Working in conservation, marine ecologist Madhavi Colton faces down despair as the challenges feel overwhelming.

Madhavi Colton is the Program Director at the Coral Reef Alliance. She oversees an international portfolio of community-driven conservation programs that are addressing local threats to reefs, including over-fishing, poor water quality, sedimentation, and habitat destruction. Madhavi is also spearheading new scientific research into how ecosystems adapt to the effects of climate change and is applying this knowledge to develop innovative approaches to coral conservation. Her expertise lies in building partnerships between academic researchers, non-profit organizations, governments and local communities to implement durable conservation solutions. She has worked in California, Hawai‘i, the Mesoamerican region, Indonesia, Fiji and Australia. Madhavi has a Ph.D. in Marine Ecology from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

This story originally aired on April 20, 2018, in an episode titled Dreams.

Story Transcript

So in seventh grade, I won the math prize.  Let me tell you that winning the math prize in seventh grade is the least cool thing you can do.  No one wants to be friends with a girl who wins the math prize in seventh grade.  So, like many young girls, I start to hide.  I hide my smarts.  I downplay my abilities.  I say that I’m doing less well than I actually am.

And this becomes a habit then it becomes a comfortable space to live in.  But the one thing that those mean kids in seventh grade can’t do is take away my optimism.  In fact, my family nickname is Miss Enthusiasm.  

So Miss Enthusiasm goes off to college, because Miss Enthusiasm, because me, because I am going to save the world.  I have fallen in love with wild places.  I love huge mountains and rocky coasts with big waves and the immovable expanses of deserts.  I am going to college and I’m going to study Biology because Biology is the science that tells us how the world works.  By understanding how the world works, I am going to save the world.

The first job, conservation job, I get after I graduate is at the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Really cool.  I’m the assistant to the office manager but, hey, I’m working at NRDC.  I am going to save the world.

So there’s an older, wiser woman at NRDC who I take aside and I admit my ambitions to her.  She says, “Look, if you’re serious about doing conservation science, you need a graduate degree.”

So I get a master’s.  Then I realize the older, wiser woman wasn’t specific enough and that if I wanted to be serious about saving the world through conservation science, I actually need a PhD.  So I spend hundreds of hours underwater in the Southern Ocean trying to count fish.  

I lose a very expensive camera to a shark.  I lose my breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the ocean swells.  I almost lose a diver.  My GPS craps out on me in the middle of crossing a surf zone and I run a boat aground, twice.  I get hypothermia, I get a PhD.

And now, I’ve got it.  I can go out and I can save the world.

About five years ago, I got my dream job.  I got a job at the Coral Reef Alliance which is a small international nonprofit organization with a mission, an ambitious mission that is uniting communities to save coral reefs.  Get that, save coral reefs.  I am going to work for an organization and I am going to save coral reefs.  

I remember showing up my first day, walking down this narrow, cramped hallway and the carpet was a hideous shade of blue.  And I walk down this narrow, crowded hallway and I open the door to my office.  I have an office with a door!  I have made it.  The office has a door and it has a window, and the window looks out on a brick wall of the neighboring building.  But look, I’ve got a door.

The catch is I don’t actually know much about coral reefs at all.  I studied fish in the Southern Ocean, and so I get to work reading and I get to work learning.  I’m the kind of person that I need to touch the things I read so I start printing out scientific papers and I start stacking them on my desk.  Each of those papers, I write earnest notes in the margin and I highlight them with a yellow highlighter.  And these stacks grow in my office.

All of my reading tells me that coral reefs are in trouble.  The models are saying we have 30 to 50 years until the negative effects of climate change are happening so frequently that the reefs can’t recover between those negative bouts.  And everybody is saying, “Oh no, 30 to 50 years.”

But Miss Enthusiasm is like, “30 to 50 years, I can make a difference.  I can save coral reefs.  That’s a timeframe that I can work with.”

A little over two years ago, waters around the world started to heat up.  And when the water around the coral reef gets too warm and it stays too warm for too long, the corals expel the tiny algae that live in their cells and they turn bright white.  This process is called bleaching.  Those algae provide the corals with food and so when the corals kick out the algae, they start to starve.  If that bleaching event goes on long enough, they start to die.  

And the news started coming in from everywhere around the world.  It was coming in at conferences.  It was coming in through news centers.  It was coming in through emails.  The New York fucking Times had as its headline that reefs were dying.  In the backdrop, there’s me.  And I get up every morning and I get dressed and I go to work.  And I’m going to work because I’m going to save coral reefs.

I have a daughter and I wake up in the middle of the night, at first to feed her and, then later, in an absolute state of panic about the world we’re leaving her.  And I get up in the morning and I get dressed and I go to work.

That seventh grade voice gets louder and louder until I believe it, until I know that I can’t do shit.  No one can do anything.  And I get up and I get dressed.  And I go to work.

In April of this year, I brought a group of researchers together and we’d all been working and thinking about how corals deal with climate change.  We had three very different modeling frameworks to try and understand how corals can adapt to or how corals can evolve to deal with climate change.

At this workshop in April, we got some early results that suggest that, actually, the rate of evolution for corals can be fast enough to keep up with climate change if we have certain criteria in place.  Those criteria are things like the coral population sizes are large enough, they have enough diversity, those diverse, healthy reefs are connected to each other by the movement of baby corals.

The thing is that we can actually control some of those things.  We know that improving water quality for reefs, reducing overfishing helps those populations grow.  It helps them get to sexual reproduction and that’s when you start shuffling genes together.  We know that those baby corals can take those new genetic ideas to new places.

Starting in April of this year, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, there’s something that we can do.  Maybe, just maybe, our actions can actually make a difference for coral reefs.  It’s only in the last two weeks that I felt like maybe I can make a difference.  Maybe my actions can actually help.

Thank you.