Thank you for being part of the 100 Climate Conversations. Today is number 14 of 100 conversations, you can see some of them on the wall there, happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re broadcasting today from the Boiler Room of the Powerhouse museum and this actually used to be the Ultimo Power Station. This was built in 1899 and supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s as well. Unbeknownst to them, of course, helping to create the very problem we come here to speak about today. I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose land we meet today, and of course, pay my respects to the Elders past and present and acknowledge, of course, their custodianship of the land we’re on for many years.

I’m Craig Reucassel, you might know me from The Chaser or War on Waste or Fight for Planet A, shows like that. Let’s turn though to the truly amazing person we have with us, Dr John Charlie Veron is an international authority on coral and a long-time champion of the Great Barrier Reef. In his over 50-year long career, Veron identified 20 per cent of the world’s known coral species. Veron was the first scientist to be employed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, becoming chief scientist of the organisation in 1997. He’s the author of over 100 publications, including his popular 2017 memoir, A Life Underwater. We’re so thrilled to have him join us today. Welcome Charlie.  

Good to be here.

Now, you’ve been referred to as the Godfather of Coral and the Guardian of the Reef. Growing up, did you always have a love of the natural world?  

Yeah, I think so. When I was a little tiny kid, I used to go down to Long Reef in Sydney and rip off animals at Long Reef, little kids did then, they don’t now I hope, and I kept them in an aquarium. I guess one of the things that I had, which was of doubtful value, was a little octopus and I kept that in the aquarium for about a year. His name was Occie, and he used to crawl up my arm and take a little bit of meat from my arm, crab or – every morning he would come when he was called. He knew my voice and out he would come, and he would go back to the little cave I made for him and flash little blue rings at me to say thank you. It wasn’t known then that the Sydney blue-ringed octopus was one of the most deadly things in the oceans and he did that for a whole year.  

It’s extraordinary.  

He never bit me.  

He never bit you. You seem to –

Well, I wouldn’t be here if he had.  

No, you seem to be kind of at one with nature. You couldn’t have thought of a better kind of career for you, as it ended up, you became the first full time Great Barrier Reef researcher in 1972. How much was known about the Great Barrier Reef at this time? 

Very, very little. It was mostly the domain of geologists worried about oil drilling and mining and we ran the first expedition to the far northern Great Barrier Reef, first people to dive on the outer face. It was a time of real exploration, and I wasn’t even aware of how much we didn’t know. But I used to get these phone calls from Canberra for a while asking me weird questions and then Gough Whitlam suddenly appeared and announced that the whole place was going to be a giant National Park because at that time wasn’t even known to be Australian territory or waters. There was a three-mile limit and the Great Barrier Reef at high tide is submerged. Who owned the Great Barrier Reef?

That seems to be quite ahead of its time to actually – so little was known about it and yet to turn it into this marine park.

Yeah, that has been a fundamentally important thing. Then there was a lot of talk about conservation on the Great Barrier Reef, but that came to an end when the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government of Queensland was thrown out and all the mining leases, all the drilling leases, all cancelled, the entire Great Barrier Reef and now heaven help anybody who imagined they could take anything from the Great Barrier Reef. In those days it was all up for grabs.

So I guess at that time you would have thought the reef is protected. It’s a marine park, the mining’s not happening, it’s healthy. When did you know? When did it become apparent – 

No, I didn’t think it needed protecting. The Marine Park Authority got set up, oh that’s a waste of money, it’s so big, it can look after itself. It doesn’t need protecting. I got that wrong. 

So when did you first realise that there was this other threat to the Reef? This threat of climate change? When did that become apparent to you?  

Oh, yeah, I published a book in 1986 on Corals of Australia in the Indo-Pacific and that was to bring the world of corals to the general public. And in it is a couple of pictures of white coral and I sort of kept track of these white corals, only a few of them, and they died. And I thought, ‘That’s strange.’ And then somehow, I thought they were suffering from heat. And this is back in the early 1980s. And then I heard about climate change and frankly, I thought, ‘What a ridiculous idea that is. How could humans possibly change the climate of this planet?’ Until I read up on it, this is before Google of course, before computers and all that. I got a book off the shelf, I have lots of books, and looked up the properties of carbon dioxide and thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, it can.’

