Corals are the gems of the oceans, creating beautiful colors and shapes that form our reefs while serving many vital functions for life on this planet. With 25-40% already lost, the worldwide coral population faces incredible danger from climate change and other threats. But there is hope. On this week’s episode, Hilary and I talk with Dr. David E. Vaughan, an esteemed marine biologist and author of the new book The Secret Life of Corals: Sex, War, and Rocks that Don’t Roll. Dr. Vaughan has held aquaculture research and development positions for over 45 years. He is best known for developing the innovative restoration technique of “micro-fragmentation, which can speed up coral growth by 25 times by breaking them into tiny little pieces. He is focused on making this innovative process a scalable tool for reef restoration as the Founder of Plant a Million Corals. As you’ll hear in this conversation, David brings great clarity and joy when talking about corals and why they are so important.
Corals are the gems of the oceans, creating beautiful colors and shapes that form our reefs while serving many vital functions for life on this planet. With 25-40% already lost, the worldwide coral population faces incredible danger from climate change and other threats. But there is hope.
On this week’s episode, Hilary and I talk with Dr. David E. Vaughan, an esteemed marine biologist and author of the new book The Secret Life of Corals: Sex, War, and Rocks that Don’t Roll.
Dr. Vaughan has held aquaculture research and development positions for over 45 years. He is best known for developing the innovative restoration technique of “micro-fragmentation, which can speed up coral growth by 25 times by breaking them into tiny little pieces. He is focused on making this innovative process a scalable tool for reef restoration as the Founder of Plant a Million Corals. As you’ll hear in this conversation, David brings great clarity and joy when talking about corals and why they are so important.
Links:
Book: The Secret Life of Corals: Sex, War and Rocks That Don't Roll
Website: Plant A Million Corals
NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Overview
Episode recorded: December 7, 2022
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: This is Climate Positive – a show featuring candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future. I’m Chad Reed.
Hilary Langer: I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: And I’m Gil Jenkins.
David E. Vaughan: If you're a coral and live to be 800 years old, it's okay if you're only successful once every century because you live eight centuries so you can make eight offspring. As I tell people, does anybody want to wait a hundred years for maybe the next successful settlement of coral?
Gil: Coral are the gems of the oceans, creating beautiful colors and shapes that form our reefs, while serving many vital functions for life on this planet. With 25-40% already lost, the worldwide coral population faces incredible danger from climate change and other threats. But there is hope.
On this week’s episode, Hilary and I talk with Dr. David E. Vaughan, esteemed marine biologist and author of the new book The Secret Life of Corals: Sex, War and Rocks that Don’t Roll
Mr. Vaughan has held positions in aquaculture research and development for over 45 years. He best known for developing the innovative restoration technique of “micro-fragmentation, which can speed up coral growth by 25 times by breaking them into tiny little pieces. Presently, he is focused on making this innovative process a scalable tool for reef restoration as Founder of Plant a Million Corals.
As you’ll hear in this conversation, David brings great clarity and joy when talking about corals and why they are so important. Thank you to tuning to this episode of Climate Positive. And with that, here is our conversation with Dr. Vaughn.
Gil: Dr. David E. Vaughan, welcome to Climate Positive.
David: Well, thank you very much. Such a pleasure to be here.
Gil: Let's start by granting our audience see, could you give us a bit of your background and how you first became interested in studying corals? There's a great story in your book about your love for the ocean and diving at a very young age. You say you were submerged from the start.
David: That is true. I don't know too many youngsters from 11 years old that already knew what they wanted to be when they grow up, they usually have to figure that out. I already knew that I wanted to be a marine biologist and follow Jacques Cousteau and others underwater. I just didn't know how to do it at 11 and it took me two years to finally get somebody to certify me as a scuba diver. I got to, at age 13, be able to do my first science expedition for corals, looking for a site for the West Indies lab in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands. It wasn't until later in my aquaculture life that I started to work with corals for the Marine ornamental industry and then got into corals for restoration.
Gil: I know you get asked this a lot but I got to ask it anyways because there are so many people that aren't really aware of what corals are. Could you for the layman talk about just the many ways that corals are vital to life on earth? From habitat to seafood, shoreline protection, tourism, drug discovery, and give us the greatest hits of these amazing creatures.
