"chasing coral"

Exposure Labs

Not to be a serial alarmist, but if you're as unsure about the current state of global affairs as I am, then perhaps the gravest catastrophes we face as a species (given self-anointed "pussy grabber" Donald J. Trump is our new Commander-in-Chief), are the insurmountable ways in which we inflict pain upon on ourselves and the planet, day in and day out. Our little blue speck of dust drifting through the icy cosmos, has been used as a veritable dumpster, toilet, and wasteland for the better part of a century, on a scale so vast that our total global footprint likely cannot reverse course. It's an unnerving, haunting realization, scary enough to warrant us all into giving up everyday things like plastic, meat, sugar and gluten, as just about anything found on YouTube these days, or even Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, carry the added ammunition necessary to scare the proverbial daylights out of us — forcing neighbors, friends and loved ones to adopt a stricter, pseudo self-enforced coda geared towards health, nutrition, fitness, and general well-being.

A few high school friends of mine recently watched Netflix's latest shock doc, "What The Health," directed by Kip Andersen, Keegan Kuhn and executive produced by veteran indie prankster Joaquin Phoenix — and within a matter hours went from meat eating carnivores to plant eating herbivores. Andersen and Kuhn's masterful docudrama is certainly worth its runtime; a steely, uncompromising look into the secretive U.S. industrial food complex, a narrative so coercive even I made the switch to a plants-only diet. However, after only a matter of days I found myself ditching the greens for reds again, and was back exactly where I started; ignorant, happy and really, really bloated. My pilgrimage lasted a paltry eight days, and yes, after a little more than a week I was back to eating mercury-laced fish and aviaries. My short-lived cleansing, which (briefly) forced me to reconcile my own weight, diet, amount of exercise, and a whole other host of life's concerns, still left me feel wanting — and I don't just mean the tantalizing, mouthwatering meat either. 

In a dispiriting rut, I found myself watching another Netflix docudrama, this time "Chasing Coral," director Jeff Orlowski's 2017 follow-up to James Balog's climate change-game changer, "Chasing Ice" (2012). Captured with meticulous rigor, precision and palpable indignation, "Coral" isn't so much a follow-up to "Ice" as it is a woeful complementary, excising the prototypical race against time (of the former) in favor of a more somber apocalyptic visage of the latter. Orlowski and his co. are so busy catching the world's dying corals while they phosphoresce (kicking the bucket, one by one), that the audience nearly forgets about the severity of this unnatural phenomenon. Though the real hump, or impediment to getting the word out, is the public's anemic reaction to these horrifying results. Given these massive die-offs are all surreptitiously taking place underwater, one can only imagine the adage ringing true: "out of sight, out of mind."

Fortunately for viewers, scientists, and marine biologists alike, the directors allow everyone to dive deep alongside them, figuratively and metaphorically, via complex camera techniques, bare bones perseverance, and an emotional connection to the corals themselves which remain unmatched. Perhaps most unsettling about the corals' recent spate of extinction however, are the myriad reasons behind such lethal bleachings; as our oceans absorb 93 percent of the planet's carbon emissions, major shifts in ocean temperatures are now threatening not only threatening their way of life, but ours as well. And talk about taking one for the team, for if our oceans ever decided to bounce that heat back into our atmosphere, we'd all be living in a 24/7 122-degree hellscape. And to cap off that ghoulish realization, many scientists have now confirmed that in 30 years (within our lifetime), many of the corals currently in existence will be gone for good.

What really keeps me up at night however, days after having watched this film, is the untenable feeling I share, with many other non-climate change deniers, that we're slowly chipping away at a quarter of all marine life without truly understanding the consequences of such an action. Sure, the planet is sending us some pretty glaring signals, literal screams from the ocean floor if you will, but reprimanding us into righting the innumerable wrongs of our past seems like a lost cause. Now is the time to demand action from world leaders, who by all accounts would much rather engage in nuclear brinksmanship, that we as a species face the greatest existential threat of our time. If a quarter of the world's fish supply is eviscerated in our lifetime, what does that mean for the millions if not billions who rely on such a food source? If no action is taken as our booming civilization continues to expand, having no fish in the sea would be calamitous for mankind — because frankly, if there aren't enough bushels to go around, we'd best prepare for the global ramifications of a far-reaching famine, and in turn, our own sad, soggy demise. 

"CHASING CORAL" Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.