#246 - Quit Stressing Me Out: How to Restore the World's Dying Coral Reefs

Cory Ames [00:00:00]:

The right amount of stress at the right time. That's all it requires to trigger coral to grow anywhere from 25 to 50 times its natural rate as it would in the wild. In the practice of coral farming, this is called micro fragmenting. In their infancy, coral are cut into much smaller fragments. This disturbance This stress triggers an incredible growth response in the coral. Doctor David Vaughn, at the time the executive director of the Mote tropical research laboratory is responsible for stumbling upon what, in 2014, the New York Times called a Eureka mistake. It was by accident. Doctor Vaughn accidentally broke apart a coral colony when attempting to transfer them into a different To his surprise, checking back a week or so later, the broken coral had doubled in size in response to the stress The baby coral bounced back in such a way that we don't typically see in nature. Do you write amount of stress at the right time? We could also call this Eustress. That Miriam Webster defines as a positive form stress having a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and emotional well-being. Right amount of stress at the right time. Context just might be everything. The work of Doctor David Vaughn, who now runs his own organization plants a 1,000,000 Corals, is what made the work of my guest today, Sam Tysher, possible. Sam Tysher is the co founder of Coral Vita, and Freeport Grand Bahama Coral Vita is farming coral to restore the planet's dying reefs by employing breakthrough techniques charted back to the work of folks like Doctor Vaughn, Coral Vida can as well grow coral at fifty times the typical rate. And in 2021, Coral Vida was an air shot prize winner which is an incredible award for any environmental organization. This honor recognizes the great potential of their solution and awards them with £1,000,000 to further advance and scale their work. But perhaps like a baby coral polyp, you could say coral video was born of similar circumstance right type of stress, right amount of stress, right time. It's easy to focus on the Earth shot, the £1,000,000, but if you asked Sam He might say a much smaller number 1000 is more important. The first investment in what has now become Coral Vita. Here's what they did with that $1000.

Sam Teicher [00:02:44]:

It let us take what was a draft business plan, fly down to Florida where There's a lot of ongoing scientific and nonprofit work on coral restoration. This was in 2014 to meet with folks from the federal and state government to explore what kind of opportunities there might be for it if we wanted to set up a coral farm in Florida. How would we go about doing that? To meet with some of those restoration stakeholders and get to know them, introduce ourselves as well as to meet and eventually recruit doctor David Vaughn as one of our original So we had enough money for flight, to rent a car for food, but that was about it. So we ended up, sleeping in the the rental car as we worked our way down the the keys, which worked out better for me than for Gator, because I definitely can be a bit of a snore at times And so, he had to suffer through that along the way down. But that was the the starting point for us to be doing the work that we're doing. It really did start with that $1000 grant.

Cory Ames [00:03:46]:

That $1000 got Coral Vita started. They spoke with key stakeholders. Researchers and organizations about the potential for bringing their restoration based business plan to life. They secured critically important advisors, such as doctor David Vaughn himself. Alas, Florida wasn't the right fit, but it didn't matter. The fledgling Coral Vita team had gained advisors, new criteria for selecting the 1st farm location, and most importantly, momentum. I asked Sam how he felt about the $1000 after receiving that first grant, and here's what he said.

Sam Teicher [00:04:20]:

It was a lot of money. You know, we were grad students who had an idea, and this was gonna pay for us to go do the first test. A thousand bucks can go a long way if you have the right purpose and are able to sort of put it to good use So in retrospect, no, it's not that much money. But if we hadn't gotten that $1000 grant or then the next $15,000 grant we've got, there's all these ideas out there that have huge opportunities to scale so that they can take on $10,000,000 investments in funding and the like. But if no one's of doing those smaller scale early stage grants, you've got this chicken and egg problem that prevents a lot of great solutions to really either seeing the light of day or reaching the level of actually they can achieve. So that $1000, ultimately, was a huge, huge amount of money.

Cory Ames [00:05:11]:

Now with on the ground experience, expert advisors in a sharpened field tested plan that 1000 became 15,000 and admission to an accelerator. And on the story goes, 1st investor, 1st farm, Each step is a much more significant accomplishment than the last. You can't help but wonder how an earth shot prize winner becomes an earth shot prize winner. How A best selling author becomes a best selling author. How an Olympic gold medal winner becomes an Olympic gold medal winner. Undoubtedly, it all starts with something. Small, at least something that seems small in retrospect. As Sam said, 1000 is a small number looking back But at the time and for the sake of where they are today, it was and perhaps still is everything. Making a significant change starts with making a change, right type of challenge at the right time. Restoring a coral reef in entirety starts with cutting a coral into a fragment that's an inch a half wide. It's great to aspire, but we shouldn't compare ourselves to our aspirations. We use them as a compass, taking one step at a time gauging what feels or doesn't feel like progress along our way. If I asked you, how do you become an Ershop prize winner and capture a £1,000,000 award to scale your incredible solution to some environmental degradation Would you tell me to chase $1000 grant first? Probably not. There's no way to anticipate that one accomplishment would lead to the other. Just as Sam couldn't have told you, the aspiration was to win a nurse shop prize the day after he and Gator were granted that $1000. So, yes, aspire, dream big, but be careful to issue judgment on where you are versus where you aspire to be. Pull out your compass, see where it points, and think, what's the smallest action or challenge that I could take on that my bring me closer to what I aspire to achieve. What's the eustress that I could create in my life right now that would push me to develop into the person I hope to one day be. Just like Doctor David Vaughn, cutting a piece of coral into the tiniest piece you can imagine so that in the span of 1 to 2 years, that coral grows the same amount that it would have taken 15 to 30 years without such an intervention. The right type of stress, the right amount of stress, the right time. So stick around for this episode with Sam Tysher as through this lens of good stress, bad stress, and everything in between. We explore the work of Coral Vita, the vital, importance of our coral reefs and share solutions to restoring the world's dying reefs. We'll be back with Sam in just a moment as he shares the role Reefs play in our marine ecosystems and coastal communities. I'm Corey Ames, your hosts, and this is the social entrepreneurship and innovation podcast. Let's hear a quick word from our partners that make this show possible Change is brewing folks. Dean's beans organic coffee is on a mission to use coffee as a vehicle for positive change. In the coffee lands and beyond. Now your source for the best organic fair trade sustainable coffee offers subscriptions. That's right. The folks over at Dean's beans are making it so easy to get your favorite coffees delivered right to your doorstep while saving 10%. Simply choose the coffee you want, select how often you want it delivered, and check out. It's that simple. Never run out of coffee again. And making changes to your subscription is super easy. You can even gift a shipment to one of your coffee loving friends. Subscribers also get surprise discounts and exclusive access to new products like Dean's bean stellar limited edition coffees. The Dean's bean's crew is passionate about bringing you the freshest coffee you can buy. Which is why they roast their organic fair trade coffee fresh daily. I might recommend getting started with the Peruvian which is a single origin coffee medium roasted coming from the Amazonian Highlands in Peru, thanks to the the PangoA cooperative, which, the Dean's beans folks have been partners with since 2003. So Head on over to Dean's beans.com to subscribe and start drinking the freshest, fairest coffee you can buy. Sustainable, convenient, delicious, beans, beans dot com. The social entrepreneurship and innovation podcast is supported by Transform. Listen to the incredible We Transform Lives podcast to hear about the extraordinary impact of entrepreneurship in the business innovations, driving social and environmental change in communities across Africa, South Asia, and beyond. Find We transform lives wherever you listen to your podcasts and for more information visit www.transform.global. Welcome back. I hope that ad break didn't stress you out too much. Now let's hear from Sam on why it's so important to protect our reefs and the greatest threats our reefs around the globe face today.

Sam Teicher [00:10:39]:

So coral reefs take up less than 1% of the seafloor while sustaining the livelihoods of up to a billion people and over a 100 nations, along with a quarter of all marine life. That's pretty remarkable. I think the total area of coral reefs around the world is it's like 280,000 square kilometers. It's not actually that much, space on earth. But again, a billion people, 25% of marine life depends on this one ecosystem. Why is that? Well, from the biological perspective, biodiversity, I think that's probably a bit more straightforward for most folks. You've got a habitat just like if you've got trees in the forest, that allows all the other organisms to thrive the deer, the birds, the the fungi, the the vegetation and the plant life, the whole forest ecosystem, a large part due to the, the trees. Corals, are an organism. So corals are an animal. Start with that. So often we'll are they a rock? Are they planted? They're animal. They're actually an animal that plants living inside of them to make rock for their skeleton. They're gonna be cool, 3 for 1. And they build reaps. So their skeletons are calcium carbonate or limestone. And so they basically build these big structures as they grow while then through their shapes, their nooks, and crannies provide habitat for nurseries. For fish to hide from predators. And if you either are talking about the fish and marine life that actually live on coral reefs, but also work their way out to the ocean through the food chain. You've got this whole web that all comes back to the health of corals and health of the reef. When it comes to people, coral reefs are incredibly valuable. The latest estimates are that they generate $2,700,000,000,000 annually in goods and services. The low end of that spectrum is $30,000,000,000 a year. Which is still a lot of value and a lot of money. How is that bias through a range of different factors? One is that think about to the beginning of our conversation that I'm a scuba diver. People who wanna snorkel who wanna scuba dives and wanna experience coastal and ocean tourism in the tropics are often coming because of coral reefs. They wanna see those beautiful colors and shapes and creatures, even if it's not corals they're coming for if it's the big schools of fish, the turtles, the dolphins, there's no coral reefs, then there's nothing to see. And often, even the sand that you're sticking your toes in, if you're not even getting in the water, that's often, you know, ground up coral reef of sort of over time through parrotfish and another, sea life. So tourism economies So, so, so much depend on helping borrow reach. There's also, in terms of the 25% of marine life, both recreational artisanal and commercial fisheries that depend on reefs. So whether there are people that are trying to feed their families and pay the bills and live as fishermen, to the seafood dinner that's ending up on your plate in Oklahoma, there are often ties to coral reef health. There are drugs that are on the market or could be discovered, that come from coral reefs. We often think about the rain forests and certain nature's medicine cabinet experts estimate that the 3 to 400 times more medicinal compounds and coral reefs, and they're already drugs fighting everything from cancer and arthritis and viruses, that come from coral reef organisms. There's cultural heritage. There's communities, in island nations whose not only livelihoods, but sense of being is often tied up with coral rich in the Hawaiian people's origin story, all life, all life comes from the coral polyp. And then I think finally the big one worth mentioning is Coastal Protection. So a healthy coral reef reduces wave energy, on average by 97%, which is a big deal. Mangroforests, which are also amazing and wonderful and have symbiotic relationship with coral Reefs, they also provide the same, closer protection value. So when you're thinking either about erosion over time or storm surges coming in during hurricanes, coral Reefs save lives, protect infrastructure, protect property. They are cheaper, longer lasting with a range of other benefits, and much cooler than sort of gray seawalls that are often built to protect host lines. So that's all the value that Reece provides. Again, billion people, 25 percent of marine life, and $2,700,000,000,000 a year, But, unfortunately, half of coral Reefs are already dead, and we are currently on track to lose over 90% by 2050 in less than 30 years. Which is an ecological tragedy, but then coming back to all that value is a socioeconomic catastrophe. And that is why coral reach mattered to all people everywhere. Even if you live nowhere near coral reefs and why their destruction in front of our eyes is one of the biggest threats facing biodiversity and humanity.

Cory Ames [00:15:53]:

Certainly some some stark figures that that you mentioned there and the the status of the coral reef population globally. Can you explain this this term of coral bleaching? Actually, what happens in those events is that, you know, synonymous with a coral reef dying. You know, I know those are headlines that that will catch from time to time. What's happening in in that circumstance?

Sam Teicher [00:16:18]:

It often implies mortality. It doesn't always guarantee it, but the 2 are definitely linked. So I mentioned before coral reefs, animals, plants living inside of them make rock for their skeleton. So the plants that live inside of basically the tissue layer of of corals are the symbiotic algae. It's what gives corals their sort of vibrant, beautiful colors, but it also provides much of the food that corals need to survive. So through photosynthesis, all the extra energy that the algae produces goes to the corals so that it can live and grow. Coral basic gives the algae protection from predators. And that skeleton I mentioned before is limestone. I mentioned this because what basically the simple way of thinking about coral bleaching is just like we as people, if we're feeling sick or something inside of us, white blood cells, you know, we started attacking parts of our own body trying to identify the problem. When the temperatures get too hot or too cold, but more and more still coming too hot, when when corals have issues, what they often do is they expel the algae. That it's feeding them until things get back to the way corals need it. So, you know, if it gets too hot for us, we can get a fever, we can get sick. It's a problem. If it gets too hot for corals, which are happening more and more and more frequently, we expel the algae, exposing their white limestone skeleton, is why it's called coral bleaching. And if the temperatures don't drop back down, within enough time, which is often in several weeks, then the coral's basically will starve to death and die. So that is what we're seeing with coral bleaching. And a mass coral bleaching event, which is a huge, you know, area of bleaching, which can sometimes happen globally or across massive area like the grape barrier reef. That's often referred to as it's the equivalent of a 100 year flood. So flood so strong. It should only come once every 100 years. We've had 6 or 7 since the late nineties. And if we exceed 1.5 degrees warming, which is what we're well, well, well on track to not only hit, but go well past. Scientists and experts project, we're gonna have a global bleaching event every other year. So from a 100 year event to a 2 year event, and that's that's bad news for Corals.

Cory Ames [00:18:51]:

And and so, you know, what what are the greatest threats to to coral reef health still and and coral a degradation. I mean, broadly speaking, climate change and and, of course, the the warming that comes with that. But you know, what what sort of activities are we most concerned about that are affecting reefs?