So then overnight, I thought, ‘This climate change business, this is for real.’ And it was oh, a decade after that, that I really started to worry that it was affecting the temperature on the Great Barrier Reef, and it was linked to bleaching of corals. A friend of mine at the University of Queensland, he did the first physiology in this and his results were very interesting. And I still thought it was not a big deal until I was working in Japan, and I came across a bay which was really isolated, there are no people, no roads, no nothing and all the corals were white. And that was the first time I’d seen a mass bleaching and I thought something like this has been noticed on bits of the Great Barrier Reef and that’s when I first realised there was a connection between climate change and bleaching of corals.

Firstly, I think the amazing thing about you, your experience on the reef, is you’ve been diving for so many years. If I go up to the reef and dive, there’s still moments of beauty, there’s still beautiful bits around, but I don’t know what it used to be like. Take us back to when you first dove the Great Barrier Reef. What did it look like? How is it different to how it is now?

Well, first time I hitchhiked up to Gladstone and got on the boat to Heron Island, dived over the edge and swimming along and I was absolutely gobsmacked. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in all my life. It wasn’t just the corals, it was the massive life, life was all around you, it was three dimensional for a start, and it was so engaging, completely, it just took over. And I would stay out on the reef all day long until I was absolutely exhausted.

How different would it look, though, from that experience when you were diving then to now, how much of the Great Barrier Reef have we lost at this point?

If I was to be in a time capsule and could go back and compare then and now, 95 per cent? Something like that. It doesn’t look anything like it did once. 

You spoke about not just the beauty of the reef, but the fact that there’s so many animals around you, so much marine life around you. How important is a reef for the animals?  

What a coral reef is, is a place where animal life can exist because it pretends it’s a plant. They have algae in their tissues, and they can use sunlight to grow, and they form these skeletons which are wave resistant. That’s what coral reefs are, they are things that grow at the interface between the land and the sea and the air, and nothing else grows there. And that makes coral reefs so very, very special for everything else, because it’s now at least, maybe even 70, 80 per cent of all marine species have some part of their lifecycle in a coral reef. And you’ve only got to swim over a coral reef to see why, if you’re swimming on a coral reef, there’s lots of little fish, everywhere. But as you swim towards them, they’ll disappear into the coral and they’re protected by the coral, and down deeper into the coral, there’s little tiny things, larvae of everything. Now, if that coral dies and just turns into rubble, all that protection goes. And so, we’re not just worried about the loss of the beauty of a coral reef, we’re worried about the biggest, the most essential part of the ecology of the entire ocean.

So if we take away that home for the marine life, what is the flow on effect?

Ecological collapse of the oceans. And this has happened many times in the geological past, well over 30 times, five of those times have been ultra-dramatic in that they’ve been called the mass extinctions. It’s a misunderstood thing because the mass extinctions take a long, long, long, long, long time, except the last one, which is due to a gigantic asteroid hitting the Gulf of Mexico. But most, all the other mass extinctions, they’ve taken a million or more years to come about as the chemistry of the ocean changes because of carbon dioxide. So the carbon dioxide changes the alkalinity of the ocean surface, and that means that anything that is made of calcium carbonate is in danger and that’s what’s happening now. It is straight out chemistry, it’s when the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, which it does. Now this has happened many, many times in the geological past. But this time it’s happening to us in our time and it’s also happening much quicker than in all the geological past events, except when an asteroid hits the Earth and even then, it’s taken hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s frightening what you say, but it’s also that human thing of like, ahh 100,000 years, it’s a timescale we don’t really deal with. Do you think that that’s been part of the problem of getting people to respond to this – we don’t really, we can’t look into the future in a way.

That is the problem. We are human and we’re geared to the here and now. And so further and further the time away, the less panic for us it is. It’s not that big a deal for most people until they realise that a century down the line the world is going to look nothing like it does now and as I’ve said often, I’m likely to outlive the Great Barrier Reef and for me, that’s a mega horrible thought because I just so much love that place.

You do love that place and you’ve named around 20 per cent of the corals. Why did you think it was so important to kind of name and categorise the coral?

I don’t that’s what the press says.  

You don’t?  

No I don’t. What is important is to know what’s out there. The whole science of understanding is not about naming things, it’s about knowing what’s there and the last thing I want to do is to find a new name. I’m not good at names, they’re boring. And so, I tried to find an old one and so for X percentage of corals, I failed to find an old name, it’s a failure, not a success.

But I guess it’s not necessarily about the name but as you say, it’s about knowing what’s there so that you can track the changes.

