A Waving Forest – by Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
Image: John Turnbull
On a glazed blue summer’s afternoon, we leave for a small marine reserve called Tinderbox. We take hairpin turns that zigzag through the hills, rising and dipping as the lane curves around the archipelago’s inlets, driving down a back road behind putalina/Oyster Cove.
Suddenly the horizon opens out into a shattered expanse of rocky shore. Shards of sunlight prickle the blue estuary. Cloud shadows graze patches of windswept trees. Dolerite columns tower above crosshatched shelves of mudstone cliffs. There is something about this island that I don’t know how to explain—its abundance of hidden pockets and frayed edges. The way you can turn a corner and all of a sudden there are no buildings or roads, not even humming powerlines.
We arrive at the beach beside the marine reserve and stretch wetsuits over our hot skin, strapping on flippers and snorkels. From the carpark, we can see the scrubby hills of Bruny Island, the industrial fish farms of Kettering and the blinking lighthouse on Iron Pot. Arms of golden green land stretch around timtumili minanya/the Derwent River, where in previous centuries, pods of whales and dolphins would raise their spouts for miles on end.
At Tinderbox, I shuffle along the pebbly shore and slip into the water after my friends, whose bodies elongate with manmade appendages, neoprene wetsuits and flippers. Beneath the water, life is more graceful. Sprawling groves of kelp shift and furl in the current, while tiny silver snook fish dart between the seaweed; a wrasse glides between the plunging curtains. I follow it, hearing my sucking breath amplified by my snorkel. The mask fogs up. I continue paddling, floating and kicking over the kelp beds. I can’t see anything except a cloud of my own shallow breathing.
Suddenly, my heart is racing—my chest feels like it will burst. The physical sensation of being underwater grips my ribcage like a vice. As spots appear in the corner of my mask, every shadow becomes a dark trench ready to swallow me.
“As spots appear in the corner of my mask, every shadow becomes a dark trench ready to swallow me.”
‘Are you okay?’ my friend asks, bobbing a few metres away from where I surface, gasping.
‘I’m alright,’ I say.
I have a complicated relationship with water. My dad dropped me into a dam when I was two years old, and I’ve had nightmares about being abandoned underwater ever since. I remember water flooding my mouth and my body falling into darkness. But when I dream of this, I feel detached—almost calm. After a few moments, a silver shadow swims down and grabs me in its arms, lingering a moment before propelling us back to the surface. In the dream I choke and splutter, watching my dad’s curls shimmer and bob with droplets of water. The world is murky with green light and there is a rusty taste in my mouth.
I don’t actually know if this incipient memory is the cause of my thalassophobia, but I suspect they might be linked. Because sometimes in the dream I don’t get to taste the air; I sink to the bottom where I sit like a pebble in the cool, dark water.
*
When I was a child, I regularly borrowed Jeannie Baker books from the library. I loved the thick shadowy collage illustrations, which always scared me a little. It was like there was too much depth, too much shadow; it sometimes felt as if the pages would engulf me in thick tresses of seaweed braiding the ocean floor, sheltering the life tucked away in sponge beds.
In The Hidden Forest, I learned that there are clans of weedy sea dragons, abalone, seals and crayfish among the giant kelp, nursed beneath its canopies; pods of grey whales, rafts of sea lions and otters take refuge there to hide from predators and storms.
Thumbing through the glossy pages, I felt trepidation as the young scuba diver explored the underwater wilderness and the kelp’s long tendrils curled and tangled around them. At swimming lessons, I was taught to raise my fist above the water to wave for help. Maybe the giant kelp was signalling to other sea creatures, showing them a haven in the open ocean. Not drowning—waving.
“Maybe the giant kelp was signalling to other sea creatures, showing them a haven in the open ocean. Not drowning—waving.”
In cold, nutrient-abundant conditions, a single strand of seaweed can grow up to forty 40 m in length, almost as long as the Tasman Bridge is high. Giant kelp, or Macrocystis pyrifera, is the largest marine plant in the world. But in recent decades, water temperatures across the globe have climbed as the oceans have absorbed heat from the atmosphere.
