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The engine that drives ocean health are reefs.
Their impact for other parts of the ocean is vast.
So anyone who's affected by ocean health
arguably could be affected by coral reefs.
The majority of countries in the world have coral reefs.
So if you're losing a quarter of all marine life,
it's a ridiculous experiment
to just roll the dice and see what happens.
It's madness, utter madness.
The first time I saw coral,
when you're in the water and you see these big, towering structures
and these big, sheer reef walls, big crevices,
it's all built by coral.
When you actually see something in the distance,
which is like a city coming out of the ocean,
I get quite emotional thinking about it now
because you think, "Wow!" It's, like, a miracle of life.
I am David Smith, Professor of Marine Biology.
I'm the Senior Director of Sustainable Solutions at Mars,
and I'm Chief Marine Scientist.
There's been other ecosystems that have been really threatened,
but I don't think there is a system
which is quite so close to the edge.
If you look in the fossil record,
there's been a number of times
that reefs have been on the edge of extinction,
all related to big changes in climate.
But there's never been a time where you've got a billion people
who are directly or indirectly dependent on reefs
for food or economic security.
You would argue that the consequences of reef loss today
are much greater than they were in the past,
and everything that we've learned suggests that
the system could collapse.
And if it collapses,
we're in deep, deep, deep trouble.
Humanity is in trouble.
The restoration of Bontosua is by the island of Bontosua.
It's not just us coming in and solving the world's problems
and charging out to solve the next problem.
We're facilitating that rebuilding of their reef.
It's not our reef.
This project's been going on for, like, 15 years,
and I don't know if purposely kept under wraps
or that wasn't a priority, but certainly
very little information, if any, had come out.
I was curious about what they were doing.
I jumped into the water and thought, "Oh my God!"
You know, I came out of that dive and thought, "Wow!"
"This is sort of..."
"This is sort of one most depressing dives I've ever done,
but one of the most exciting dives."
Depressing because I kind of forgot what coral reefs could look like.
That's a reef that man has built.
They actually rebuilt this reef,
restored it from a degraded, barren rubble field
to this flourishing, vibrant reef
within about three or four years.
I couldn't believe it.
To see something that you thought was actually going to be lost,
it's absolutely astonishing what can be done.
Reef Stars were designed with this hexagonal structure.
Basically made of steel bar, available everywhere,
bent in a certain way,
cross each other to form the six legs.
So it's very quick and easy to produce
using these local materials.
Now, in a reef system which has been pounded by the waves,
you get natural coral fragments breaking off.
It's just part of the cycle.
What we do is collect those corals and we put them in baskets
and we use that to put onto the Reef Stars.
You attach it, and you have to attach it really, really tight
so that coral doesn't move.
And then within a matter of four or five days,
you'll see the coral skeleton
starting to grow over those cable ties.
And in a matter of three or four weeks,
the coral starts to attach to that reef frame
and then grow over it.
When you deploy the Reef Stars, because they're hexagonal,
like a honeycomb structure,
you can put them onto the sea bed and then can link it with another one
and link it with another one in a modular way,
and it becomes a very strong, strong web
and supports really active coral growth.
The coral lifted off the sea bed
by only 20 or 30 centimeters, that's like the magic height,
you get water flowing through it,
and that stimulates really rapid coral growth.
It's three to four times quicker on a Reef Star
than it is in a native system,
which is just quite remarkable.
These are vast areas of vibrant reef.
All of a sudden, there seems to be a solution on the table.
But... so what?
All right. If it works here, where else can it work?
And what's the furthest you can push it?
Sheba Hope Grows is about taking that hope to other locations
to see if it's possible in these other environmental settings.
The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is a quite unique ecological system.
We need to try it there.
The East African reef system, we need to try it there.
Middle of the Pacific, out in Hawaiʻi, let's try it there.
We want to build this army of reef-builders.
# I can see clearly now the rain is gone #
# I can see all obstacles in my way #
# Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind #
# It's gonna be a bright #
# Bright Sun-shiny day #
# It's gonna be a bright #
# Bright Sun-shiny day #
# I think I can make it now the pain is gone #
Hawaiʻi is home, always will be.