David: A lot of times I get asked just those two questions. First, what is a coral, and then why are corals important to study or to look into? The first thing I usually do is ask somebody, do they know what a coral is and they usually answer that in a question. Well, is it a plant? Is it an animal? Is it a microbe? Is it a living rock? What is it? The answer to that is yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Gil: Dave, that's really not helpful. It just took me, about 10 years ago, I realized it was an animal. Now you're saying it's also a plant and a microbe and a moving rock?
David: Yes, and in fact, it's a small, clear, colorless animal, a polyp about the size of a small seed, and it has an algal plant that lives inside its tissue, not on the outside, on the inside of it. It can photosynthesize because the animal is clear that sunlight can get through it, but on the outside of that animal is a layer of mucus with a microbial community that becomes its immune system. If that's not wild enough, the three organisms are three different phyla or kingdoms living together and they literally produce a living skeleton as calcium carbonate rock.
Gil: Hence, the rocks that don't roll.
David: That's right. They have a crazy unknown, and usually, for most people undiscovered. That's why it's kind of a hidden life or a secret life because they're underwater, but they are so important. Like you mentioned, most people think they're just a nice thing to look at, a colored rock of some sort, but most people know that that colored rock provides, not only in Florida, $5 billion of economic engine, also $5 billion in Hawaii, and $5 billion, probably in the Caribbean, $5 billion in Australia, so it's a big monetary job. 70,000 jobs in the state of Florida related to corals.
The part people don't really realize upfront is that even though they're 1% of the bottom of the ocean, which is not much at all for at least the shallow water corals, that they're responsible for 25% to 40% of the world's fisheries. It's like an underwater oasis where most of the sea life comes to feed, to breed, and to raise their young, and without that, we may have 28 species of corals in Florida but we have hundreds of species of fish and thousands of species of invertebrates like lobsters and shrimp and crabs that require that living reef to be there.
The other thing that is surprising to most and it's very relevant today is that they are really the first protection for our shoreline erosion. That is, hurricanes are getting both more frequent as well as stronger and they are the first thing that break the waves before they come ashore. One good example of that is Hurricane Irma four or five years ago. Off the Keys where it hit dead on, they were recording 35 to 38-foot waves offshore, but 5 miles offshore is our barrier reef and then 5 miles of patch reefs, and we only had 4.5-foot waves come across the Keys.
If it hadn't been for those corals, 35-foot waves would've wiped out every single person in structure on the Keys, so it's important for all tropical places to realize that if we lose our shoreline protection when we need it the most we should be building it up. What better way to do it than a natural reef that also produces fisheries, also produces tourism? I sometimes tell people, do you like to breathe? The oceans produce 60% of our oxygen we rely on, so as I sometimes say, every other breath, you should be thanking the oceans for the oxygen produced.
That's produced by seaweeds, sea grasses, phytoplankton, and also the algae that lives inside coral reefs, so we start losing the best habitat for fisheries, the production of oxygen underwater. It is really a keystone species. It's a keystone group that we should not be losing but we have lost 50% of that.
Gil: Let's talk about that. I don't want to spend too much time on really what the plight of corals is but I think we have to, right, and we're going to talk a lot about solutions and hope here but how bad is it today with rising sea temperatures, and ocean acidification leading to those mass bleaching events that we've been hearing about and reading about. Just give us a sense of the challenges that corals are facing today.
David: Well, it's a perfect thing to talk about especially on this program because corals, like the poor polar bear, are one of the first organisms seeing the impact of climate change. People usually list about a dozen things that are impacting corals and they all do but they all are a different priority in different parts of the country. It's nearshore pollution, which of course we need to have better water quality, but people don't realize that water quality includes the water temperature and includes the water pH in the form of acidification.
If you had a reef right outside of an outfall, in that one spot an outfall would be probably an important factor. If you lived in Indonesia where in some places they practice dynamite fishing, you would think dynamite fishing is the biggest impact on corals, but to me, that's something that is feasible. Stop selling dynamite to fishermen and you've stopped dynamite fishing in an island area.
Gil: Right. Sunscreen is a localized--
David: I think it's a very minor one. I've done some tests on sunscreens and a good portion of the sunscreens are not harmful to corals. You do have locations where you might get a hundred thousand snorkelers in one year in one location, and if they each put on a smothering and jump in one location, then it might have an impact, but oceanwide, it's probably not the factor like climate change which is global.
Hilary: You're based in the Keys now and I'd love to hear a bit about your Plant A Million Corals initiative that's bringing more attention to both the plight of coral and also the opportunity there. Could you tell us about how that initiative came to be?
