Heather Cox Richardson: Kentucky Derby

Heather Cox Richardson

 

May 1, 2021 (Saturday)

In honor of this year's Kentucky Derby (won today by Medina Spirit), I'm posting a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. It has no deep meaning... it's just fun. It remains one of my favorite things I had a hand in writing, and I'm pleased to have an excuse to share it.

I'll be back on the usual beat tomorrow.

1) Traveller

General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.

2) Comanche

Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden, and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.

3) Beautiful Jim Key

Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia – buttons, photos, and postcards – or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”

4) Man o’ War

Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in WWI, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss – to “Upset” – came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.

5) Trigger

Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.

6) Sergeant Reckless

American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her, and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.

7) Mr. Ed

Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.

8 ) Black Jack

Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands – a US brand and an army serial number – recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.

9) Khartoum

Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

10) Secretariat

Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.” 

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: "World's Most Tyrannical Regime Can't Stop Babbling About 'Human Rights' "

Caitlin Johnstone

Poster based in Australia

  

Excerpt from "World's Most Tyrannical Regime Can't Stop Babbling About 'Human Rights' ":

"America won’t back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms," reads a Wednesday tweet from the presidential Twitter account. "No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated."

The tweet, an excerpt from the US president's prepared congressional address, was retweeted on Saturday by Secretary of State Tony Blinken with the caption, "We will always defend human rights at home and abroad."

Like all US secretaries of state, Blinken's public statements overwhelmingly focus on the claim that other nations abuse human rights, and that it is America's duty to defend those rights. Which is very silly, considering the fact that the US government is the single worst human rights abuser on planet Earth.

And it's not even close.

There is no other government that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it via invasion, proxy wars, blockades, economic warfare, staged coups, and covert operations. There is no other government on earth whose violence has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. There is no other government waging nonstop wars around the world and dropping scores of bombs per day on human beings in foreign nations in order to perpetuate its iron-fisted domination of our planet.

And it just says so much about who is controlling the dominant narratives in our society that these actions are not considered human rights violations. Clearly we should all have a human right to not be murdered by explosives dropped from the sky, and we in nations where this does not commonly occur would be very upset if it suddenly began happening to us. Clearly it is an abuse of human rights to deliberately starve children to death because you don't approve of the people who run things in their part of the world. Clearly it is an abuse of human rights to turn a nation to rubble and chaos for profit and geostrategic control.

CAITLINJOHNSTONE.SUBSTACK.COM

World's Most Tyrannical Regime Can't Stop Babbling About "Human Rights"

 

EXCERPT:

Not a day goes by when the US government is not doing these things, both directly and through its imperial member states. Yet the US secretary of state spends all day tweeting that other governments are guilty of human rights violations. Because, as far as power is concerned, narrative control is everything.

If mass murder is not an abuse of human rights, then "human rights" is a meaningless concept. But even if bombing campaigns and other acts of military butchery do not transgress your personal definition of human rights, the US still does not care about human rights.

Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled

A few years back we used to hear a lot about Duterte's atrocious human rights record—but that seems to have stopped over the past year or so. Wonder what Duterte could've possibly done to get the human rights industry heat off him? amti.csis.org/south-china-se…

April 30th 2021

135 Retweets474 Likes

As journalist Mark Ames recently flagged, a few years ago the imperial narrative managers were very keen on informing us that Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was a despotic human rights abuser, but we haven't been hearing much about what an evil brute he is of late.

So what happened? Did Duterte cease promoting the extrajudicial killings of drug users and spontaneously transform into a cuddly wuddly human rights advocate? 

Of course not.

What happened, as Ames points out, is that Duterte ceased publicly toying with the notion of pivoting from Washington to Beijing as he had been doing since taking office, shifting to a hard line against China in support of Manila's longtime imperial overlord.

We saw the change in coverage because Washington and its imperial spinmeisters only care about human rights abuses insofar as they can be exploited against the few remaining nations like China that have insisted on their own sovereignty instead of allowing themselves to be converted into member states of the US-centralized empire. We know this not only from naked eye observations of the empire's behavior from year to year, but also because they have blatantly said so.

Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitoz

That Time A Leaked Memo Proved The US Weaponizes 'Human Rights' Against Nations Like China "The reality is that actions against China were already planned, and a narrative was used to justify them." That Time A Leaked Memo Proved The US Weaponizes ‘Human Rights’ Against Nations Like ChinaThe US, UK, EU and Canada have simultaneously implemented new sanctions against Chinese officials in yet another reminder that these nations consistently function as member states of a single empire on foreign policy, and that the Biden administration iscaitlinjohnstone.substack.com

March 23rd 2021

239 Retweets460 Likes

As I never tire of reminding readers, a leaked 2017 State Department memo spelled out in plain English how the US only cares about human rights when they can be weaponized against its enemies, and has a standing policy of ignoring them when they are committed by its allies/vassal states.

In December 2017 Politico published an internal memo that had been sent the previous May to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by virulent neocon Brian Hook. The memo provided useful insight into what it looks like when a toxic swamp monster orients a political neophyte to the inner mechanics of the empire, explaining the way "human rights" are really just a tool to be cynically leveraged to advance the goal of planetary hegemony. It reads like an old veteran explaining the backstory to the new guy in the pilot episode of a new TV series.

"In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights," Hook explained in the memo.

"One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently -- and better -- than adversaries," Hook wrote. "We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically."

Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitoz

Imperialist propaganda is like ninety percent concern trolling.

CNN Politics @CNNPolitics

Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women's rights https://t.co/UgqVYW4Hul

April 10th 2021

178 Retweets632 Likes

In Imperialist Brain Worms World, "human rights" is nothing other than a propaganda weapon to be used for building antagonistic international coalitions, manufacturing consent for invasions and regime change ops, and spinning the dominant narrative in support of starvation sanctions and world-threatening cold war escalations. It's just mass-scale concern trolling of the most destructive and malignant sort imaginable.

This is what you are feeding into, by the way, when you parrot State Department lines about how horrible and tyrannical US-targeted governments are. You are helping to circulate the narratives our rulers are spending billions of dollars circulating, and you are doing it for free. You are making the jobs of the imperialists that much easier, because you are unwittingly operating as a pro bono Pentagon propagandist.

Don't be a Pentagon propagandist, pro bono or otherwise. Don't be an imperial concern troll. Don't let the worst human rights abuser on the face of our planet get away with pretending to support human rights.

LINK

RSN: Jesse Jackson | The Case for Statehood for the District of Columbia Is Clear

 

 

01 May 21

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Jesse Jackson | The Case for Statehood for the District of Columbia Is Clear

Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state of the union. It finally would end the denial of voting representation to its more than 700,000 residents, the majority of whom are Black or Brown."

Making D.C. a state finally would end the denial of voting representation to more than 700,000 Americans, a majority of whom are Black or Brown.

ast week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state of the union. It finally would end the denial of voting representation to its more than 700,000 residents, the majority of whom are Black or Brown.

The bill was passed 216-208, with Democrats voting unanimously and Republicans offering not one vote. That led the media to declare the bill dead on arrival in the Senate, where it could be passed by a majority but derailed by a filibuster that would require 60 votes. Republicans have announced that they are prepared to filibuster the bill and block the majority from passing it.

Once more, legislation guaranteeing basic civil rights is threatened by a minority employing the filibuster, the favored instrument used to block civil rights legislation and sustain segregation for decades. Only this time Republicans, once the party of Lincoln, have taken up the mantle of the plantation Democrats of the Old South.

The case for D.C. statehood is clear. The nation was founded in protest against taxation without representation. D.C. residents are denied voting representation in the House and Senate. The nation is shamed by military service without representation. D.C. residents have fought in wars going back to the Revolutionary War and yet have no representatives to vote in favor or against those wars. America, which claims to lead democracies across the world, denies the foundation of democracy to more than 700,000 citizens in the nation’s capital.