I moved out of Hawaiʻi
for over five years now,
and nowhere feels like home yet.
I always miss home. All my family is out here.
My mom is the seventh child of the seventh child.
I got hella cousins out here and...
And it's really just me and my cat in Los Angeles.
It's the ocean, it's the mountains, it's magical.
But for me, someone who just grew up here,
I just thought it was normal.
Until I left.
I am Auliʻi Cravalho and I was born and raised in Kohala, Hawaiʻi.
I never did any spearfishing or anything like that,
but my uncles and my other family have.
I just wanted to go down and look at the shells.
Freediving, you rely on the strength of your lungs.
It's really based on your own physical ability...
...and your own kind of courage to dive down as deep as you want
or as deep as you can.
It's a really calming experience.
You're in a really healthy and vibrant reef.
Like, there's little pops and little snaps,
and it's shrimp and it's fish eating,
and I didn't realize that there was music underwater.
It's so beautifully alive.
It's just amazing being down there and feeling small.
You are entirely alone
with your own thoughts and your own capabilities down there.
I feel it when I go freediving and doing coral restoration.
Now I notice how everything is changing,
and I think that we just really want to protect it.
We're willing to do just about anything.
And working with Kuleana Coral, like, we focus truly on
Kanaka or people who are native to Hawaiʻi
or born and raised there.
So, bringing back these, like, Hawaiian words
when also we have been so close to losing our language
because it was forbidden to be spoken for a couple of generations,
like, bringing that back and coming back to our roots,
I think is what really makes Kuleana Coral different.
What attracted me to work in Kuleana
was their level of commitment to restoring,
and they've been doing this in their own time, part-time,
whilst living a normal life.
If you really want to be sure, on your computer...
- Yeah. - If you go up too fast,
it'll have this bar and it'll light...
They're completely embedded within the community.
Their mission is very similar to us.
It's made up of ex-fishermen, conservationists and scientists,
all from the community.
Throughout my life, it was always surfing,
it was fishing, diving, but...
never did I really think that I can give back to the ocean.
Right. And then...
The goal for Kuleana is to restore marine ecosystems,
and that's through coral restoration.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If you look at the bigger vision,
it's to make sure that our Hawaiian people, our local people,
can be self-sustainable,
whether it's economically or food sustenance,
or the absorption of wave energy, right, our coastlines.
If we lose coastline,
we're going to lose land and lose homes.
I didn't pay any attention to coral growing up.
It's just some rock that the fish live around.
We only pay attention to the fish, especially as a fisherman.
You know, if you take, you have to give, right, that kind of balance.
And, I mean, it was just informal conversations,
mostly of me and Kapono on the boat fishing,
it's definitely not as abundant as it used to be.
Asking, it was like, hey, this thing has provided so much for us.
What are we going to do? That was it.
We took fish. Now we want to make fish.
I don't know, it seemed pretty simple.
We have a vision for a future that it's really abundant,
and having a healthy reef ecosystem is a part of that.
We have time for the baskets because we're...
I typed into Craigslist "diving jobs".
I threw the word "science" in there. I saw a posting that said,
"Fisherman seeking scientist."
"For..." You know, and "Scientist/scuba diver".
I'm like, "That's perfect!"
And so I called the number, and it's all history now.
My name's Danny DeMartini.
I'm the Chief Scientist at Kuleana Coral Restoration.
Okay. All right.
Kuleana involves a lot of diving, obviously.
We have to get down in the ocean and do the work by hand.
It's a lot of heavy lifting.
Our system here in Hawaiʻi is unique.
Our island is centered in the middle of the Pacific,
so we actually get a huge amount of energy
from across the Pacific year-round.
So we're always getting the brunt of storms from all over the place.
These corals tend to tumble
and it turns over into the sand and it doesn't get any sunlight,
doesn't get anything it needs, no nutrition, and it starts to die,
and we try to give that coral a second chance at life.
It becomes a bowling ball underwater.
It becomes this wrecking crew that, through the waves and currents,
it'll knock other corals.
We're looking for the living tissue, it still needs to be healthy,
and then we'll bring all those corals to the surface.
On the boat is where we'll prepare them
to be planted back down underwater.