In the summer leading into 2016 – which would become the equal hottest year ever recorded by NASA – experts estimate around 95% of original kelp forests disappeared from the east coast of Tasmania. Cayne Layton, a researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and a vocal advocate for wild kelp forests, says, ‘If we’d lost 95% of our forest on land, there’d be public outrage, there’d be riots in the street. Unfortunately, it’s under the water and it’s somewhat out of sight, out of mind.’
While the surface of the water remains unchanged, the underwater landscape is rapidly transforming; warming ocean temperatures have ushered the East Australian Current further south, introducing a barrage of invasive predators and stripping marine ecosystems of the nutrients that abound in cold water. Over the past 60 years, the East Australian Current has extended down the eastern seaboard from Victoria to Tasmania, lengthening its oceanic conveyer belt by 350 km in the space of half a century. ‘The whole ocean has effectively shifted to the south,’ says Mick Baron, a 65-year-old grandfather, biologist and diving instructor who runs the Eaglehawk Neck Dive Centre.
Over the course of his life, Baron has watched the wild kelp forests disappear from the Tasman Peninsula: ‘25 years ago when we started the dive centre, there was kelp everywhere,’ he says. ‘You took it for granted; now, as of the summer last year [2016], we have none.’
Baron says the east coast’s last patch of forest, Munro Bight, used to be dense and impassable for seafaring vessels; like the old stories of whales obstructing the paths of ships in the Derwent. ‘You couldn’t get a boat through there before … originally there were three patches of forest in that area,’ he says. ‘It’s open space now.’ He cites the commercial operations in the area, where industrial development is compounding the challenges facing the giant kelp forests. In 2012, the Australian Government granted these forests an endangered status, meaning that any development projects that could impact on them would require assessments under federal law. But it’s cold comfort, according to Dr Neville Barrett, an IMAS scientist who spoke to a senate inquiry about the kelp die-offs in 2017. ‘There’s actually nothing we can do about it,’ says Barrett. ‘Sometimes we try to upgrade something to critical … but there’s not much point if really there’s no management response.’
In recent years 500 Tasmanian kelp plants have been transplanted along the island’s east coast. Studies aim to discover how kelp cultivates itself when grown in sparse, diminished populations that warmer waters have severely fragmented. The hardy, remaining plants that persist in warmer waters are able to help restore seaweed communities by re-anchoring the old forests, putting down new roots beneath pavers on the sea floor.
“The hardy, remaining plants that persist in warmer waters are able to help restore seaweed communities by re-anchoring the old forests, putting down new roots beneath pavers on the sea floor.”
On Twitter, I scroll through threads of photographs that Cayne Layton has posted showing seaweeds that are particularly adaptive to high temperatures—plants he calls ‘Superkelp’. They look just like any other seaweed to me, but they have unexpected capabilities. Layton says the recovery process for giant kelp forests is complex, requiring a kind of ‘parenthood’. His research on artificially constructed reefs shows that adult kelp play an active role in creating favourable conditions for juveniles to grow, as the adult specimens shelter the younger kelp by calming the water flow, dimming light levels and filtering sediment. ‘Juvenile kelp don’t do as well [otherwise], because the adult kelp really help to change that environment for the juveniles,’ Layton says. In areas without older kelp guardians, the new kelp struggle to establish themselves.
Reading this, I imagine giant kelp towering over their fledglings—wrapping their arms around tiny saplings of seaweed and shading them from the bright light above. Sheltering their young from the turbulence.
*
My younger sister, Coral—I got to choose her name—was born on 14 March 2006, a month after scorching summer temperatures bleached the Keppel Islands, tropical reef atolls in southern Queensland. My sister was born into a world where carbon dioxide molecules made up 381 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric gases. When I was born, in 1997, the level of carbon in the atmosphere was 363 ppm. It is now around 420 ppm, the highest ever recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to limit warming to a relatively safe 1.5°C and avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to lock down enough carbon dioxide to limit its atmospheric concentration to 350 ppm. A bubble of possibility. To get down to that number and avoid the worst impacts of the warming ocean we must urgently curb our fossil fuel emissions, but, crucially, we must also rapidly begin decarbonising the atmosphere. This involves sequestering billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases in living organisms. It sounds like an impossible technical challenge: to not only cease producing carbon dioxide and methane, but to draw them back into the earth. It brings images to mind of huge, carbon-sucking machines, gargantuan air vents and filtering systems. In reality, the way forward is more grounded.
