Are You Quietly Thinking Our Planet Is Doomed? Then Let Me Introduce Human Fish Dr. Charlie Veron, Our Present Day Charles Darwin

He will answer your questions

Three times, in as many days, I have listened to three different scientists, none of whom, is optimistic for our planet’s survival.

Last night it was Charlie Veron’s time in the spotlight, on ABC television.

Charlie is not his actual name, by the way, but he was given the name way back in time, by his teacher, because of the uncanny characteristics he shared with Charles Darwin, and the name stuck.

Charlie lives in Queensland. He’s cracking on, as the saying goes, but he’s not ready to ‘play bingo’.

Charlie has work to do.

‘Charlie Veron is practically a human fish. He would never come to the surface if he didn’t run out of oxygen. He would live down there in an underwater garden at one with the fish and the other busy marine life.

‘Dr Veron has spent the past 50 years diving around coral reefs, observing, absorbing, enveloped by nature, at home in some of the most remote places on Earth. And every single time he dives, “I see stuff I have never seen before. It is unending.”’

Charlie wasn’t much of a student in school, despite living in Sydney’s north shore where he would have attended a pretty posh school. In fact, he did his final year twice, the second time doing no better, academically speaking, than the first.

School had nothing to offer him

It was only later, at the behest of his father, he agreed to have an IQ test. Coming as no surprise to his father, he was told his son was a genius!

On being offered a scholarship to study, he went on to complete a PhD.

These days Charlie is as revered and sought-after as David Attenborough, the highly-acclaimed environmentalist.

Though expert in different fields, they both realize the vital connection of all life on the planet.

Charlie is a fish

He’s at his happiest when he is down deep in the ocean.

“A living reef, he says, is ‘really noisy’.”

“You can hear all the snapping shrimp and all the fish and other organisms communicating acoustically with each other. Things chatting away to each other. It’s like being in the middle of a city.

“Most of all, he likes it at night. Torch turned off, sitting alone on the bottom of the ocean on an outer reef when the Moon is bright. ‘Everything is either silver or grey. It is just absolute, absolute beauty’.”

For the life of me, I cannot imagine sitting on the bottom of the ocean, alone, but not lonely, yet he does. The ocean bed is where he does most of his thinking, where he makes observations, identifies life forms, plans, and hopefully affords us hope for the future.

Charlie tells us that almost fifty years ago, when he began researching/diving, the Great Barrier reef was teeming with life.

When he first started diving the Great Barrier Reef in 1972, he says, it was an “otherworldly experience”, a place teeming with life. He’d love to confirm that this is still true, but the sad reality is that it is not. In some places, he says, it is deathly silent.

When your life revolves around the ocean and its health, and you find that it’s seriously at risk, you can do one of two things:

• lapse into depression and decide that all is lost, or,
• take up your cross and be a beacon of hope

Charlie is no slouch. Only a few years ago, in his seventies, he chose to join ‘ a scientific expedition to the remote far northern Great Barrier Reef, a 1,000-kilometre stretch from Port Douglas to Cape York.

‘There, among all the dead coral, they found a perfect living coral garden.’

BINGO! Charlie’s kind of bingo.

So think about this. How does finding a ‘perfect living garden’ speak to you?

To Charlie it spoke of hope, of work to be done, of time, and urgency, and finding ways to preserve what we still have, things to be put in place.

Can you even imagine his joy?

Now, at 77 , when many of us might be ‘playing bingo’, he has taken on responsibility for collecting ‘one of every species of coral on the Great Barrier Reef to create a coral biobank or “coral ark”.’

“They can be used when the technology is right to repopulate the reefs,” Dr Veron says. “There’s no plan B, that’s it. If we don’t do it, it’s all over.”

Here in Australia, the present government is seriously reluctant to put in place:

• strategies to reduce global warming, and
• strategies to reduce industrial waste, not just from from agriculture, but from anything that is harmful to coral, running into the ocean.

Our government should have some representation at the “gathering in Glasgow next month for the UN Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in what is being hailed as “the world’s best last chance” to get the climate emergency under control.”

I understand that our PM is contemplating not being there, though he may change his mind after last night’s story on Charlie.

Yet he should be, (going), because climate change is the greatest threat to the reef.

“When the water is too warm it upsets the symbiotic relationship between coral and its resident algae, causing bleaching.

“The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states coral reefs worldwide will be mostly wiped out by a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature. On current projections, that grim milestone will be reached in 2035.

“It makes preserving the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef all the more important (and urgent). If the corals can be collected and kept alive in aquariums for posterity, they will not be lost.”

Time is running out for the planet.

Time is running out for Charlie, committed as he is. He never stops. Between overseeing the coral bank, (his insurance policy legacy), writing his life’s work, and ‘planting 20,000 to 40,000 trees” as part of a corridor that connects the rainforest on their property on the Atherton Tableland, to the adjoining World Heritage area,” he’s as busy as he’s ever been.

What an inspiration! He won’t be around to really appreciate the changes, the turnaround of the health and happiness of the reef, but neither will we. The process demands ongoing commitment over hundreds of years.

What we can’t do, is give up hope.

What are your thoughts? What small things might you and I be able to do to make Charlie’s job a little easier?

Will you, at 77 be as determined as he is?

Are you at 17, 27, 37, or any 7, willing to back this amazing scientist up?

You can share your ideas for Charlie, right here!