D.C. is not too small to be a state. It has more citizens than Vermont and Wyoming, and about as many as Alaska. Those states, of course, are overwhelmingly white. D.C. would have the largest proportion of African Americans of any state. There are no constitutional obstacles to making D.C. a state. The Constitution calls for Congress to control the seat of government. The new bill defines the seat of government as including Capitol Hill, the White House, the National Mall and connecting property, drawing the state from the remaining areas.

Historically, voting by D.C. residents — even for local officials — has been suppressed because of racism. In the 1870s, at the same time the South was beginning to suppress Black votes and construct what became the American version of apartheid, Southerners in Congress moved to strip District residents of the vote for fear of Blacks. This isn’t disputed.

As segregationist Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, “In the face of this influx of Negro population from the surrounding States, [Congress] found it necessary to disenfranchise every man in the District of Columbia ... in order thereby to get rid of this load of Negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them. That is the true statement. History cannot be reversed. No man can misunderstand it.”

And racism propels the opposition today. Across the country, Republicans are mobilizing in state after state to make it more difficult to vote in ways that disproportionately impact minority voters. Rather than seeking to win the votes of Black and Brown voters, they choose instead to find ways to impede their ability to vote. Filibustering against D.C. statehood is simply the most extreme expression of this campaign of voter suppression.

Republican legislators toss out all sorts of objections to D.C. statehood — it’s too small, too urban, lacks manufacturing, doesn’t have a landfill. But their real objection is that it is too Black and Brown and likely will elect two Democratic senators and a Democratic member to the House. D.C. residents tend to be more affluent and better educated. You would think that they would be prime targets for Republican appeals. And they would be, except that the residents are disproportionately Black and Brown, and the modern-day Republican Party has made itself into the party of racial division.

The opposition to D.C. is mirrored in the opposition to statehood for Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but, as a territory, have no right to vote. They too pay taxes and serve in the military. Puerto Rico, with 3 million citizens, is even larger than the District. Most Americans support Puerto Rican statehood. But Republicans fear that, since Puerto Ricans are largely people of color, they will tend to elect Democrats. Once more racism stands in the way of democracy.

In 1988 when I ran for president, I called for statehood for the District and for Puerto Rico. I also called for the U.S. to end its support for apartheid in South Africa and demand that Nelson Mandela be freed. Since then, Nelson Mandela was freed and became the leader of his country, leading a peaceful transition from apartheid. Historic change is possible. Yet in the U.S., the citizens of the District and of Puerto Rico remain deprived of representation. And the right to vote is once more under siege across the country.

This summer, the Senate will convene a hearing on D.C. statehood. The White House has strongly issued its support. If Republicans continue to employ the filibuster to block the vote, it is time for Democrats to suspend the filibuster, just as Republicans did to drive confirmation of their Supreme Court nominees to lifetime appointments. The tricks and traps of our segregationist past should no longer stand in the way of simple democracy for the citizens of the District of Columbia.

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People take part in a May Day demonstration in Washington Square Park in New York. (photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)

May Day Protesters Demand More Job Protections Amid Pandemic
Nicholas Garriga, Niniek Karmini and John Leicester, ABC News
Excerpt: "Workers and union leaders dusted off bullhorns and flags that had stayed furled during coronavirus lockdowns for slimmed down but still boisterous - and at times violent - May Day marches on Saturday, demanding more labor protections amid a pandemic that has turned economies and workplaces upside down."
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An immigrant detention center. (photo: ABC)

ICE Said to Transfer Women Out of Detention Center That Became Infamous Over Allegations of Forced Sterilization
Charles Davis, Business Insider
Davis writes: "An immigration detention center in Georgia where dozens of people alleged they were subjected to unnecessary medical procedures without their consent is no longer detaining any women, according a lawyer for some former detainees."
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Amazon workers protesting. (photo: Valérie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)

Amazon's Already Busted Out Its Anti-Union Playbook in Staten Island
Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo
Kimball writes: "A bootstrap Amazon unionization effort is underway in Staten Island, and lo and behold, Amazon is firing up the union-busting campaign early. We've heard allegations that it threatened Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse workers with shutting down the warehouse amid their attempt to unionize."
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Darryl Anthony Howard (middle) and his wife, Nannie Howard (right), leave the Durham County Detention Center with their lawyers and family. (photo: Chuck Liddy/Getty Images)

North Carolina Governor Grants Pardon to Man Who Spent 22 Years in Prison for Killings He Didn't Commit
Hollie Silverman and Jamiel Lynch, CNN News

orth Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Friday pardoned a man who was wrongly convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree arson in 1995, a news release from the governor's office said.

