End-of-year attention
A documentary like "Chasing Coral" is a reminder that it isn't just human lives that I should feel obligated to, so I re-watched it from the beginning.
I was looking at the various shows in my Netflix queue that I started but didn't watch to the end this year and I felt a spike of guilt at seeing the 2017 documentary "Chasing Coral" there. There are numerous situations in the world that I've spent time mentally digesting lately (such as the war in Ukraine and mass starvation in Somalia), even though I have no power to effect change with them. I think this is partly built in to what it means & feels like to be a citizen of the modern 'connected' world- at least for me, I do feel a kind of obligation to be aware and try to empathize with what other humans are going through, even when it is atrocious.
A documentary like "Chasing Coral" is a reminder that it isn't just human lives that I should feel obligated to, so I re-watched it from the beginning. Though difficult to sit through, I thought it does a stellar job of bringing the stories of both coral ecosystems and those trying to convey the urgency of what is happening to them to life. The driving narrative centers on a team that is trying to use underwater time-laspe photography to better educate people on what is happening when the excess heat from climate change ends up in the oceans: the corals often have an intense stress response that leads to 'bleaching' where just a white skeleton remains.
A few highlights from the film: seeing what happens when the initial focus on the technical aspect of placing underwater cameras doesn't pan out & the divers have to be more directly involved in capturing tons of footage (the emotional rawness for them is quite palpable); learning new details about the amazing symbiosis present in a coral, which is an animal that usually hosts photosynthesizing microalgae in their tissues, & how the algae stop photosynthesizing at certain temperatures; hearing a scientist describe the ecosystem present in a healthy coral reef as a place where "you hear the grunts and groans of so many different animals".
I recently came across this non-profit group, Coral Guardians, that does direct restoration work on coral systems in two locations. I haven't thoroughly researched them, but I do like their fundraising framing of "Adopt a Coral"!