Mmm! Smells like coral.
Look at that! And what are these?
Ew! They're slimy.
If you don't know, call it a sponge.
The preparation is to drill a hole at the bottom of it.
Figure out where we want to plant it.
This is all the live tissue upright, so we're going...
...to stick a metal pin in there,
and that's going to stabilize the coral
when we plant it underwater.
- Have this. - There you go.
- Ow! - Brah!
- I'm just kidding! - Brah! Ah!
Ay!
We see this systemic problem with carbon emissions,
this ocean that is becoming less hospitable to the coral reefs,
through acidification, through the temperature changes.
Y'all are gonna be sick of me!
You're on the team.
It's pollution coming from land.
It's the agriculture runoff.
- That's it? - Yeah.
It's cesspools, it's septic systems
that are all feeding into the ocean.
It's the boater use. It's the anchors.
It's... It's all of it, right?
It's people being in the water and not really being aware
of some of the details about the ecosystem
that they're putting themselves into and how to treat it respectfully.
Have a good dive!
You could sit around and say,
"It's a huge problem. There's nothing we're going to do."
Or you can roll your sleeves up and put in the work,
and at best we can buy humankind a little bit of time
so they can turn things around
so our reefs can actually make it through the next century.
In my head is like a ticking clock,
like a Doomsday Clock, if you like.
It is probably a couple of minutes to midnight.
When you see restoration efforts
which take a long time and are quite labor-intensive,
you want to do as much as you can
to help to speed up the process.
We have to drill, we have to apply epoxy,
put a pin in, drill into the sea floor,
put more epoxy, and then set it there,
and, like, this technique is necessary
because of just how strong our swells are,
so there's really no way of getting around it.
This is, like, these coral will then stay where we put them.
But it's hard.
It is one of the most incredible creatures on this planet.
It's a rock, it's a plant, it's an animal, it's everything.
It's our ancestor. Like, coral is...
It's an amazing little creature, uh... that
that they, all these little polyps work together
to survive and thrive, and I love that.
It's a community, really.
Like what we're all trying to do together out here.
We're trying to build something, and that's all they do.
They build homes.
No matter what you think about climate change,
it's having dramatic effects on the planet.
Weather patterns around the world are dependent on ocean processes.
Climate regulation is dependent on ocean processes.
The number of Cat. 5 storms will increase year on year
as a result of climate change.
You'll get a higher frequency of these high-intensity storms
capable of doing damage, which means, in essence,
the time that reefs have to recover
between the next event is decreased.
Ah-ah, oh-oh!
It's important that we show our ancestors
that we're still... our culture is still strong.
We still maintain it.
We still have to show that respect to our ancestors so that
we're protected while we're there.
Brian, about fishing, going out fishing and hunting, gathering fish.
"Guyu" in our language means fish.
The reef is part of us. That's who we are.
We live off that reef. We need the reef.
We take it away, we'll have nothing.
Djilibiri!
Djilibiri! Barramundi.
It's like taking our passport away.
So if the reef gone, we're gone too.
See this mountain, the Murray Prior Range,
see that mountain range there,
the Murray Prior, it runs right along here,
then extends right back out to the Great Barrier Reef.
Right up to Moore Reef, that's all our Sea Country.
Every place you look out here is all Gunggandji country,
whether you're on the land or in the ocean.
Our Sea Country needs a lot of help.
I've seen the bleaching, and it's not good,
especially for our food resource because we do rely on that.
You can find showers
directly behind the dive deck area for you to rinse off.
On the left-hand side of the dive deck area,
you'll see stairs leading down into the water
for your ease of access for your snorkeling today.
We do have a second level to the pontoon, we have our sun deck.
You'll be able to access the sun deck
via the large set of stairs in the middle of the pontoon.
Up on the sun deck, you'll find additional tables and seating.
You'll also find our drink bar
which will be open during our lunch service for drinks.
We have our marine biologists' wet laboratory.
And we also have a fish feeding today at 1 p.m.
And the fish feeding will be conducted
down the far end of the pontoon, just by the dive deck.
Just a friendly reminder,
both the main vessel and the pontoon are no smoking or vaping today.
