Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise

  • Steve Jones
Little, Brown: 2007. 256 pp. £15.99 0316729388 | ISBN: 0-316-72938-8

If I had first seen Coral by Steve Jones in a bookshop, rather than receiving a review copy, I would have bought it. I would have been attracted by its superb cover, whose eerie blue serves as a glorious background for a swimming red snapper. And attempting to casually browse through the text, I would have been slowly ensnared by the loops of its fascinating literary, historic and scientific digressions.

Any book with the word 'pessimist' in its title must have a sound basis. Here it rests on Charles Darwin's solid shoulders — or more precisely, on his first scientific book, from 1842, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, in which he presented a hypothesis that solved the riddle of how coral reefs grow, where they grow, and why. Jones, in his first chapter, explains how Darwin came to his hypothesis, how it shaped all subsequent research on coral reefs, and how drilling into Pacific atolls, conducted in support of nuclear bomb tests, ultimately confirmed it.

Credit: JOE MAGEE

Darwin's book relied on the simple but profound idea that 'lowly' organisms, here coral polyps, pursuing their own tiny goals, through their sheer numbers and over the immensity of time, could play major roles on the geological stage. This is also a theme in his 1859 book The Origin of Species, whose detractors could not fathom the transformative power of small, between-generation changes occurring over eons. This simple idea was again the theme of his 1881 book on the slow, subterranean work of earthworms, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, to which he devoted his final years.

Genomics has given us a powerful tool to study the phylogenetic history and affinities of these tiny agents of change. In his second chapter, Jones uses genomics and the hydra (a non-colonial polyp related to corals) to introduce the notion that the cells of hydra cooperate, just like those of people. They do this, says Jones, because they have learnt from the mutually beneficial relationships of their organelles, many of which are descendants of formerly independent bacteria-like organisms.

He explores this idea further in the third chapter, which is devoted to what appears, in coral reefs and other ecosystems elsewhere, to be disinterested cooperation between species. But it isn't, notwithstanding the benevolent anarchist Prince Kropotkin, who gets a loop of several pages. Rather, barely masked warfare prevails, interrupted by tenuous and short truces, revoked when conditions change. Altruism seems to be limited to humans, and one of the biggest tasks we face is to expand our altruistic acts from our circle of relatives, friends and compatriots to the whole of humanity.

Jones then disposes, in his fourth chapter, of the tenacious Western myth of South Pacific coral islands as 'paradise'. Life was too precarious for that, particularly after the first contact with Europeans, who brought previously unknown diseases, some sexually transmitted. The abolition of cannibalism did not compensate for the population losses caused by these scourges.

In his fifth and final chapter, Jones documents the lengthy and rapacious exploitation of coral reefs. He starts with the geological conditions that cause carbon to form extremely hard crystals. In the middle of the nineteenth century, these conditions in parts of what is now India enabled the Maharajah of Hyderabad and his court to trade diamonds, via the East India Company, for jewellery carved from calcium carbonate from Mediterranean corals. Now the East India Company is no more, and these precious corals are mostly gone too.

Jones calls the book's epilogue, entitled 'A Pessimist in Paradise', an 'envoi', as if it were appended to a poem. He uses it to pull the many strands of this book into one: we are now stuck with trash carbon in the form of carbon dioxide that gums up our atmosphere and, as carbonic acid in sea water, threatens coral reefs, and indeed much marine life, with Armageddon. He explains the physics and chemistry involved with much verve, and more looping (Captain Cook, Australian cockatoos, the Permian extinction, the prospect of 9 billion humans, the Irish Republican Army, California's abalone, Newton, Funafuti Atoll in Tuvalu...).

Finally, he explains his pessimism: “The world of coral gives more reason for despondency than for hope. Local conservation can do little in the face of global change. The future of the reefs is bleak indeed. Their end presages a catastrophe that will spread far beyond their bounds — and remind us that we too are far from safe.”