What I did in most of my life is take the taxonomy of corals from the museum to the reef. And the taxonomy of corals in museums has got almost nothing in common with what you see underwater. What you see underwater varies, anyone you can see it, it varies enormously to where you happen to be swimming. And if you’re a scuba diver, you can dive down a reef slope, all the corals change, the shape and so on. It’s the same species, but it forms different shapes and has different structures as you go down the slope and that’s not reflected at all in the museum specimens. The foremost coral taxonomist of that old era, he was with me in the Marshall Islands, and he said, ‘Charlie, look, in this latest volume of yours, I find it absolutely unbelievable what you’ve done. You’ve said all this is one species.’ I said, ‘Yes John, and it’s quite a common one here.’ And so, I grabbed my tank and laundry basket where I put things in, went down 50 metres or so and collected this species all the way up the slope and then I cleaned them all and laid them out on the big bench and let him loose and he spent hours pottering up and down and said –

It’s amazing.  

‘That’s all the one species.’  

As you say though it’s all the one species, but it’s different at every depth. We can’t recreate the reef outside, it’s something that if we lose it in that capacity, it’s going to be very difficult to get back.

So this taxonomy for me is, it has to be like plants, you need a name for them. We’ve got 600 species of eucalypts or so, they’ve got to have a name because that name means you can photograph it, you can map it, you can describe it. You can’t do that with something that’s abstract.

You said that you started off initially being sceptical about the climate change, but obviously once you read into it you became convinced that it was going to have devastating effects on the reef. And in 2009, you appeared with David Attenborough at the Royal Society of London to I guess, ring the kind of warning bell there. 

Well, what happened when I realised climate change is real and I realised its impact on the coral reefs. I was, at that time there happened to be lot of arguments between me and the director of my institute, Australian Institute of Marine Science, and I said to him, ‘Look, I might clear off for at least a year and take half long service leave and half research’, he signed off on that because he’s just glad to get me out of the place, I was such a troublemaker.  And so, with my family, we went to France, and I studied climate change from all different aspects, much more so than I’ve ever done for a university degree. And its geology, its chemistry, its genetics and I put it all together in the book, and it’s called A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End. I mean, that drew attention, as it was designed to do.

That presentation at the Royal Society in London just went absolutely everywhere. And for me, that was personally a good thing from all sorts of points of view and one of those was, I knew more about the future of climate change than anybody and it’s not because I was a whiz bang scientist, it was because a lot of American climatologists had been funded by Exxon on the condition they would only publish their work in scientific journals and they could be really nailed by Exxon if they ever spoke in public or wrote anything for the general public. Well, I’m not beholden to Exxon, they gave all their stuff to me and so by the time I arrived at this Royal Society meeting, I knew more about climate change than anybody on the planet. 

What was the response at the time from, I guess, the public and also scientists?

Well, in my own institute I was just blacklisted completely. And the response of other scientists was glee, pat on the back, I was very, very popular. And I have to say that irritated me somewhat because they would say, ‘Charlie, look, you really need to talk about this or that.’ I said ‘Why don’t you talk about this or that?’ ‘Well, I can’t I’m not allowed to’. And they’d also say, ‘Well, it’s all very well for you, you’ve got tenure.’ But when I started talking, I didn’t have tenure at all when I started talking about things that I wasn’t supposed to talk about. But it is true if their job is threatened, they are muzzled to some extent, and they’ve got their family to look out, they’ve got their careers to worry about. I think that is changing, but it’s got a long, long way to go.

It is interesting that because I have noticed that in talking to many climate scientists, in talking to you over the years, you do seem to have a greater freedom to speak, or at least you don’t feel as constrained as others. Do you think there’s been a problem in communicating the challenges and that people have been constrained? 

Oh yeah. I am a real busybody when it comes to science, I love knowing everybody else’s subject. And that’s difficult because first of all, you’ve got to get on top of the jargon. Jargon is what keeps science from the general public, you got to know all these complicated names. You’ve got to know the difference between the Carboniferous and the Cretaceous, there’s nothing in that that’s common but you’ve got to know it. And so, I have always been able to translate all these different sciences and I can then give it to a bigger audience, or a bigger readership and I love doing that, bringing science to the general public.

Do you think there has been a problem in communicating the challenge of climate change to the general public because of the technical nature of academic speak and scientific speak? Has that been a real challenge for scientists?

Oh, absolutely. There are two things about that, one is the actual science itself and what scientists love doing is explaining their science, talking about their science and if that’s not followed, well they sort of shout louder, they don’t change what they’re saying to make it palatable to other people. And I sometimes cringe when I hear a scientist being interviewed because they in their head think they’re talking to other scientists, they’re not, they’re talking to non-scientists and if they don’t think that, they’re not getting the message across. And the other thing was the Australian Government for a long, long time was not wanting scientists to speak out about climate change. And in fact, in my institute we were prohibited from talking. And I just said, ‘Up yours’ to the director, I had tenure, he couldn’t sack me, but he could take everything else away from me and did.

