Humans are taking a toll on ocean ecosystems – pollution, overfishing, climate change. Jeremy Jackson has watched human impacts sap the ability of Caribbean coral reefs to recover from natural disasters. But he says the greatest threat to ocean health is right inside our heads.
When Jackson first started studying coral reefs in the late 1960s, he was drawn by their beauty, by the fun and excitement of learning new things about corals. Over time, he and colleagues began to notice changes caused by human impacts.
But it was a hurricane in the early 1990s that really set off alarm bells. Reefs were devastated, and Jackson thought it would be an opportunity follow the progression of reefs as they rebounded.
The problem is, many of them never did. Today, many former Caribbean reefs are dominated by algae, rather than coral. Jackson points the finger at a laundry list of human activities that weakened reefs and made recovery impossible.
But what he finds even more distressing than the “pathetic” state – and likely ill fate – of coral reefs is people’s ability to accept these greatly diminished reefs as normal, a phenomenon known as shifting baselines. He laments that mid-career scientists who first saw Caribbean coral reefs in the 1990s have no (firsthand) idea what a healthy coral reef really looks like.
Without that gut understanding of how much has been lost, Jackson says, it’s difficult to know how alarmed to be and how to respond. Still, despite having been nicknamed Dr. Doom, Jackson says he remains optimistic that, given enough time and space, ocean ecosystems can recover