Sam Teicher [00:19:10]:

Yeah. So that sort of grew, but you've got the climate crisis. Which is primarily rising temperatures and acidification as threats to corals. And that's important to the future. We're seeing it now. Together with habitat destruction of human induced local impacts. So overfishing pollution, bad coastal development, poor, you know, personal practices around coral reefs. Those are are really the big ones. And so, you think, well, how is overfishing a problem? So I was talking about symbiotic algae that live inside the corals before. There's other forms of algae too. And there's macroalgae, big algae that competes with corals for space. Again, if you think about any other ecosystem. One organism is trying to find its niche and something else wants to come into its space too, and they'll sort of duke it out. Algae of the sort of the macrol allergy type, it can be a problem if corals are trying to expand or corals die and they're trying to come back and sort of resettle on structures because they can't find a place to live if it's covered in this big algae. If you have enough of the right kind of marine organisms, the right kind of, you know, say parrot fish is a is a really important one that eat that algae then the whole system gets thrown off. So by taking too much fish out of ecosystems or by dynamite fishing or by bottom trolling, which is horrific and terrible. It's basically just like dredging the sea floor, then you're you're gonna threaten coral reef health. Pollution, I think, is pretty obvious. If you put topics to out there, a lot of things aren't gonna be able to live. Happetat disruption from bad coastal development, there's perfectly fine and acceptable ways you can build along coastlines. But if you let a lot of that sedimentation run off, go out to sea without properly taking care of it because you're being cheap and lazy and quick. Then often the corals will get buried. And if they get buried by sand, they don't get enough sunlight, the algae don't get enough sunlight, they can bleach. And then there's a lot of talk about sunblock and things like that. And there's definitely forms of sunblock that you shouldn't wear around coral reef that has certain chemicals like Oxybenzone and the like, or there are divers who, you know, aren't mindful and they kick with their fins and they break off corals. I wouldn't say that's a massive contributor, but it's an important contributor, still particularly on a local level. So at the end of the day, it's people, but to circle back on on all of the things again, getting a grip on the climate crisis is essential to preserve coral retail together with just being better stewards, the planet by implementing management techniques and policies and power local communities that are looking after these coral reefs and their health

Cory Ames [00:22:00]:

eustress, a definition from the American Psychological Association. The negative stress response, often involving negative affect and physiological reactivity, a type of stress that results from being overwhelmed by demands, losses or perceived threats. Distress triggers physiological changes that can pose serious health risks. Not all stress is created equal. And clearly, as Sam explained that applies in our coral reefs as much as that applies to the human condition, right type of stress, right amount of stress, right time, context, just might be everything. So Mike fragmenting, he might be okay. In fact, even advantageous for a Corals growth trajectory, but ocean pollution Carolist development overfishing, clearly there's an upper limit of stress that coral cannot or should not endure. What's important to note, however, as Sam Kinley pointed out, development can happen. Fishing can and needs to happen diving and recreation can happen. Maybe no ocean pollution is the right amount of pollution, although we're away from that. But It is all about finding a balance. It's about noticing what's and perhaps what we shouldn't do at all. Just like working out or strength training, the right way can build muscle or endurance. Doing it the wrong way or to excess can cause injury. The same activity, but in different doses or approaches, we cross some precipice from use stress to eustress, right type of stress, right amount of stress, right time, context, just might be everything in the most critical skill of all might be how to notice what context we're in. So When we come back from another break, we'll hear more from Sam about the balance they needed to find for an appropriate place for First Farm, and will dive deeper into the coral farming techniques they're employing to restore the world's dying raves. Bodie surf and yoga, the 1st B Corp certified surf and yoga camp in the world, is located in Bahia, Vienna, UVita, OSA Costa Rica, a small, still relatively untouched community on the southern Pacific zone situated at the footsteps of the Moreno Bayana National Park, a place where the jungle ocean and mountains meets, a unique backdrop for a place to immerse yourself in nature, become energized and awaken your mind body earth connection. The word Bodie is Sanskrit for awareness, a concept that is central to the activities and lifestyles surfing and yoga, and an attitude that bodysurf and yoga shares with those it comes into contact with. Students, guests, fellow community members, and businesses alike. Body surf and yoga utilizes surfing, yoga, nature, immersion, and community engagement as a way to facilitate memorable, unique, and an extremely substantive learning and travel experiences. I can attest to this completely and wholeheartedly. Annie and me had the incredible opportunity to spend a week with the folks at Bodie for our honeymoon a few years back. A beautiful, comfortable, but still simple lodge with incredible daily surf and yoga instruction. I would say that Bodia's responsible for me actually enjoying surfing for the first time. So awaken your inner bodie and and check out bodie surf yoga camp in UVita Costa Rica to learn about their latest vacation packages go to growensemble.comback/bodie. That's a DOD HI. Intrepid travel is the world's largest travel b corp, and its mission is to create positive change through the joy of travel. With more than 950 small group trips on every continent Intrepid creates that change by taking travelers on soul defining life changing adventures that give back to the communities they visit from dining at a social enterprise restaurant that empowers women from nearby rural villages in Sri Lanka to whale watching from a carbon neutral electric boat in Iceland and everything in between. Find out more at intrepidtravel.com. Welcome back. As promised, we're next going to hear how Sam and his team decided on the location for their first Coral Vida Farm the latest in their coral farming techniques. And lastly, what Sam sees as necessary upon reflecting for advancing the greatest systemic change for the health of our reefs and coastal ecosystems. Here's Sam.