David: I sometimes could tell young kids that I've had a very diverse path and past, and that's not necessarily a bad thing because you get a diversified experience and you know what you like and you don't like. I actually retired from Harbor Branch Oceanographic over 24 years ago and I retired when I was working on oceans, reefs, and aquariums a process to cultivate clownfish and corals for the aquarium trade so it wasn't taken from the reef.
We produced in greenhouses mostly the legal Pacific corals, the branching corals, and broke them and fragmented like people in aquariums do into larger pieces and then grew more and it was a visit by the Cousteau family, when they saw what I was doing with the clownfish, they loved it, but when they saw the corals they said, "Why aren't you doing this for the reef instead of the pet store?"
I did one of those aha moments and I left my position there and started with the Cousteaus the first international coral restoration initiative. Then I worked with the Mote Marine Laboratory as their executive director in the Florida Keys for 15 years and worked on trying to produce technologies that could grow corals faster for the corals that weren't being cultivated.
In Florida, the majority of corals, the mass of corals, the brain coral, the boulder coral, the things that actually build the reef were not being grown because no one knew how to grow them, they thought they grew too slow. By mistake, I ended up breaking a piece into small pieces and found out they grow faster, and we can now grow all 28 species of corals faster than the one fast-growing staghorn coral or as fast, and now it's a game changer for corals to do this. I've had some background in working with corals but not always for restoration.
I retired from Mote Marine Lab when most people retire at about 65 years old. I decided to write a book for the rest of the scientists basically called Active Coral Restoration: New Technology for a Changing Climate and Planet. Then, as soon as I finished it, I realized I didn't write a book for the general public, and the general public needs to know about climate change and how it's affecting corals, but the good news of what we can do and they can do as well.
I switched and formed a foundation called Plant A Million Corals and realized that besides writing the book to show how it can be done, I needed to actually prove and demonstrate that we can produce not just 1,000 or 5,000, or 50,000 corals but produce millions of corals because as you probably know, it's a big ocean out there, and doing something just in a backyard of a few here and there as like I like to say, it's great to grow some tomato plants and vegetables in your backyard to augment your food, but it won't stop world hunger. You got to produce food at mass, and I wanted to show universities and even research institutions like I worked in and governments, that this can be done at scale and successfully because if it's not done at scale, it is just a hobby, it's just expensive, and there's not enough numbers to make a real difference. That was the reason I like to say the non-profit Plant A Million Corals is our mission, it's our vision, and it's the recipe.
Hilary: I want to highlight one of the things that you referenced with breaking off parts of the coral, and you've been an advocate for micro fragmentation. Could you walk us through what that looks like and how it works in practice?
David: Sure. The normal way that people from the aquarium trade who usually bought branching corals from the Pacific had in their reef tanks. They would reach in and maybe try to rearrange or clean the tank and by mistake break off a big branch of one, and they realize that if they stuck that one kind of growth style back in the rock or glued it back on, it would continue to grow.
The big mass of corals, the ones that at least in the Atlantic provide the majority of the reef structure, the ones that you are familiar with like a brain coral or big boulder coral, or mountain coral, the one that really breaks the waves and makes the habitat for fish and builds the reef up, no one was doing anything with because they thought it grew very slow and that it was very difficult to produce in culture.
Well, when I had worked for 20-something years in clams and oysters and fish and shrimp and clownfish, we ran a hatchery. When I came to Florida and they were taking the one species of staghorn coral breaking it in a big piece like an aquarist does in the field and making more but no one was doing anything with the other majority of corals, I said, "Well, why don't we grow the other corals? They're the orphaned corals." They said, "Well, they're difficult. No one's ever grown one of those, they must take hundreds of years." I said, "Well, why don't you use a hatchery or sexual cycle?" They said, "You've been working with shrimp and fish too long, didn't you know that we didn't even know corals had a sexual reproductive cycle until 1985?"
Gil: That's a fact I didn't know-- [crosstalk]
David: It's unheard of. Is that crazy?
Gil: Yes. Wait a second, so I sense also from your book that you had this eureka moment, you had done, but why was the choral science community so skeptical? You're saying it but until recently, not that long ago, they're still fighting this notion that you can do this for larger coral species.
David: Yes, and I think a lot of that was most people working in corals were coral ecologists, coral disease experts, things like that, and they were doing the typical thing of observing and monitoring mother nature. If you go out in the wild and try as a geologist or a coral biologist and measure corals in the field, they grow very slow. All the people that did publications that said that these boulder corals, massive corals, only grow about a millimeter a month or a year, which is the length of a head of a pen. How would you ever grow these?