My name is Frederick Lefoe. I am a Gunggandji man from Yarrabah.
I was born and bred on the seas, and I love it.
I always feel proud to be owner of the Sea Country.
Especially to work in it, it's a great job.
Sea Country means everything.
It's the place where we was born and grown up before,
and it's the place we love to go out every day,
especially to see the reef.
Non-stop action.
The Great Barrier Reef is the most iconic reef on the planet.
And consequently the health of the Great Barrier Reef and its status
is kind of a barometer for reefs around the world,
but it's also a system that's under threat.
So where's there a need, a want and a will to restore,
that sort of focuses you into a place called Moore Reef.
I want my grandchildren to be out there too one day,
swimming around and seeing all those beautiful fish,
especially the corals.
When you're on land, you've got so many
things around you that's happening.
And then when you hit the water, it's so calm, it's so peaceful,
everything just lifts off you.
I've seen the work that they've done,
and are caring and... they love the environment
and their people too. They're here to help us.
That's one of my goals, is sharing.
Because without that, we've got nothing if we don't share.
So Site 1 at Moore Reef is four years in now.
The recovery has been insane.
Even to my eye, I couldn't see any Reef Stars.
Similar to what we saw in Indonesia,
coral growth seems to be much faster than you would predict
for a native coral, which is fantastic.
It's the reef that's doing well, not just the corals.
The fish are recovering.
The biodiversity looks vibrant.
You can feel it. You can sense it in your bones.
When you dive over that Moore Reef, you can hear it.
It's like multisensory.
Before I started on the reef, I was a carpenter,
building houses and that.
I was scared at first because I never done something like this.
But luckily we got a great trainer.
He was talking to us every step of the way.
First time I have seen a coral reef like that.
Guys, you might want to shift aside
because there's coral restoration work happening.
Especially the experience of it,
diving and just sitting there watching it grow.
Oh, beautiful, eh?
Like an entire mountainside, but underneath.
Like a new world experience.
At Moore Reef, we want to build it up
and to have the community move to come out and help us,
to help build the reef.
I did the Reef Star I built yesterday myself.
It was incredible.
It wasn't that stressful or anything.
It was just like putting a Lego together.
This is the best job in the world. I can just say that.
The reef is so beautiful that it's inspired me
to look after it so much that I just want to
stay here forever on the reef,
build a house on it one time.
Be like Sandy on SpongeBob.
In the recent years that I've been out on the reef,
I've seen the change, I've seen the seabed.
They've put all these corals back in there, and it's growing.
I've also done some planting there too.
I was amazed to go back and look and it's thrived.
I can see it, where it's been put.
We, as Gunggandji people,
need to go back and look at Mother Nature
and see for ourselves what climate change is doing.
The sustainability of our hunting,
that's one thing that we need to maintain.
Without that, our children will have nothing.
For me, Moore Reef is a great example
of how Reef Stars can work on the Great Barrier Reef.
I'm really excited to see corals grow very quickly
and the reef that we're working on respond.
But we need to go bigger.
That's what success will look like.
If you have any questions,
please do not hesitate to ask our friendly staff.
The world is changing. We see mass destruction.
See reef dying.
More storm, more freaky storm.
But the weather's a bit more hotter than 10 years or 20 years ago.
Really makes you sorry.
Makes me want to cry.
Have a fantastic day
out here on Reef Magic Pontoon.
The ocean and the land, it provides for us.
We don't own the land. The land owns us.
We're just caretakers, that's all.
Woo!
When you do a smoking ceremony, you're not only
connecting to country,
but you're also burning away
all the toxins and all the bad stuff that's going through your head.
Through our creation story,
we were placed here to look after this land.
We came from the land.
When our time's up,
we go back to where we come from.
So we go back to Mother Earth.
I swam at night.
There were corals spawning, and it was beautiful.
Oh, it's like you're in space.
There's all these little bubbles coming around.
We call her mother.
That's our mother, she provides for us, she gives us everything.
She's Ma Boodja.
She can become angry when she wants to be.
And she'll tell you that too.
She's a reproductive creature.
Indonesia is a flagship site for restoration.
The scale of restoration surpasses anything else
which has been done anywhere in the world, I would say.
