mess around.
"I just got back from a two-week research cruise through the Pacific," he told me. "Big things are happening there. Big things." His tone was intense but his volume soft. He had an intensity directed at no one. I got the sense he cared far more about what he was saying than about who he was talking to. "Big patches are DEAD. Gone. Nothing to regrow on. We need to stop playing around with conservation. This is too urgent."
Anuar teaches the first day of his coral propagation course in the upstairs restaurant of Trawangan Dive Shop on Gili.
Anuar's face is dark from the sun and lined from caring so deeply for another organism's life. Born in Malaysia, Anuar studied oceanography in the United States at Florida Institute of Technology before working in naval and tourism industries. Fifteen years ago he left it all behind. Coral has Anuar's entire heart, now that his two children are grown and his marriage has ended. The corners of Anuar's mouth are always pulled down in a slight frown, even when he's laughing. He has the worn expression of a soldier who's lost too many battles but who refuses to give up for love of his mission.
Sabine and I wait for a herd of lumbering brown cattle to cross the road as we walk across Gili for the sunset.
Then I met Anuar's counterpart, and she could not have contrasted more starkly. Sabine has a Swiss-French lilt to her English and corkscrew curls. Her smile, which she flashes often, spreads across her whole face. Over the following days, Sabine became my close friend. Over beach sunsets and gelato dinners, we learned we had much in common. We were both 23-year-olds (less than a month apart in age!) with a propensity to work on vacation and dream about fixing the world's problems.
Sabine met Anuar a few months ago as a dive student. On her gap year before starting occupational therapy school in Switzerland, she'd planned to see Southeast Asia, learn to dive, and follow wherever the path took her. Well, it took her straight into a full-time job volunteering as Anuar's assistant.
"I saw how much passion he had, and how disorganized his operation was, and I just had to help," she explained, almost as an excuse for why she was toiling away on a computer screen during this tropical vacation. Sabine sees organization as her greatest asset, and she certainly has the talent, but I'm not sure even a hard-working wonderwoman like Sabine can put decades of chaos into order.
The next day, I had a great surprise when I met the rest of my classmates. They were my coworkers from Reef Check and Coral Alliance in Bali, plus a few of the higher-up conservationists I'd never had a chance to meet! What luck. I got to spend three days picking their brains and talking marine-conservation over every lunch and dinner.
The Coral Team, from left to right: Chris, Nyoman Sugiarta, Jaya, Nyoman Swastika, me, Nikin.
Nyoman Sugiarta pulls on his wetsuit, always an unpleasant task, before we hit the water.
Anuar's paperwork and contact lists might be a rat's nest, but Anuar's coral propagation class lived up to its reputation. Anuar's goal is to replant corals all over the equatorial ocean, to give them a boost in the face of mounting stresses like rising temperatures, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, sewage runoff and destructive fishing techniques.
When it comes to coral propagation, I've always had one lingering doubt: if the coral has already died in a particular bay, why would replanting the same coral help? Won't it just die again, unless the root cause is addressed?
Anuar had a clear answer ready for me. "We only plant where we know the cause of the coral's original death," he explained. "So if it was killed by bomb fishing, and that's not happening anymore, for example, we will plant corals in that area."
Anuar shot and edited this video of our first day building a coral nursery on Gili Trawangan. The pile of rocks will be the nursery where corals grow from tiny fragments into large colonies, forming the broodstock for replanting the rest of the reef.
What about the bigger, global threats? I asked. What about rising temperatures and acidity? You can't stop those on the local level.
To that, Anuar explained that by planting corals, we are speeding up their recovery. We are allowing the reef to repopulate decades faster than it would without human intervention. By doing so, we are essentially accelerating evolution by natural selection.
Think of it this way: today, you have a full, healthy reef, 100%. Then a major storm hits and kills 90% of the reef. We use the remaining 10% to repopulate the reef. Already, by starting with the survivors, we have allowed natural selection to work; we have chosen the storm-resilient individuals to repopulate with. With our help, the reef recovers quickly, and in five years, it's full of healthy coral again. Then another disaster hits. This time, let's call it a heat wave that bleaches and kills 90% of the coral, again. Only 10% remains, and again, we replant from that stock. Now the corals have been selected to be both storm and heat resistant. Get it? It's far from perfect, but the idea is to give corals a chance to avoid extinction as they evolve to withstand their new, strange environment.
Human-induced climate change has accelerated the cycles of destruction for reefs, and without our help, corals wouldn't grow back quickly enough between major disasters to survive. But if we can also accelerate the cycles of regrowth, maybe we can give corals a chance to do what they've been doing so well for millions of years: evolve in response to changing oceans and survive.