It was me trying to grow the first sexual reproduction of that big elkhorn coral that we got some of the first dozen test tube baby corals at Mote Marine Lab while I was there, and a whole group effort into keeping them alive. At one year old, I could show you a picture of these test tube baby corals only under a microscope, and by two years, the size of a small coin, and by three years, the size of maybe a quarter.
I thought this is way too slow. It's not working. They're right, it grows very slow, and so I took them off the upper rung of the science glass aquarium and put them on the bottom plate and later went to move them into a clean tank and one stuck and had grown to the bottom and I didn't know it. I yanked at it and it cracked and broke into pieces.
Gil: Then micro fragmentation thus became a pioneering solution. What about coral re-skinning? That's another technique.
David: That's the second blessing that we have as a game changer for corals. My eureka mistake, as the New York Times called it, was one where we take a specialized saw, one that is meant to cut coral jewelry.
Gil: Wow. There's a little bit of irony in that right? We're cut--
David: There's irony in that. However, it's good they invented one, but we cut live coral tissue and something the size of a golf ball, instead of waiting three years for it to grow a little bigger and cut it half then waiting another three years till it grew a little bigger and cut it in half, we cut one of those into 20 to 100 micro fragments and now called micro fragmentation. It's almost like plant tissue culture where you would do it in a laboratory. Not only do we get so many more pieces, let's say 20 to 100, but all 20 to 100 are stimulated to grow 20 to 40 times faster.
It's like your skin, it's a healing response that if you cut something, it wants to heal up right away. For a small piece of a coral, it tries to grow back its space so nothing else grows in it and so it grows very quick. Now we actually take those pieces, tag them, and we plant all 20 micro fragments near each other and they grow together. Instead of fighting like most corals do, they grow back together, and that's what we call re-skinning. They re-skin over, let's say a dead coral head.
If we take a coral head the size of a basketball and put 20 of these pieces on it that came from one piece the size of a golf ball, we cut that golf ball into 20 pieces. Six months later, we have 20 golf ball-size pieces. We plant those golf ball size pieces on something that looks like pepperonis on a pizza. When those grow out and touch each other, instead of fighting, they recognize each other as themselves just like a skin transplant on your arm would recognize yourself, not reject it, and it fuses together and we produce a coral that would've taken 25 to 75 years in two years.
Gil: Wow.
Hilary: That's awesome.
Hilary: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions for over 30 years. To learn more about our climate positive journey, please visit HannonArmstrong.com.
Gil: Okay, and then you're scaling this up, right? I read in your book about what you call coral restoration units or CRUs. Tell us about that.
David: They're a fancy name for something that's sort of like a portable classroom. If you wanted to teach more than a class of 20 but you made 20 portable classrooms and shipped them out to 20 schools around the world and taught a teacher in each one to each teach 24 students, you'd be doing better. We decided since most of the people thought that putting the aquaculture systems together to do this process was too high-tech, too expensive, and they didn't know how to do it, so I figured I'd put them together but all the tanks, the pieces, parts, the filters, the valves, and check them out that they're are working system, let's say, to grow 10,000 corals, and put them inside a shipping container and ship a turnkey coral nursery in a box to somebody else around the world so that they also can save their corals on their island or their location.
Gil: You have a citizen science component to this, right, I think you alluded to it. Locally in Florida, you've done some work with the boy scouts. Tell us about how this is really reaching out into the community and the way you're making it accessible.
David: Well, I've been in aquaculture for a couple of decades, and in all marine aquaculture, there are three main stages; a hatchery, a nursery, which could be land-based or sea-based, or both, and a final out planting or release, or stock enhancement. When corals got started with just the staghorn coral, they only did the field nursery and a final outplant. No one was doing a land-based nursery or even a hatchery. I started doing the work with micro-fragmentation in a land nursery, and that land nursery literally was one that lent itself to anybody being able to volunteer or be an intern student or be involved in.
Picture yourself thinking that you see videos of some people in some part of the country diving underwater and cutting some corals. Then if you could walk into a land nursery or a farm where you had tanks the size of kitchen table tops filled with water, and you could stand up in front of those and look down in the water and see every single one of a thousand corals growing up, and move to the next tank where you see another species being grown and say, "Wow, this is so great. This is like being in a public aquarium. I don't want to have to pay to be here. I want to work here and volunteer."
