I want to tell the world about … ocean acidifcation.

Radio Lab is one of my favourite Podcasts (It’s free, but if you love it, make sure you support them!).  The show is about big topics; morality, time, deal and my current favourite topic, stress.  The hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich do an excellent job breaking down complex topics into easy to understand topics.  In short they’re story tellers.

This morning I heard the latest short, Killing Babies, Saving the World (hang in there, its a brutal title, but it’s a fascinating episode) where Jad and Robert revisit and earlier discussion on morality.  They pose a question; say you’re walking by a lake in an expensive suit and you saw someone drowning, would you jump in to save her?  Most people of course answer that they would.  Now, what if someone told you that you could save someone’s life by writing a $1000 cheque, but the catch is you’d never meet them and never be impacted by her.  Would you write that cheque?  Most people say ‘no’.  Well, why?  Its argued that the immediacy of a drowning child is something that we’ve evolved to respond to, while the abstractedness of saving someone somewhere in the world is too difficult for our brains to comprehend.  Our emotions aren’t prepared to deal with things that aren’t immediate to us.  Some of the biggest issues humanity has to deal with are abstract.  Our ancestors didn’t have to deal with global warming, pollution or global credit crises.

So, why am I writing about this on a reef blog?  What does this have to do with our briny glassboxes we all keep in our living rooms?  Most of us who keep reef aquariums live far away from actual reefs.  Heck, a lot of us live far away from the ocean period.  However most reefers understand the dangers of global warming on reefs, what ocean acidification means to oceans.  Sure, we might not think of it that way, we think of it in terms of our tanks.  “My PH is at 8.1 and my coral has never looked better!” or “My temperature spiked last week and all my SPS bleached.“  We are all environmentalists whether we know it or not.  I believe the reefing community has a job; to spread the word on the effects of ocean acidification and global warming on the reefs.  Reefers know both of those things will bring a disaster to their aquarium.  There is no doubt on what will happen to the ocean if temperatures rise another 5 degrees.

It’s an abstract topic for most people to grasp.  Most people have never seen a coral let alone understand the diversity of life beneath the waves.  The first step is helping people understand.  Show off your aquariums and educate people as much as they’re willing to listen.  We need to come together as a community and help save the reefs.