Sabine and I watched this unreal sunset, but it left me with a deep melancholy. Maybe it was the techno dance music blaring on the beach, making me homesick for Sweets dance parties. Or maybe it was the heart swing for couples.
As I looked down the beach at the hordes of relaxed vacationers, I felt entirely alone. My heart and mind were too fiercely stuck on this urgent question, how to save our planet's corals? I'm glad I had Sabine at my side, or I might have imploded with the magnitude of the feeling.
That's the theory behind coral propagation in general. Anuar has some strongly-held and well-defended ideas about just how coral propagation should be done.
For one, he bans any use of plastic, concrete, or metal substrate. His experiments have shown than corals do much better when attached to aragonite stones, the porous, calcium-carbonate skeletons of long-dead corals. Plus, if you refuse to drop human-made junk in the ocean, you have done no harm in the event that you have to abandon a coral propagation project partway through (an unfortunately common occurrence).
Another of Anuar's unique gems is his glue system. He has a particular method of securing each type of coral to the rock. For hard corals, he suggests gluing the coral fragments to rock underwater using a combination of mineral gel and patented calcium-based catalyst. (If you don't have that, or if you're working on the surface, superglue will suffice.) For soft corals, pin the fragment into place with a pair of wooden toothpicks. For sea fans and sea whips, simply wedge the fragment into a crevice in the rock.
The third piece of Anuar's system is the nursery. Anuar discourages the "pluck and plant" method of cutting or gathering large chunks of healthy coral and gluing them to other parts of the reef. He says this method is haphazard, wasteful, and difficult to monitor. Instead, he recommends gathering only broken coral from the seafloor and cutting tiny pieces, about 1 cm long, and gluing each of those to its own rock in a centralized "nursery." Once the nursery matures, you can continually harvest those corals into tiny pieces, which you then glue all over the wild reef you are trying to rehabilitate.
The turtle nursery on Gili is an example of a conservation strategy gone wrong. The turtles are often collected from their nests and put on display in this box-like tank to generate donations from tourists.
The baby turtles are too crowded, as you can tell from the scratches and bite marks on their shells and fins.
During the four days I was on Gili with Anuar and Sabine, my mind was working overdrive. I was inspired to have found a tool for conservation, since so many of my previous Watson projects have been merely attempts to study and understand the problems, not strategies for solving them. But was this the right tool? Would Anuar's coral nurseries prove scalable to the entire equatorial world? Did he have the necessary networking and organization to keep the momentum, or would the project fall apart once its charismatic founder retired?
Anuar and I pose with my certificate after I finished the course. I am now an official Coral Propagator.
Then the more existential questions set it. Is coral conservation the career I should pursue? What's the best way to make a difference in the world -- neat, published research from a university, or a messy underwater stab at growing things before they die forever? Yes, Anuar was right: the situation is urgent. The biosphere is unraveling. The oceans are emptying. The life is dying. But where does that leave me?
It was hard to say goodbye to Sabine, but I know we will both be working hard on whatever catches our hearts, and we can always commiserate about that from across the world.
For that, Sabine offered a trip to the gelato counter, and a bit of consolation. "Why do we always pretend we know everything?" she mused. "We don't control anything!" She told me about her worldview, which seems to center on sincere gratitude. From someone who is meticulous about filing and obsessive about doing good, the next piece of advice came as a surprise. "It's a wonderful thing to let things go," she told me. "Just let them really, really... go."
I was reminded of a poem Collin sent me back in September, when I was lonely in Brazil:
“Understory” by Mark Nepo
I’ve been watching stars rely on the darkness they resist. And fish struggle with and against the current. And hawks glide faster when their
wings don’t move.
Still I keep retelling what happens till it comes out the way I want.
We try so hard to be the main character when it is our point of view that keeps us from the truth.
The sun has its story that no curtain can stop.
It’s true. The only way beyond the self is through it. The only way to listen to what can never be said is to quiet our need to steer the plot.
When jarred by life, we might unravel the story we tell ourselves and discover the story we are in, the one that keeps telling us.
I'm no expert at that process of letting go yet, but I accepted Sabine's reminder to stop analyzing everything for its lessons and just let the experience wash over me for a while. Without a chance encounter in a hostel and a stranger's advice, I never would have met Anuar or Sabine. I would not have glued my fingers to a baby coral by mistake. I would not have carried a laundry basket of stones across the bottom of the ocean or built Gili's first coral nursery from scratch. I wouldn't have felt the existential fear of being lonely when surrounded by dozens of laughing, drinking beachgoers, nor the nostalgic comfort of remembering that I'm always with myself, no matter who else I am with.
On the two-hour boat ride back to Bali, I was alone with the sun and the sea. Nothing was solved. The earth was still in biotic crisis. My graduate school plans were still nonexistent. The ideal career continued to elude me. But, for now, it all felt okay.