The chances of students being involved in this process is very high. The chances of citizen scientist retirees that always wanted to be a marine biologist but had to get a real job years ago could really be involved. We will be offering that as a way to keep the economics correct. When we first grow just a few hundred corals, the real cost is a couple of hundred dollars a coral. Once you start getting in the thousands and ten thousands, it gets to about $25 a coral. Producing a million corals a year, we should be doing it at $1 to $2 a coral.
Hilary: That's fantastic. I am one of those people who's shocked that I am not currently a marine biologist, and so I can see the draw.
Gil: It's not too late, Hilary.
Hilary: This could be my start.
David: It's never too late. My wife Dona would probably get mad at me after writing two of these books during my so-called retirement and during COVID, and during times when all of our friends are just traveling around the world. I said, "I want to write a third book." It's called So You Want to be a Marine Biologist, Huh? and show people how you can. Not only from the young person that needs to know what diversity and experiences they have to have and tenacity to keep in it, but to those like yourselves who at any part of your life said, "I really want to work with critters from the sea but I just don't know how. I already have a career." This is an opportunity as a citizen scientist to volunteer, and really get some cool things that you are doing for the world.
Gil: You've been a marine biologist, what, 50 years now?
David: Yes,
Gil: You've dived all over the world. I've been thinking a lot about places like the Great Barrier Reef. They may not be around if we don't stop what we're doing to exacerbate climate change. Where do you tell people they should go dive and see corals if they're fortunate enough to do it, and as soon possible in the places I imagine? Where do you tell people to go?
David: Yes, Gil. That's an excellent question. I try not to answer that question in the way they're expecting because I've seen things such as where I dove in the 1960s, if I go back to that location today, it doesn't look like it did in the '60s. If I went to an island in the '60s and said, "Oh, it's just fantastic," and then came to another location now and looked at it, and I had another diver that was at the location I'm in now and I say, "Go back to where I went in the '60s," and he went there and he said, "This is worse than anything I've seen," so it's time.
Climate change has made a big impact on corals not just in any one location, although some are worse than others, is that time has made this big effect. I'm hoping that people realize how cool corals are and how fast we are losing them because they're one of the first indicators that something's wrong with this planet, and we know that it's climate change.
CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas that most people were in denial up until a few years ago that it even was a problem until they started seeing in person the things that you can see as fires and droughts, and hurricanes and storms and all those kinds of things that happen. Hopefully, corals will be one of the things that wake people up.
Sometimes people use the term, the canary in the coal mine. It's the first one that shows problems and they are, and so is, for instance, the polar bear. However, the polar bear we know is having direct indications of impact by high temperatures and climate change, but there's not too much we can do except address climate change for them.
Gil: Let's stay on. How did you come up with the title of the book, The Secret Life of Corals: Sex, War, and Rocks That Don't Roll? Do you arrive at a punchy title like that before you write the first pages, or was it at the end or somewhere in the middle?
David: Yes and no. I actually was enamored by the book, The Hidden Life of Trees. Wonderful book if you haven't read it. It talks about the things that you would never imagine. Even though you can walk through a forest or through a park and see trees, you really don't know what can be going on. That book was wonderful. I thought it's too bad, corals are the same way except that you cannot walk through just a stroll in the park or down to your car through the driveway and see a tree and say, oh yes, it's fall and it's doing well and changes. Seeing a coral is much more difficult, even if you are a diver, seeing it that often, which is why we didn't notice the one moment in time that they have sexual reproduction.
No one was there because 20, 30 years ago, in the middle of the night for 10 minutes and one spot, there weren't that many diverse diving at night to see it.
I wanted to do something similar to The Hidden, but then I realized these are three crazy critters that have a lifestyle of activity between how they war and how they grow that is really secret. I wanted to know those secrets so I had a separate whole chapter that was called Sex, War, and Rocks that Don't Roll. The publisher said that's quite a great subtitle. It really needs to be the subtitle on the front of the book.
Gil: There you go. If you had to choose one thing, and it's hard, I know, but what's the one thing that you haven't mentioned perhaps it makes coral so extraordinary?
David: Well, there's probably two factors. One is their sexual reproduction cycle is just so crazy and wild and so much like a one in a million every a hundred years that makes it.
Gil: It's like alien stuff we're talking about?
David: Yes, that's right. If you're a coral and live to be 800 years old, it's okay if you're only successful once every century because you live eight centuries so you can make eight offspring. As I tell people, does anybody want to wait a hundred years for maybe the next successful settlement of coral?
