Tour boat divers have long borne witness to mass bleaching events. Once reluctant to wade into discussions about global heating, they are now opening up

Tour boat divers have long borne witness to mass bleaching events. Once reluctant to wade into discussions about global heating, they are now opening up

“You can see it on their faces,” says scuba diving instructor Elliot Peters. “There’s definitely some remorse and sadness.”

Peters works at a resort on Heron Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef and, in recent weeks, he’s had to tell curious guests why so many of the corals around the island are turning bone white.

The reef is in the middle of its fifth mass bleaching event in only eight years – an alarming trend driven by global heating in a year that has seen record global ocean temperatures.

Peters has never seen a mass coral bleaching event up close before, but this summer he’s seen ancient boulder corals that can live for hundreds of years bleaching and showing signs of death.

“If anything it’s motivating me,” he says. “It’s opening the doors to get people talking about climate change and the health of the reef. People are thanking us for telling the truth about what’s going on here.”

      • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Hopefully my sarcasm was obvious.

        I swear people are just gladly diving headfirst into total despair. Any hint of good news? Shit all over it with a one liner as the guy above, trying to point out the hypocrisy as if the vacationer should just not fly back from the trip lol. Like jfc, would it kill you take the small W??

        People who see the effects of climate change (on the reef or whatever) with their own eyes are going to be a lot more likely to take climate change seriously and maybe take some real action – there’s a massive list of things we could be trying rather than being a doomer on social media. It’s not that hard to find activist groups, write govt representatives, etc. And fuck this idea that millions of people doing something won’t make a change lol. More learned helplessness.

        Not that we aren’t fucked… but how fucked we will be depends on what we do. Dooming on social media is guaranteed to not get it done.

        All it does is drains you of any motivation (or will to live) you might have had to do something, even if small.

        I’m just fucking sick of the constant despair-aganda and kind of want to tell people spreading it to shove it up their asses.