Sam Teicher [00:27:05]:

So one of the valuable things we learned from that trip to Florida was that there's was and still is a great need and interest for scaling coral restoration, but that it was in the first place to to build a farm. There are, among many other things, there are in every country permits around dealing with corals typically because they're an endangered species. And because we didn't have a track record folks from the state and federal government were like, look, we love what you're doing. We hope can come here and work, scale it up, work in partnership with the other restoration practitioners that are around, but it's gonna take you maybe 5 years, 6 years to get the permit to do that kind of work here. And in the Bahamas, it end up being closed for 5 or 6 months to get the permits. It wasn't a straight shot that that was the case either. But basically, once we raised our pre seed round, we were the idea was to then set up our 1st coral farm. We were using science like micro fragmenting along with assisted evolution methodologies that helped boost coral resilience that were pioneered by our other original advisor documents with Gates. We weren't doing being a novel is what I'm sort of trying to say from a scientific perspective. Though plenty of ideas about how we could improve the space at the time, but we needed to sort of say, here's correlated his work. Here's the reefs that were or showcasing that we could do it so that we could then do the work in Florida. And and eventually, our vision is to help launch or partner and create coral farms and large scale nature in every nation with reefs around the world. We were looking for three things from a high level perspective for where do we build farm number 1? What's the ecological opportunity, economic opportunity, and partnership opportunity? So ecological opportunity, unfortunately, pretty much every country around the world, coral reefs need help. However, not every reef can be restored, and that's a very important point to underline that restoration while essential and must be scaled up is not a silver bullet. We need to stop killing coral reefs. We need to solve for fossil fuel emissions and climate change and habitat destruction, lower efficient pollution, all of those things. But we also know that coral restoration can work, but if the water quality isn't good, if you still got toxic waste being dumped in or dynamite fishing or anything like that, that you shouldn't be doing restoration there until those upstream factors have been solved. So we just need help. Can they be helped? Economic opportunity, we're doing this as a mission driven for profit business. So is there a way for us to make it financially viable? Can we sell restoration as a service, use our farms as tourism attractions, all these other sort of revenue generating activities to make ecosystem scale restoration financially viable. And then are there good sort of from the partnership opportunities, people, organizations on the ground that can help facilitate this work happening in an effective and also rapid fashion. Island time is a real thing. So having the ability to get streamlined permits, to get access to land for the farm, to connect with the right community, scientific leaders, and folks within the government. So we had a few different options. We were looking at a hotel in the Dominican Republic, we actually were invited to build the pilot farm on Mecher Island, which is Richard Branson's Island down in the British Virgin Islands, they then got hit by the 2017 hurricanes and pretty hardly wiped out, which something we later experienced in the Bahamas but ultimately settled on Grand Bahama. There's someone here called Rupert Hayward, who's one of the directors of the Grand Bahama Port Authority. Which itself is a fascinating organization, but effectively big landowners and regulators here in specifically for Freeport Grand Bahama, and Rupert has a vision of conservation and sustainable development really being the future of this island and and of the Bahamas, he has his own organization now also called the blue action lab, which is trying to bring businesses and entities like ours. Down to Grand Bahama to sort of make this a hub for those types of projects, but the we basically ultimately partnered with the port authority who gave us land for next nothing who introduces the right folks in government to basically make this an appealing place to set up coral farm number 1.

Cory Ames [00:31:30]:

And and so was it to you and and Gator, like, wherever we can do this, we're gonna go, or was there any sort of resistance or hesitancy in the prospect of of what the the destination would end up being.

Sam Teicher [00:31:43]:

Pretty much the ladder. You know, we we needed to get to work. And so whatever it took to make farm number 1 happen, we were ready to do it.

Cory Ames [00:31:52]:

Well, Sam, I I'd love to get a bit more nitty gritty on the restoration solution that that y'all are offering at at Coral Vita. So can you outline a bit of of what that looks like for us? And are there there challenges or or limitations to this approach that you're still working out right now?