Ocean systems research suggests that kelp forests and sea algae can play a pivotal role in locking down carbon. Seaweed is one of the most important strongholds holding off the worst impacts of the climate crisis; a 2016 paper published in Nature Geosciences estimates that the carbon sequestered by macroalgae alone is in the hundreds of millions of tonnes. When you include microscopic algae like phytoplankton, the contribution is much higher. Photosynthetic algae is also responsible for producing 54% of the world’s oxygen, according to UNESCO. It’s incredible to think that tiny breaths from the ocean’s smallest creatures are the reason we can breathe on land—that the heat from the sun is held back by these watery organisms.
“It’s incredible to think that tiny breaths from the ocean’s smallest creatures are the reason we can breathe on land—that the heat from the sun is held back by these watery organisms.”
According to NASA, the top 3 m of ocean holds more heat than the entire atmosphere. The ‘photic’ zone, which extends 200 m into the ocean, is where most photosynthesising algae lives. The shallow water ecosystems where kelp forests grow absorb the heat first. At the same time, they offer alternative pathways around catastrophic global warming. ‘Blue carbon’ is a term for organic CO2 captured and stored in coastal ecosystems like kelp forests, seagrass meadows and mangrove swamps. Planting seaweed forests is a practice known in the literature as Ocean Macroalgal Afforestation. It is still in its relative infancy in Australia, but its employment in the recovery of giant kelp reserves could usher in a raft of economic and environmental opportunities. On the very same east coast of Tasmania where giant kelp forests have been disappearing, the township of Triabunna hosts a 6 ha seaweed farm, the first of its kind to harvest macroalgae commercially in Australia. The company grows a native species of red seaweed called Asparagopsis; the seaweed is sold to farmers as a supplement for cattle feed, to reduce the amount of methane produced by ruminant animals by inhibiting certain bacteria in their guts.
Other climate-related values of seaweed farming are regenerative and monetary: growing kelp for the purpose of soaking up carbon and furnishing a home for marine creatures provides a way for companies to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon credits. But their real world value—outside capitalist imperatives—is deeply ecological: they fulfil the need for biodiversity, for life to lie alongside other forms of life, astonishing and alien.
“But their real world value—outside capitalist imperatives—is deeply ecological: they fulfil the need for biodiversity, for life to lie alongside other forms of life, astonishing and alien.”
*
Seeing the underside of Tinderbox through the snorkel, my breathing is punctuated by the rice-bubble sounds of snaps, crackles and pops, the vocalisations of microscopic sea creatures. I am afraid, I think, of those things I can’t see—the shadow that falls beneath my own body from the sun that arcs up over the sea, the light that pours through water in rippling columns. There is a kind of mourning in visiting a site of vanishing life, and a denial in filling absences with imagination. What’s left is everything; and yet everything that was is not what’s left. The swirling, weedy forests, the thick clouds of migrating parrots, the cacophonies of whale song.
I often connect these visions of nature with my late father. My mum tells me he once slept under a tree for a month, and swam from bay to bay along the rocky New South Wales coast, leaping from rope swings into creeks. The only physical memory I have of him is of plunging into the dam after me. These glimpses of the past are made precious by their scarcity, enhanced with a pearly sheen.
I imagine the old diving instructor telling yarns about the giant kelp and empty lobster pots, weaving sturdy narratives as if to capture the legacy of disappearing organisms and haul them into the future. It’s hard to lose your parents, and must be harder still to lose children. To stand in a place which once teemed with life and see it fall away. To fight and protest, document and lament; to witness the slow disappearance of a waving forest. ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite
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