Darryl Anthony Howard can now file a claim for compensation for the years he spent in prison. In North Carolina, people wrongly convicted of felonies can receive up to $50,000 per year they were in prison, but no more that $750,000.

Amelia Green, an attorney for Howard, said: "We are pleased to have the State acknowledge what has been clear all along -- Darryl Howard never should have spent a moment in prison for these horrifying crimes, let alone over 22 years. Darryl is relieved to have this official recognition of his innocence as he moves forward to the next chapter in his life."

Howard has been a free man since a judge vacated his convictions in 2016.

In 2009, attorneys filed a motion on Howard's behalf requesting the victims' rape kits be DNA tested, the pardon said. According to media reports, Howard's attorneys argued that the DNA found in the kit of one of the victims implicated another man. Howard's DNA was not a match, the News & Observer of Raleigh reported in 2015.

In 2016 a judge in North Carolina ruled the new DNA evidence showed that Howard was innocent.

Days after the judge vacated the convictions, a district attorney announced he would not retry the case, according to media reports.

"It is important to continue our efforts to reform the justice system and to acknowledge wrongful convictions," the governor said in his statement.

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43/Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian man. (photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)

ALSO SEE: What Is Happening in Occupied
East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah?

"A Threshold Crossed": Israel Is Guilty of Apartheid, Human Rights Watch Says for First Time
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "A major new report by Human Rights Watch says for the first time that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid and persecution in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The international human rights group says Israeli authorities dispossessed, confined and forcibly separated Palestinians."
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A diver swimming over coral. (photo: JW Porter/University of Georgia)

Watching a Coral Reef Die in a Warming Ocean
Sam Purkis, The Conversation
Purkis writes: "The Chagos Archipelago is one of the most remote, seemingly idyllic places on Earth. Coconut-covered sandy beaches with incredible bird life rim tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from any continent. Just below the waves, coral reefs stretch for miles along an underwater mountain chain."

he Chagos Archipelago is one of the most remote, seemingly idyllic places on Earth. Coconut-covered sandy beaches with incredible bird life rim tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from any continent. Just below the waves, coral reefs stretch for miles along an underwater mountain chain.

It’s a paradise. At least it was before the heat wave.

When I first explored the Chagos Archipelago 15 years ago, the underwater view was incredible. Schools of brilliantly colored fish in blues, yellows and oranges darted among the corals of a vast, healthy reef system. Sharks and other large predators swam overhead. Because the archipelago is so remote and sits in one of the largest marine protected areas on the planet, it has been sheltered from industrial fishing fleets and other activities that can harm the coastal environment.

But it can’t be protected from climate change.

In 2015, a marine heat wave struck, harming coral reefs worldwide. I’m a marine biologist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and I was with a team of researchers on a 10-year global expedition to map the world’s reefs, led by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. We were wrapping up our work in the Chagos Archipelago at the time. Our report on the state of the reefs there was just published in spring 2021.

As the water temperature rose, the corals began to bleach. To the untrained eye, the scene would have looked fantastic. When the water heats up, corals become stressed and they expel the tiny algae called dinoflagellates that live in their tissue. Bleaching isn’t as simple as going from a living coral to a bleached white one, though. After they expel the algae, the corals turn fluorescent pinks and blues and yellows as they produce chemicals to protect themselves from the Sun’s harmful rays. The entire reef was turning psychedelic colors.

That explosion of color is rare, and it doesn’t last long. Over the following week, we watched the corals turn white and start to die. It wasn’t just small pieces of the reef that were bleaching – it was happening across hundreds of square miles.