Sam Teicher [00:32:11]:

Yes. Well, surfacing, yes, there's still challenges. And it's it's worth noting that it's a it's a global effort to take care of coral reefs. There's a lot of restoration practitioners and scientists and community leaders who have been doing this work for decades and deserve a lot of credit and a tremendous amount of continued support for their work. And what we're looking at effectively is two ways of doing restoration. There's asexual production and sexual production. So to put that in the sort of simpler analogy for most people aware of how things work with trees and plants. You can graft branches or cuttings from a tree or a flower that then grow into, you know, a living organism or trees and flowers pollinate. So Asexual production for corals is taking cuttings from living corals, growing them until they get bigger, and then planting them back out into the reach. Sexual production is Corals make babies. They spawn. There's a few different ways of it happening, but often they will sort of sync up from the same species right after the full moon. A few times a year, it's happening in August in sort of species we're targeting in our part of the world, and the eggs and the sperm mix, and then you get coral babies. We're primarily focused on fragmentation of the corals, but we do also do some of the spawning work as well. So Again, the process is basically we go out on the reefs to identify species that need restoration, that provide all of these different functions for the reef health and their ecosystem services, the benefits they provide that are endangered, whatever it might be. We then bring them to our farm, which as I briefly described before, is on land. It's an aquaculture facility. So we've got these four foot by eight foot tanks. We've got a whole high-tech advanced system that lets us really deliver good water quality through those tanks under shade cloth, and then the corals grow. For 6, 12, maybe up to 24 months, until we then feel they're ready for out planting and we go into reefs that have been surveyed. We've got all the baseline data. You know, hopefully there's a customer there that's paying us to do the work. And we go down with underwater drills and epoxy glue or cement is the main way it's done and plug the corals in. When the glue dries and then they attach and they do their thing. That's the simple way of how coral farming works. But we're also doing some of the things offer us a number of advantages again with a land based farm. So we're using microfragment things so that we can accelerate growth rates so that we can grow a greater diversity of species and do much more holistic restoration by growing corals that normally take 10, 25, 50, 100 years to reach the size of the basketball, dinner plating, growing them, and 2 or 3 years at the most, before they're ready for out planting, incorporating these assisted evolution methods, like acclimating the coral. So we often get asked what's the point of putting these corals out there if they're just gonna die. And it's very reasonable question. Sites selection is key, so not putting them where there's destructive fishing or pollution coming in. But you still have climate change. It's a big threat. And so the land based system, again, gives us control of the quality of the water, our tanks as opposed to growing them out in the ocean and being subject to whatever, is throwing your way So we can basically give corals the spot fragmenting, or we can take them to the gym. We can make the the, say, the temperature just the way they like, say, with the flow and the sunlight optimize for growth, or we can mimic future ocean projected temperatures, raise the temperatures or tanks to bring them back down, stress hard in recorals, so that when we outplant them, they can better survive. And again, that's being done by other scientists around the world. And then if we have enough land, we can just add more and more and more tanks to potentially supply entire islander region or nations reach from a single site. So that's how we really go about doing most of our coral farming work. We do also know deuce falling so the team's getting in the water in August. Night dives waiting out there for the corals within that sort of maybe hour and a half window to hopefully do their thing right in front of you. I definitely encourage people to look at videos of this on YouTube. But one of the other exciting things is we recently acquired a system, produced by folks out of the Horneman Museum and other partners in the UK who've actually designed a lab based spawning system that not only can make the corals do their thing, in the middle of the day, which is much nicer than having to go out at 10 PM and, you know, potentially rough water conditions but can also do it multiple times per year. It tricks the corals through artificial lunar queues. So the corals can spawn four times per year, and that's really important for genetic diversity and a range of other benefits. And now who knows? Maybe we'll play some Marvin game very wide and see if that, makes them do their thing even better. But with that, we try and grow more species diverse and genetically diverse corals that are more resilient and hopefully more affordable as well so that we can really do impactful large scale restoration work.

Cory Ames [00:37:30]:

Yeah. What what else do we need systemically for us to be able to to really hone in on the protection and conservation element?