Gil: Pretty lonely.
David: Not me.
Gil: No.
David: Then they say, well, tell me about this journey that coral gametes and the larvae have to go through to become a baby coral that has made it to the life that you can actually say one in a million made it. I say, well, it's a pretty interesting sexual reproduction, and it's too bad we only experienced it a few years ago, but it happens in the summer. It happens usually in August, and it usually happens after the full moon in August. It usually happens about two days after the full moon in August. It usually happens about two hours after sunset, after two days after the full moon in August, and lasts about 10 minutes.
It's a orchestrated release of what looks like little bubbles that float to the surface which are gamete bundles of joy, sperm in one bundle and eggs in another bundle. When they come to the surface and hit the air, they burst and release millions of eggs and billions of sperm. It's an underwater snowstorm that goes upside down. It's pretty crazy to see and it happens triggered immediately by all these coral heads that literally are 10, 20, a hundred feet apart. How they sense and tell each other, they have no calendars, they have no watches, no stopwatches, no cell phones to tell each other, "Now. Ready? Everybody go," but they do, and on one coral head, it actually looks like a stadium wave. It starts on one side, and it's literally as fast as brrr, to the other side that they all release at once.
Gil: You're saying, we didn't know about this until 1985?
David: Peter Harrison from The Great Barrier Reef happened to be doing a night dive and looking at corals with a group of students and witnessed this fantastic event and then became a lifelong dedicated coral reproductive biologist which he's still working today. Got a few emails from him saying that the spawn was good last week in the Great Barrier Reef. What a fantastic thing. Then the whole life journey of the larvae which developed is even a whole nother story that I'm not sure we have enough time, but they float around on the surface for one to three weeks and go through being eaten by everything [chuckles] until finally, they settle on the bottom.
Gil: I want to close, perhaps by I loved your final chapter, Moving Forward with Faith, Hope, and Love, and your closing of the book. You offer simple ways that people hopefully who are moved by the amazing story about corals, that they can begin to appreciate this at a deeper level and you offer some sort of simple suggestions of what folks can do. Could you share a few of those suggestions that you offer?
David: I really have like many people, a reverence for life, all life, and I became enamored by everything. I try to eat down the food chain. I try not to kill anything that I don't need to eat. I try to know that all the things that people can do to help solve the climate change is really not just pointing the finger to one big company somewhere that it's their fault, but all of us who buy incorrectly or want the kinds of things that make a better or worse choice, so I go over few of the choices that you can make, for instance, eating down the food chain.
It takes 10 times more energy and 10 times more land to be creating animal feeds on land than it will be plant-based diets. I like everybody started off as a youngster with a pretty poor gas-guzzling truck [chuckles] that probably got eight miles per gallon and it was easy to trade that one in and get one for 15 miles per gallon and it's easier to trade it in and get one for 25 miles per gallon. Now I have one that's 40 miles per gallon and I also have an electric hybrid, and so there's all those kinds of things that you as an individual can do.
It's not just, "I can't do a dynamic change against climate change." You can by your purchasing power and you can by what you buy. You can by what you conserve, you can by what you recycle. If each of us had such a smaller carbon footprint, people wouldn't be producing the oil or burning the fossil fuels to make electricity if we used half the amount of electricity. We can all do those kinds of things. They're pretty easy.
The example I give to people is we thought acid rain in the Midwest was a giant problem. We thought that the hole in the ozone layer was too big a problem and we're solving them both. We're still trying to solve and move forward in the ozone layer hole, but we solved what we considered too big of a project of acid rain. There were people that didn't even say that existed until there was no fishing and no frogs and turtles in some of the areas. All we did is switch to a less sulfur fuel in the Midwest and we solved acid rain. We can solve climate change. Not you, all of us can.
Gil: We, great. I love this notion, faith, hope, and love, great words to live by. I can tell that the ocean has deepened your spirituality and your love for nature and your fellow human being. It's really fun to talk with you and learn about corals and the amazing restoration efforts. I applaud you on a terrific book. I hope you do write that third book much to the chagrin of your wife, I'm afraid. You've got a wonderful spirit about you and wonderful experience and thank you for sharing your story with us all.
David: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be here. I always say we've been given a Garden of Eden and we have a garden of Eden underwater, and I got to be the one to see it early on many years ago and I want to bring that back for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and everybody else to see as well.
Hilary: Wonderful. Thank you, Dave.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com.
I'm Hilary Langer.
And this is Climate Positive.