- Morning, everyone! - Morning!
Another exciting day, hey?
Woo!
So, today is our final day for building.
The program's been so successful
that we invite people to come in and see what's possible.
But also use it as a training ground.
So we have NGOs and governments who want to come in and learn
how we do and what we do and how we work with communities
and what's the best practice and take that to their own reefs
to try and do and repeat and do the same.
Reef Star heroes!
Woo!
Get on the boat!
But really what you need to do is empower thousands of people,
thousands of communities, if not tens of thousands,
to rebuild and restore reefs in their own backyard
and become responsible for their own reefs.
We have people here from the Maldives, from Australia,
from here in Indonesia, from Kenya,
and the Hawaiʻi crew is learning so, so much,
but also sharing their knowledge.
It's lovely to hear what techniques work and what doesn't.
And there's no shame in saying it out loud
because this has truly become a data hub.
It works here.
Hopefully when we try it in Hawaiʻi, it'll work there too.
Because if it works in Hawaiʻi, it'll work anywhere.
Nothing has kind of hit me quite as hard as going to Bontosua
and seeing those restored reefs.
That was just out of the question
as far as the realm of possibility in my mind.
So it's... it was gorgeous. I seriously couldn't believe it.
Even now I'm like, "Man!" So I told everybody that.
But until I saw it for myself,
I didn't really understand.
In Indonesia,
the community component of the restoration
was a beautiful thing.
Having everybody out there tying on the corals
and big smiles and just... and the amount of work they can get done
by incorporating the whole community was just mind-blowing.
Isn't this the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?
It shows you, when everybody works together,
many hands make light work.
It is probably the most significant operations
of coral restoration I've ever seen.
- One hundred! - Okay.
Woo!
I loved taking the Reef Stars off the boat,
so you swim, swim, swim.
You are only on a snorkel.
And you reach up and they pass you this Reef Star.
You sink down into the water,
and you take it and you go... ...deep breath.
And you dive it down to the very bottom,
and you place it down there, and then you pop all the way back up.
And you do this in a circle for however long it takes
to take the hundreds of Reef Stars
that were prepared earlier in the day by the community.
It's incredible to see it...
at the bottom of the ocean,
to see where the new sites are
versus the sites that are six years old.
It's night and day.
And the fact that, like, it works, right?
Sometimes you can see the bars of the Reef Star,
but oftentimes you can't.
One of the most magic moments was taking
Danny from Kuleana out to Bontosua.
We said we'll see a good reef then we'll go see a degraded reef.
We got into about 40 minutes of the dive.
He said, "Where's the restoration?"
He's doing this, "Where's the Reef Stars?"
I wrote down, "You've been swimming over it for 40 minutes."
It was the most amazing... He was like, "What?!"
Bontosua... it just blew my mind.
I had no idea that restoration at that scale
was even a possibility.
Like, seeing what they've done with the Reef Star system
and just going to the science block, so where they've planted,
a couple of years ago they planted big sections of reef.
You can't tell there's Reef Stars, you can't tell it was restored.
Coming from just the land of total rubble out there,
then they brought it back to this just vibrant, healthy reef
where you couldn't even tell.
I swam over that thing for a half hour before I even realized
that we were swimming over something
that used to be an unrestored bed of rubble.
Nothing has hit me quite as hard as seeing those restored reefs.
I've learned so much here.
I think, like, the biggest thing I've learned
is really the possibility of full-scale reef restoration.
And I think that's, like,
just absolutely unreal the reefs that we saw
and the scale that they're doing it at.
Feel like I just wanna go home and just start planting Reef Stars.
That's, like, all I want to do, start production tomorrow,
so I'm feeling, like, really passionate.
The scale of their operations is huge,
and it's something that,
if we could even get a sixth of that scale out in Hawaiʻi,
I would love to see how much fish would come back.
To see how much work is done off of these coasts,
and trying to think,
is that something that we could bring to Hawaiʻi?
I don't know.
There's some hurdles in the way but, realistically,
that's what we're gonna do, and it's gonna be just as epic.
Constantly reading bad news and stuff,
it's really refreshing to see something
that's working in a positive direction.