Sam Teicher [00:37:37]:

Well, I hope to one day be celebrating being put out of business because there's no more coral reefs that need restoration, but I definitely think that's an ambitious goal, but that you know, celebrating our governments and industry and media leaders actually solving for the climate crisis and habitat destruction. Beyond that, though, on a, near term perspective, you know, it's a range of things. We think that there needs to basically be a restoration economy. Where we can ingest in solutions, communities, environmental health on a localized but also so global scale into ecosystem health and revitalization. Right? If you think about, okay, if we restore a reef along the coastline, That's good for the biodiversity, obviously. But now we've got a living seawall that can protect coastlines from storms if it's sort of built and designed in the right way that's boosting fisheries stock. Well, that's also a tourism attraction, and it's employing a lot of locals. That's a win win win win win win across the board. While achieving a lot of high level biodiversity and climate goals, my life would be much easier if Corals had a meaningful carbon sequestration value, but you can still apply the restoration economy to see metros and mangrove forests and dunes and terrestrial ecosystems. So having policy makers align with financiers, to make that come together, be it through, streamline permitting. You know, we don't really have a lot of time to wait to deploy restoration at scale. Right? Coral Reefs, I've mentioned for 2050 over 90% are likely gonna be dead. And really within the next 10 years is crucial. So instead of waiting 5 or 6 years for permits, getting those permits in, you know, 5 or 6 weeks, 5 5 or 6 months, need to ensure that it's, you know, you're doing things the right way. It's not just like a blanket rubber stamp, but ensuring that there isn't Bureaucratic inertia holding up a lot of critically needed projects from being deployed together with can fay hotels, who spend money on protection and restoration receives some sort of tax breaks from the government to getting built out more by big financial institutions. Carbon credits are definitely a thing, but a lot of companies are trying to be nature positive in addition to carbon negatives. And so that's much more nascent. How do we spur that along? We're seeing people within the reinsurance industry actually developing insurance policies for coral Reefs because they protect property, I mean, that the payouts are gonna be significantly lower, after storm events if the reef is still healthy. So seeing people with power and influence stepping up and leading that then obviously hopefully contributes to the upstream things that are killing coral reefs also getting solved. But I I do think basically deploying capital and streamlining permits are the 2 things that policy makers and financial leaders have the most sort of clear cut and effective ways of helping restoration scale in a big way.

Cory Ames [00:40:50]:

So you stress versus distress. What does this matter for us in our efforts to live more sustainably? What does this matter for understanding coral Reefs and the restoration efforts at large? It seems protecting, preserving, and restoring the world's various natural ecosystems is not exactly about leaving everything all alone. The world's coral reefs are a perfect example, an undeniably beautiful onspiring creation of nature, but so uniquely connected to the practical day to day lives of so many people. Like the figure Sam mentioned, coral Reefs directly sustain the livelihoods for up to a billion people across a 100 different nations. And according to the coral reef Alliance Reefs to reduce wave energy by 97%. And as product of this, over 200,000,000 people depend on reefs for natural flood defense during severe storms. Reefs also support 6,000,000 fissures across the world, and fish who call various coral Reefs home are a primary food and protein source for many coastal communities. And coral Reefs also have an incredible wealth of medicinal benefits. Chemical compounds that have originated from reefs are used in treatments for cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and much more. As well, many believe that we're just scratching the surface of this medicinal potential. And so all this has me believe It's an impossibility to leave nature completely be. I mean, we are a part of nature. We depend on nature. Nature feeds us, closes us, houses us, and in ways, protects us, and even cures our ailments. But nature won't bring the food to our mouths. Build a roof over our heads or cut and sew. We farm, we fish, we hunt, We gather, we build, and maybe most importantly, we decide in what style we do those various things and how much of it we do. Some intervention seems necessary, but the right intervention. Only inducing the right types and amounts of stress at the right time. It's about being attentive to the balance, ensuring for whatever we use, Wherever we intervene, communities and homes we design and build, we ensure that our natural ecosystems and resources are stronger, more resilient, and more abundant, than they were before. Almost as if, life lived sustainably means a life lived in balance or an alignment with nature instead of against it. It's about restoration, of course, but a conservation areas and protected lands, but in one way, it feels we perpetuate and imbalance a missing connection. Such as the connection, Sam explained to me, has been so important for him in arriving at the work he does now.

Sam Teicher [00:43:50]:

My first experience with a coral reef was well before I dove, was when I was six years old, and Somewhere around the West Coast, lots of lava rock lagoons, and I just had this memory of stepping into the water with a snorkel mask on and just seeing every possible color and creature and dazzling shape that could think of him feeling I was stepping onto an alien planet only the shoreline was, you know, a dozen feet behind me. And that has stayed with me for a very long time. And I love for the ocean that pure joy and sense of adventure when getting sort of underneath the waves, it's it's really something special.

Cory Ames [00:44:35]:

So there's the areas we humans live, establish our homes and our communities and out somewhere else, there's nature out there, a bit unknown, protected and preserved, but separate from us. For many of us, as Sam described, nature is something we experience on vacation. Maybe. But I think Neil Spackman, a CEO of regenerative resources and ecosystem services firm, explained this nuance to me in global restoration quite well.