I decided then that I would speak out and that was a big decision because like the scientists of that time, we’re talking about 15 years ago, scientists didn’t see themselves as people that should be in front of a camera, they saw themselves as people that talk science to other scientists and maybe a journalist could listen on and make what they could of it. And I made a decision, in my memoir I call myself a media tart and I have been in media tart for 15 years at least. As soon as a camera turns up, I will talk to it and I took every opportunity to talk to it and we’re talking now hundreds upon hundreds of episodes in front of a camera because what is the use of doing more science if the animals you’re going to work on are going to die? And I thought I’m going to give my time for the animals to stay alive if I can, do my bit.  

It’s fascinating. It is as if the kind of nature of academic science kind of constrained it to be able to kind of communicate at a really important time.  

Well, it was.  

I mean, do you think it’s because they’ve gotten better, or do you think the scientists have got better?  

Oh a lot better, much better. And scientists now are not threatened with the sack as they were in my time. I would have been sacked if the then director of my institute could have, but he couldn’t, I had tenure.

Do you feel like now, 2022, do you feel like the public has a lot more understanding? Do you feel like there is a lot more, I guess, momentum towards actually positive change?

It’s huge. Back when I started getting on my soap box, I would not talk about, I learnt not to talk about mass extinctions because if I was going to try to persuade the audience, whatever that may be, that climate change was real, it is happening, it will happen to you, it’s serious. That was a hard enough message to put over but when I then went to the next step, this is the forerunner of a mass extinction. Come on. So, I didn’t talk about that for years and years and years although it is by far the most serious aspect of climate change.

I think you’re right, it’s probably the most serious aspect as we talked about the fact is that it feels like a long way away. I think one of the changes we’ve seen now is that people feel like we’re actually experiencing climate change now. Now, one of the things that you’re now doing is to try and deal with that problem and you’re building a living coral bank. You’ve got this ambitious plan of building this kind of coral ark. Can you talk me through that? How does the coral ark work? 

Well, it’s just like a seed bank. We’ll go to a botanic gardens or a zoo that keeps plants or animals going when they’re going extinct in the wild.

How do you do that though? Do you take bits of coral back and where do you keep them?

In an aquarium.

So you’re building a giant aquarium. Where is this aquarium going to be?

If we can, we haven’t got any funding but if we can. We want to keep all species of coral, you can keep corals in an aquarium forever and they grow, and you can chop up bits and move the bits to other aquaria. You can form a network of aquaria that keep corals alive, effectively forever. The plan is not to be able to repopulate reefs when we get over our climate crisis. We won’t get over our climate crisis for centuries, if not millennia. It’s going to keep on and keep – you can’t, the Earth doesn’t move quickly, it moves very slowly, and it is starting to move as it has in the past. But what, if we keep these species going in aquaria, it means that clever people who run say genetics labs can find ways of making these corals more tolerant of temperature.

I think what we’re hoping for is geneticists to get temperature resistant corals in aquaria going. It’s very easy to breed up corals in aquaria. In aquaria, they also release the egg and sperm larvae and so one coral colony can produce millions of larvae. So, it is quite possible, in fact it’s almost obviously not easy, but certainly doable to reseed whole reefs with temperature resistant strains and that is technically possible and scientifically quite feasible. What we need to do is to keep those corals going until those geneticists have done their thing and they’ve produced temperature resistant strains of these corals, put them back on the reef.

Is this not going to happen naturally as well? Are they going to be, are they naturally more temperature resistant corals that are thriving with the change? I mean, are we trying to save the past in a sense?

We’re not going to be able to save reefs that look like they do now. We’re just not. The average coral has a generation time in decades. So, if natural selection were to do all this, we’re looking at multiple decades of maybe change, maybe not, it’s a very slow process. Humans have got to be able to speed up evolution by technical means in laboratories and they can, this can be done. This has to be done if we are to keep coral reefs going.

It won’t be in time to stop I think the next mass extinction, I think that’s already starting. If you look at the Great Barrier Reef, well over half of the Great Barrier Reef will be quite useless for being a home for other species. We’ve got this phenomenon of time lag, we’re heating the ocean, we’re putting the flame under the kettle, it’s warming but it’s a very big place, the oceans, it is warming incredibly slowly. So what we are seeing now is a response to conditions that existed around about the turn of the century. So even if we stopped all the warming now, the oceans would not be equilibrating into what is already in the atmosphere for another 20 or so years.