And being a part of it,
and the potential that we have to alter our environment
in the sort of positive direction that they do here
is giving me hope and giving our team hope,
and hopefully we can perpetuate that hope in Hawaiʻi.
I think what they came back was, like,
like, legit, like different people.
Ecological restoration is happening and possible.
It's possible to restore our damaged coral reefs on this scale,
and that is a switch from what we see in Hawaiʻi.
Because now what we're doing with these little tennis court-sized areas,
maybe we're pushing the needle a little bit on some certain species,
but we are not restoring entire ecosystems.
We have permits to put Reef Stars in the water.
You know, the first Reef Stars to ever go in in Hawaiʻi,
so I think that's a monumental step,
but we still have a way to go.
That's at a pilot scale.
At least we have the process underway
to build that trust now with those regulatory agencies.
Funny thing was, I think, originally,
everyone told us we wouldn't get them.
I think if we didn't have Danny,
the state would not have trusted some local kid
that's not a scientist with a permit like that.
And I hope that what we see is that, yes,
this is going to be something
that could potentially save our reefs in Hawaiʻi
as we continue to decline
and going into the next centuries
to really give it the foundation and the strength
and rebuild areas that need to be rebuilt,
and have this tool that we can keep coming back to.
The drilling will happen through the hole in the Reef Star.
We're not going to put the Reef Star down then drill the holes.
We're going to have the Reef Star in position.
So drill one hole, drop the pin in,
and then drill the next one, so it holds...
- We're not drilling till after? - Yeah...
Corals in Hawaiʻi grow really slowly.
But because they grow really slowly, they grow really dense as well.
All this epoxy comes up...
How are we going to screw down onto it, tighten it down?
See what I'm saying?
The question for us is, wherever we looked at in the world,
corals that we put on Reef Stars
have grown much more quickly.
Yeah. So this is our legitimate first time doing this, so...
- The first time... - Don't judge us too hard.
Every time we do something the first time.
Yeah, it works out, eventually.
The waters are completely different here.
We're so much deeper also.
Yeah.
So, does the same happen in Hawaiʻi?
So those old hard corals, difficult to grow,
do you get a bit of a bump if you put them on Reef Stars?
Are you good?
He's the second strongest person on our team.
I'm gonna hold it out.
Time will tell, hopefully.
You're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, basically.
So the distance from you
and the next piece of land is vast.
And that's the fetch,
that's the space that the water is moving over,
gathering energy, building up its energy,
then, bosh, crashing into the Hawaiian archipelago.
And the first thing they come across is your Reef Stars.
It felt like history when we were planting those down there,
and it's also a real test.
Will we be allowed to put more Reef Stars down there?
Will they stay put where we put them?
If we prove concept with these few Reef Stars that we've done,
then we will be allowed to now try a network of them,
how they're designed to work in other parts of the world.
Yeah, good!
- Yeah! - It's been a while.
That went a lot easier than I thought.
Still was a little bit of work, but easier than I thought it was gonna.
These are designed to be something that's permanent, right?
So I think, fine.
But... it's the winter time that we're worried about.
- Yeah. - You know?
Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable
to very small changes in climate.
They become really finely tuned.
And the consequences of that,
they become really vulnerable, they become really vulnerable,
because there only needs to be very slight changes
and the whole system collapses.
When things go a little bit off-kilter,
then it becomes a real dramatic problem.
So, a couple of degrees of heating is catastrophic.
That's what happened in Kenya.
Our people on the ground are members of the community,
and that's really, really important,
and they're on the front line.
What I don't want to do is give false promises to communities.
It is dire. There's no two ways about it.
When resources get so low, life becomes so hard,
then people will resort to anything they need to do
to get what they need to survive.
The restoration had been put in for about a year,
yeah, it was going well.
The message came through from our partners in Lamu,
and just photographs started coming through.
I was like, "Oh my Lord."
The whole reef system's coral bleached,
white reefs, white reefs, white corals,
death of corals,
pretty much on all of the images
in areas that we just did not see coming.
Lamu was a shock.
Three, two, one...
The coral, which is usually full of color,
starts to pale and then go white,
but it basically has lost its way of obtaining food and energy,
so it eventually starves.
