Saving the rain forests of the ocean

How greens and villagers, and a bunch of big ceramic snowflakes, are reviving the devastated coral reefs of Indonesia.

By Jeff Greenwald

Dec 6, 2005 | Scuba diving in the bath-warm waters of Bunaken Island is to be immersed in an impossibly alien world. Blue ribbon eels unfurl their fluorescent bodies into the current, decorator crabs prance across the coral heads wearing live anemones on their backs, and ornate ghost pipefish hang above soft corals like feathered seahorses. I pass a shallow cave, waking a loggerhead turtle, and watch the giant creature knife toward deeper waters with the grace of a slow-moving pelican. Below, a white-tipped shark slices through a school of snapper.

Bunaken lies off the north shore of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The small island is one of the gems in Bunaken National Marine Park, created in 1991, one of Indonesia's first marine parks. I am here with Seacology, a nonprofit group based in Berkeley, Calif., that works with islanders around the world to help preserve indigenous communities and ecosystems. In Bunaken and neighboring Manado Tua, a perfectly round island dominated by the towering cone of a dormant volcano, Seacology is funding a revolutionary practice of reviving coral reefs.

Often called the "rain forests of the sea," coral reefs are among the world's most endangered ecosystems. Currently, all of the world's reefs would cover an area only half the size of France. Once damaged, reefs demand well over a century to regrow; in many areas, they may not grow back at all. With the reefs gone, fish disappear, and the islands themselves become vulnerable to destructive waves and erosion.

The years prior to 1991 saw a lot of bad mojo at work around Bunaken and Manado Tua. For decades, fishermen bombed the reefs with dynamite, or squirted them with sodium cyanide, to net large harvests of fish that surfaced. Low tides forced local boats to anchor amid the fragile corals, and dive boats (not to mention clumsy divers) wrought havoc as well. Storms reduced already weakened corals to rubble. By the time the national park was created, big sections of the reef were already in dire shape.

In 1998, marine biologist Mark Erdmann, a senior advisor to Conservation International, along with Indonesian activist Meity Mongdong and dive master Christiane Muller, helped create a management board for the Bunaken National Park. They managed to shift control of the park away from the central government in Jakarta and put it in the hands of local villagers, fishermen and dive operators -- people with a vested interest in preserving the area's ecology.

Environmentalists have employed various strategies over the years to revive crippled reefs, from sinking old railroad cars to dropping huge cement balls into the rubble; anything to give new corals a handhold. But the most elegant fix, the one funded by Seacology, may be EcoReefs: white ceramic modules, the size of squat, round coffee tables, that look like 3-D snowflakes (they're inspired by the shape of staghorn coral). Anchor enough of them in the rubble, the theory goes, and tiny polyps -- the animals that create coral reefs -- will take root on the modules' arms and fish will return in huge schools.

EcoReefs are the brainchild of Michael Moore, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moore looks like a young Ed Harris and holds a Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley. "One of my favorite things about EcoReefs," he says, "is that unlike old tires or railroad cars, they're not marine pollution. They are made of harmless materials that will ultimately be broken down by wave energy -- leaving only the new reef growth in place."

In 2003, hundreds of modules were brought to the northern Sulawesi islands. Local dive operators and villagers worked together to assemble them. "It was fantastic," Erdmann says. "Everyone from little kids to grandparents helped out. Then the dive operators came to do the underwater installation."

The largest installation is off the coast of Manado Tua, where blasted reefs are shored up with 620 modules. Seacology donated the EcoReefs to the island's villagers in exchange for an agreement to leave the area alone: No Fishin'. There's no diving, either, but exceptions are made for biologists and, fortunately, journalists.

Next Page: Underwater, EcoReefs are covered with baby corals and sponges, more varieties than I can count

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