It’s depressing to hear that kind of thing and particularly with the reef, because the reef feels like the canary in the coal mine, in a sense. It’s the first thing that’s affected, it’s being affected the most, it’s hard to find positive stories there. Are there any other initiatives that are giving you hope in terms of the reef? 

Well, I take hope from almost anywhere possible, but the main hope comes from technology. And the other source of hope is that people like me think, ‘Oh, we know all about corals.’ But in fact, take a closer look, we don’t. Corals are amazingly inventive organisms and that’s where my hope largely rests. Maybe the corals deeper down the reef slopes are less prone to bleaching, maybe they can save the day. I get hope from all these sorts of, maybe things we don’t know about yet.

Let’s look to the future and I guess your future as well. The last few years, you moved from the house you built in Townsville, you moved to the Atherton Tablelands. What prompted the move?

Escaping climate change.

So you moved from fear of the effects of climate change and what particularly, what effects of climate change are you worried about in Townsville?

The relentless increase in temperature but also now the coastal cities of Queensland are built on floodplains, they’re going to go under, they will go under. There’s no possible doubt about that and so that’s going to bring a lot of social upheaval, obviously, housing, expansion of cities. And so, my partner and I, we just, we gave a couple of seminars to our children about why we needed to move. We had a lovely place near Townsville, and we didn’t want to leave it and it wasn’t threatened by sea level rise, it was 40 metres above sea level. But we wanted to have a place that our kids could enjoy that was self-sustaining and also where we could make a more positive contribution to land development.

Well, I want to ask you about this because you’re interested in conservation, not just underwater, but also on the land. What are the things you’re doing to try and regenerate the land there?

For better or for worse, we’ve bought a whole lot of land. We’re looking out over 500 acres of rolling grasslands, rivers, rainforests, it’s a fabulous place. We’re going to plant tens of thousands of trees and we’re going to make a corridor between a little National Park that our land spreads into and the big world heritage at the other side. And we’ve got a couple of neighbours that will participate in this, but we’re going to make a corridor and a cassowary there is going to be able to walk from one to the other and back and so on. It’s partly a selfish thing. I built a tree house in a garden, a great big tree house in a gigantic fig tree and we had tree kangaroos scrapping on the roof of the tree house, crashing, banging and arguing as tree kangaroos do. I’ve always loved rainforests, I just always have.

I want to ask you, actually talking about tips, you’ve been, spent over 50 years campaigning for conservation. You’ve spoken for many years about climate change, you were a lone voice at certain times in that. Now today’s young people are arguably growing up in a time when it’s accepted or at least it’s the norm to think that climate change is real. What is your advice for young people today who are wanting to take action, whether it be in the scientific community or as activists? What’s your advice to young people?

My advice to young people is to be able to think and to think and to allow yourself, give yourself permission to think. I had a particularly bad school career, I mean it couldn’t be worse. I’d failed almost all exams in my entire school, although I tried. I just can’t learn what people say I’ve got to learn whether it’s history or geography or biology or physics. I’ve never passed a maths exam in my life, I love maths. So I often, as a priority I love speaking to kids, schoolkids and young students. I think it’s tremendously important to persuade children just to think and to take charge of their thoughts and don’t do what they’re told to do. I love to encourage kids to do their own thing, and it doesn’t matter what it is.

I had an aquarium and Occie was in that aquarium and I thought a lot about octopus or the little bugs I saw, I saw little critters feeding and once you see this going on, look in their little faces and sharp eyes as a child, you look at their eyes, what the hell are they seeing? And so, you just have to have that little kernel of interest and then it just grows. It never goes backwards, it will grow and maybe they’ll be teachers or maybe they’ll work in the bank, but whatever it is, that interest will be there. And how important is it to get to young people? Because they will learn not to be pushed around by what’s socially acceptable, what the teacher says you need to learn, and teachers themselves have changed, they realise that alright they’ve got to follow a curriculum, but they can also instil wonder and interest in pupils. 

Well, for many years you have instilled wonder and interest in pupils and many other people so congratulations. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking Charlie Veron for not just a wonderful conversation but a wonderful career as well.

To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com. Thank you again for joining us and thank you, Charlie Veron. I look forward to seeing the next ten years, what you achieve with your climate ark and everything else.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time.