The ocean was silent. That was the first thing I noticed when I descended onto the reef in 2015. Where there should have been the crackling of shrimp and the bustle of fish, there was only the ghostly white of bleached skeletons. It was a graveyard.
We had spent decades cataloging the decline, writing obituaries for ecosystems that had thrived for millennia. The data was irrefutable, but the action was paralyzed. I realized then that observation was no longer enough. We needed intervention. We needed to move from passive monitoring to active restoration.