What most people think of as a coral is actually many tiny colonial polyps that build calcium carbonate skeletons. With their algae gone, the coral polyps could still feed by plucking morsels out of the water, but their metabolism slows without the algae, which provide more nutrients through photosynthesis. They were left desperately weakened and more vulnerable to diseases. We could see diseases taking hold, and that’s what finished them off.

We were witnessing the death of a reef.

Rising temperatures increase the heat wave risk

The devastation of the Chagos Reef wasn’t happening in isolation.

Over the past century, sea surface temperatures have risen by an average of about 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 F) per decade as the oceans absorb the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. The temperature increase and changing ocean chemistry affects sea life of all kinds, from deteriorating the shells of oysters and tiny pteropods, an essential part of the food chain, to causing fish populations to migrate to cooler water.

Corals can become stressed when temperatures around them rise just 1 C (1.8 F) above their tolerance level. With water temperature elevated from global warming, even a minor heat wave can become devastating.

In 2015, the ocean heat from a strong El Niño event triggered the mass bleaching in the Chagos reefs and around the world. It was the third global bleaching on record, following events in 1998 and 2010.

Bleaching doesn’t just affect the corals – entire reef systems and the fish that feed, spawn and live among the coral branches suffer. One study of reefs around Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific found that about 75% of the reef fish species declined after the 1998 bleaching, and many of those species declined by more than half.

Research shows marine heat waves are now about 20 times more likely than they were just four decades ago, and they tend to be hotter and last longer. We’re at the point now that some places in the world are anticipating coral bleaching every couple of years.

That increasing frequency of heat waves is a death knell for reefs. They don’t have time to recover before they get hit again.

Where we saw signs of hope

During the Global Reef Expedition, we visited over 1,000 reefs around the world. Our mission was to conduct standardized surveys to assess the state of the reefs and map the reefs in detail so scientists could document and hopefully respond to changes in the future. With that knowledge, countries can plan more effectively to protect the reefs, important national resources, providing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in economic value while also protecting coastlines from waves and storms.

We saw damage almost everywhere, from the Bahamas to the Great Barrier Reef.

Some reefs are able to survive heat waves better than others. Cooler, stronger currents, and even storms and cloudier areas can help prevent heat building up. But the global trend is not promising. The world has already lost 30% to 50% of its reefs in the last 40 years, and scientists have warned that most of the remaining reefs could be gone within decades.

While we see some evidence that certain marine species are moving to cooler waters as the planet warms, a reef takes thousands of years to establish and grow, and it is limited by geography.

In the areas where we saw glimmers of hope, it was mostly due to good management. When a region can control other harmful human factors – such as overfishing, extensive coastal development, pollution and runoff – the reefs are healthier and better able to handle the global pressures from climate change.

Establishing large marine protected areas is one of the most effective ways I’ve seen to protect coral reefs because it limits those other harms.

The Chagos marine protected area covers 640,000 square kilometers (250,000 square miles) with only one island currently inhabited – Diego Garcia, which houses a U.S. military base. The British government, which created the marine protected area in 2010, has been under pressure to turn over control of the region to the country of Mauritius, where former Chagos residents now live and which won a challenge over it in the International Court of Justice in 2020. Whatever happens with jurisdiction, the region would benefit from maintaining a high level of protection.

A warning for other ecosystems

The Chagos reefs could potentially recover – if they are spared from more heat waves. Even a 10% recovery would make the reefs stronger for when the next bleaching occurs. But recovery of a reef is measured in decades, not years.

So far, research missions that have returned to the Chagos reefs have found only meager recovery, if any at all.

We knew the reefs weren’t doing well under the insidious march of climate change in 2011, when the global reef expedition started. But it’s nothing like the intensity of worry we have now in 2021.

Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine. Humans have collapsed other ecosystems before through overfishing, overhunting and development, but this is the first unequivocally tied to climate change. It’s a harbinger of what can happen to other ecosystems as they reach their survival thresholds.

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