Neal Spackman [00:45:03]:

So if we have that human set of problems and we have an environmental set of problems, and historically, we only have try to deal with one set by exacerbating the other one. Right? If we wanna build an economy, we do it by destroying the environment. If we wanna if we wanna save the environment, we do it by cutting it off from people. And so we we create conservation areas and say nobody's allowed to use any resources in this area. Right? And so when you have Poverty adjacent to conservation. For example, that conservation will fail. Because people who are in poverty will find a way to utilize the resources in that area. And so, historically, because we have separated these out into separate sets of problems. We will never solve either of them. Because they are inextricably connected. Right? You cannot solve one set without taking the other into consideration. It goes both ways. We tend to think of climate as a new set of problems, but the patterns we're dealing with are At least ten thousand years old.

Cory Ames [00:46:21]:

Balance, a problem today, a problem 10000 years ago. And our sense for what's the appropriate balance might be doled with distance. At least right now, we're quite comfortable with the idea of nature being somewhere other than where we build and establish our lives, our homes, our day to day. We go to the grocery store. We have pest control. We have lawn mowers. Even artificial turf for the home lawn is now catching on. Comfort. No stress. Oddly, though, I think this is a subconscious reason why people like living near mountains or the beach. To me, anyways, I can look at a mountain range with snow capped peaks or have my feet in the sand watching and listening to the crashing waves and, of course, see and feel the beauty. But, likewise, the power, the force the energy that demands your respect and appreciation in some way. To me, even being in the presence of the various natural wonders, and occurrences in the world feels like the eustress that we've talked about already. You see the waves and maybe you'd like to surf, but, of course, there's a level of skill, cognizance, and strength that you know you need to have. Otherwise, the ocean will literally and figuratively kick your ass. Or you see the mountain top, and you hope to summit. But again, there's endurance, there's gear, there's planning that you need to have done and acquired for you to do that safely. Being in the presence of nature, being in nature, living with nature, stresses us out, and maybe in the best possible way. Perhaps it's because more of our senses come back online. We see feel here, we become more alert, more attentive, more present. And so for us, when I think of Sam or when I think of the coral reefs, many of which aren't more than a 100 feet from the shore of coastal communities where people live in work, I wonder, what can we do to bring that stress the right type of stress, the right amount of stress, the use stress closer to home so that we, our friends, family, and communities are healthier, more resilient, and more attentive than before. Perhaps we choose to intervene, endure the stress of wildscaping our landscape, replacing our lawn, hopefully not turf. With the native grass, we're volunteering to play a repairian buffer so that the runoff that hits our rivers and ultimately oceans is cleaner. And on the inverse, How do we reduce, remove, and determine to avoid at all costs for ourselves and others that distress the wrong stress the stress that debilitates, degrades, and destroys. The stress that no one or no thing should endure. It seems it's about seeing the balance and the imbalance too in understanding that the decisions we all make, the interventions we choose depend on context. Are we in balance, or is there an imbalance? A constant push and pull Where we see that our health and the health of others physically, emotionally, or mentally, is dependent on the balance between the good and bad stress we endure. Do nothing atrophy. Too much, exhaustion. Context just might be everything. However, even before that, it might be the ability to notice what context we're in with type of stress, action, or intervention be it none at all, the current context calls for. Big change is stressful. And using the example of Coral Reefs, head of us is big change. We could lose all the world's core reefs, experts say, with no or insufficient action. That is a very real possibility by 2050, if not sooner. The impacts from the loss of food sources, flood defense, and biodiversity can't be fully known. Or we could restore the world's coral reefs take sufficient action to clean the oceans, better regulate fishing, advocate for more marine protected areas and do whatever we can to mitigate and reverse the warming that's bleaching and killing coral all around the globe. Both scenarios are going to stress us out. The question is, which scenario? Which stress will be better for us to endure. Alright, y'all. Thanks for watching or listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sam Tysher, cofounder of Coral Vita. You can learn more about Sam's in Coral Vita's work at coralveda.c0. As well, if you enjoyed this production, I recommend checking out my newsletter, the weekly ensemble where each week, send you a meditation that explores the art of living and working sustainably. To get my next email in your inbox, go to grow on sawmell.com. Backslash newsletter. And finally, there are heaps of reading research and writing that go into producing a show like this one in an effort to bring you both the tactical and practical along with the more narrative here, I'd advise visiting our hub page on coral Reefs at grow ensemble.com backslash learn backslash coral reeves. You get both summarizations and more detailed explanations of everything covered on this episode, including the threats facing our coral reefs and what needs to be done, both at an individual and systemic level to protect and restore them. Alright, y'all. Until next time.