Great Barrier Reef

Exjt, Coral

The Reef: A Passionate History - The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change
By Iain McCalman (Scribe 336pp £20)

Giant anemone identified by William Saville-Kent, 1893

Since 1770, when Captain Cook blundered into it in Endeavour and came to grief, Australia's Great Barrier Reef has gone from a navigator's nightmare through being a World Heritage treasure to its present status of moribund paradise. On the way it had to overcome its early 19th-century reputation as the lair of savage Aboriginals. Thanks to Cook's murder in Hawaii and lurid stories of cannibalism by survivors of shipwrecks on the Reef, the newspaper-reading public was cheerfully predisposed to view the 1,400-mile length of the Reef and the Torres Strait as a death zone to sailors, as fatally treacherous to ships as the spear-throwing locals were to their crews.

What did most to change the Great Barrier Reef's image was the interest scientists began taking in corals. The English naturalist Joseph Beete Jukes was the first to resist the popular stereotyping of the Reef and its inhabitants. He and his friend 'Griffin' Melville supplied lyrical descriptions of corals that greatly helped R M Ballantyne in writing his boy's Robinsonade, The Coral Island (1858), especially since Ballantyne had never been nearer the South Pacific than Canada. The science remained contentious. When Charles Darwin publishedThe Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, he was the first to propose that corals could only thrive in water shallow enough for daylight to reach them and that the great limestone reefs that supported them, often to immense depths, were simply layer upon layer of former corals that had died as the Earth's crust beneath them had sunk over millennia. It is a mark of how radical his explanation must have seemed that even in the early 20th century the American scientist Alexander Agassiz was still trying to disprove it. Even so, Darwin's coral theory was not irrefutably confirmed until the 1950s. Following early US atom bomb tests on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, deep drilling showed that dead coral structures extended hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

Inevitably, the entrancing descriptions of the Reef's wildness and beauty by successive scientific expeditions attracted beachcombers, then settlements, tourists, resorts and all the familiar developmental ills. The final section of Iain McCalman's admirable history chronicles the attempts in the 1970s to stop Queensland's appalling premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen signing away the Reef's prospecting and drilling rights to crony mining companies. The narrowness of the margin by which this fate was averted - UNESCO's recognition just getting there first, thanks to last-ditch activism by locals as well as by a handful of international scientists - is in its way at once a triumph and a scandal. Today the Great Barrier Reef is protected in a manner appropriate to its scientific and aesthetic status as well as its appeal to tourists (uneasily divvied up between modern Walden Ponders and the sun'n'surf barbie brigade).

Nevertheless the Reef is dying. In only the last 27 years it has lost half its coral cover. The twist to this tale is that the death of corals is a worldwide phenomenon which, for want of a better scapegoat, is principally attributed to climate change. I well remember, after years of swimming reefs by day and night, the shock of encountering serious areas of bleached coral in the Philippines. They were part of the first mass bleachings of 1981-2 and were followed by even bigger outbreaks in 1997-8 and 2001-2. For some time we ascribed them to the growing plagues of crown-of-thorns starfish, the probable result of gross over-fishing. Like the jellyfish that are today increasing everywhere, these starfish are resistant to pollution and thrive once their natural predators have been removed. Today the likeliest cause is understood to be the stress of rising ocean temperatures and acidity. Nothing can be done about either now - the process is unstoppable. At a Royal Society lecture in 2009 given by the great reef scientist Charlie Veron and introduced by David Attenborough, the conclusion was stark: all the world's coral reefs face mass extinction over the next few decades.

The Reef is a lively history of the greatest of them all, readably full of well-researched archival stories and eccentric characters. Though passionate, it is not a polemic. Iain McCalman makes a somewhat conventional effort to end on an upbeat note by suggesting that some species of coral polyps and their symbiotic algae may adapt to changing conditions. But does it matter? The ocean will survive, the planet will continue, just not in a way that suits Homo sapiens. It is inevitable that short-lived humans will lament change and decay, with the added irony that it is often innocent naturalists who help the process along with their idyllic descriptions. In 1930 the Cambridge oceanographer Maurice Yonge published a popular book, A Year on the Great Barrier Reef, that had the effect of triggering his own dread prophecy of tourism. He lived to see and deeply regret the outcome. He was merely the 20th-century counterpart to Philip Gosse eighty years earlier, whose beautiful illustrations and painstaking classification of the abundant corals and sea plants on the Dorset shore stimulated a Victorian craze for home aquaria. An army of weekend trippers soon stripped his beloved rock pools bare, a despoliation from which neither they nor he ever recovered, as his son, Edmund, movingly described in Father and Son.

A further irony is the way each generation views the world it inherits as the norm. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of a stand of poplars felled at Binsey: 'After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.' Science now refers to this creeping redaction of the natural world by the unlovely name 'Shifting Baseline Syndrome'. Luckily our nostalgia dies with us. Future generations of non-readers should be spared knowing not only that the Great Barrier Reef was once a ravishing spectacle but that, in terms of their efficiency, coral reefs ranked as the planet's most productive natural systems.