And when death happens,
you get other algae and seaweeds
and slimes and all other sorts of stuff
starting to settle on the dead skeleton.
Then you know it's dead. At that point, it's gone.
So some of those really nice ones, the branching acropora's all gone.
Table coral's gone, which is a bit sad.
There was a couple of species, a couple of individuals,
but this is probably what the future is going to look like.
So the question is, is this going to support the biodiversity?
Where we've lost species from other ecosystems,
then that ecosystem becomes much more vulnerable to collapse.
So, the collapse of the oceans, ocean health,
weather patterns, climate, food productivity,
global economics,
it's crazy to even think that we should be at a point
where we're even debating what that would be.
And these have survived.
This other one here, which is the spiky one...
This is an aggressive species,
so when you find it, if it survives, it kind of dominates.
That's why you get those big patches.
We can't look to the past to say,
this is what it was like 20 years ago, we need to put it back,
because the world's a changing place, so...
arguably, maybe the best way forward is to see which survived
and trying to increase their abundance
in areas which won't recover.
What you might find, once we get these corals in,
the system starts to recover and you get other species coming in.
That's not just, "Thank the Lord, the project's saved."
It's like, "What's going on?"
Are there enough of those survivors
to be able to put onto restoration effort?
And if we do so, what will the shape of the reef look like?
We were so close. We had our stars ready to go.
We thought the permits were going to come right in.
We sized up the stars. We took them down onto the water.
We got them set up and we thought we'd be off to the races,
but we had to pull the stars out, and now we've been... waiting.
Corals have been around for so long.
It would be devastating to learn that we humans
were the reason, were the one thing they couldn't handle.
So I guess we just grab that one off the line.
It's like 15 feet, 20 feet.
And then, if we're doing all three...
If the problem, either now or foreseen in the future,
is as big as we think,
we need to start finding solutions yesterday.
I really understand the importance of permitting.
But it's incredibly frustrating,
and I think even more frustrating when you remember that, actually,
Kuleana is the Hawaiian community.
It's not an external organization agency.
These are people within the community.
They just want to get on and rebuild the reefs
that they've been fishing on and utilizing for years.
Now we take them home.
How do we get to get the approvals
that maybe other entities would get quicker?
Because if I can find out what that is, I'll do it, right?
We have this gap.
We are not allowed to implement a solution.
And as someone from Hawaiʻi, born and raised here,
that is a huge frustration, right, it's, um...
How do we earn that right and trust to take care of our own resources?
I don't know the answer.
But I would like to learn and I'm willing to do whatever it takes.
Just pray for open-mindedness.
At the end of the day, that's all we can do,
is that we are able to soften their hearts and open their minds
and that they can see that this is possible
and that it will work here in Hawaiʻi.
Yeah. Well, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that we'll get those permits
and that they'll allow us to install them correctly.
If we can just show
that, you know, people without PhDs
are out there in the world making a difference...
you know, why not us?
It's devastating to see
something that you grew not survive.
There are no options left,
apart from trying your very best to find a solution that's going to work.
So, just because you've fallen over once,
it doesn't mean you can't get back up and keep on going.
Because I think we all deeply believe that...
all our options have not been tried yet.
We don't do devastating.
We don't.
Let's work and try and find a solution here,
and let's go on, let's move forward.
There's a new challenge,
but it's a new opportunity to find a solution.
So, you get geared up again and all the teams up and say,
"Right, we have another way forward here."
The vision is that any island community
will have the tools and the access to be able to rebuild
the reefs that are damaged and not recovering,
and that becomes part of the natural behavior,
just as you would if you were farming the land
and there was some damage, you repair your land.
You should repair your ocean
and provide communities with the tools to do that.
We cannot go and restore all reefs on our own.
It's impossible.
Really, what you need to do is empower thousands of people,
thousands of communities, if not tens of thousands,
to rebuild and restore reefs in their own backyard,
and then you'll start to see the tide turning for reefs.
That's where you'll really start to get to scale,
when you've got those thousands of communities doing
what we do at a scale which is relevant
to the reefs on which they depend upon,
and that's our process, that's the Sheba Hope Grows program.
Good night, see you and love you, and leave you.