narrator: today on "earth focus," coral reefs are home to 1/4 of all fish and marine life. but now, due to rising ocean temperatures, coral reefs are in great peril. around the world, dedicated people are working together to save the corals, coming up on "earth focus." coral reefs are the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. while they cover less than 2% of the ocean floor, reefs provide livelihoods, food, and shoreline

protection, as well as being home to millions of aquatic species. but coral reefs everywhere are being destroyed by warming seas, chemical runoff, plastic waste, and destructive fishing practices. man: coral reefs are very important for fish populations and diversity. narrator: mark van thillo is the captain of the mir, a 100-foot sailing vessel built in 1910 and world headquarters of the biosphere foundation, which he created with gaie alling, an ocean scientist and his partner of 30 years. together, they have been on the leading edge of documenting the dramatic changes in the planet's coral reefs.

alling: we started an 18-year expedition around the world, and it was to look at coral reefs. we looked at 49 sites around the world, and we found that 2/3 of the coral reefs in earth were at risk and suffering, in decline. van thillo: we were in the south pacific. we were sailing past the phoenix islands, and we had just heard that "national geographic" had been there a year earlier, and they hailed it as being the most beautiful reef and most amazing place to go. so our crew said, "let's go there, check it out, and we'll take a break and we'll go diving on fantastic reefs." and as they arrived there, they found that almost the entire reef was dead. man: 2004, 2005, the middle of the ocean, the phoenix islands in the middle of the ocean, the nation of kiribati, had this extraordinary hot spot that developed over it for 6 months.

it was like some creature had a magnifying glass and just was burning a hole in the ocean in that spot, right along the equatorial pacific. corals bleached, died. my colleagues stopped counting corals, dead corals, after they got to something like 1,900 dead corals. we thought corals in the middle of the ocean were protected because the stress was coming from the land around them, and that was, like, ringing the real alarm bells. alling: there was no corals living. it had been so hot. we had looked at the noaa sea surface temperature maps, and it was clear that for 8 months, a hot spot due to climate change sat on that reef and the corals died, and it was striking. van thillo: global warming was well-known, but most people did not dare to say this was global warming, although, for us, this was a complete sign that there was global warming.

dustan: imagine you as a human being. we increase your body temperature by two degrees, you have a fever, right? we increase it by another two degrees, and you're dead. that's what's happening to the reefs. if you recover from your fever, you can go on to be a perfectly healthy person. the reef can go on to be a perfectly healthy reef if this was just a one-time stress. if it becomes a chronic stress, and every year it gets worse, slowly those corals that survived this year might not survive next year or the year after or the year after or the year after. narrator: scientists have confirmed a dramatic rise in ocean temperatures over the past two decades. every day, humans are pushing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere. this co2 is being absorbed by our earth's oceans, contributing to rising water temperatures and acidification, which are

catalyzing the sudden demise of coral reefs worldwide... from healthy to threatened to dying. the coral triangle of southeast asia is vanishing at an alarming rate, from the top 1/3 of australia's great barrier reef to here, on the northwest coast of bali, indonesia. van thillo: indonesia has quite a few problems with their coral reefs, so one of the things we are doing here at menjangan, we've been educating the locals, the tourists, everybody that is coming in touch with menjangan reef on what is a reef doing for us. reefs around the world are responsible for 25% of all the fishes in the ocean, so they are critical to the health and vitality of our oceans. man: reefs are the most wonderful expression of life in the sea. they are this incredible ecosystem that we go

visit, and it just blows us away all the time because they are this profusion of life that we just sort of instantly see. narrator: phil dustan is an ecologist and marine biologist who has been monitoring coral reefs since the mid 1970s. dustan: i had the privilege of working with jacques cousteau in the 1970s and 1980s. i worked with him as a scientist that helped make movies about coral reefs, and i worked as principal scientist on the calypso. cousteau was inspirational. he taught us that the oceans are alive. that was the biggest gift of all that he could ever give to humanity as a single human being. alling: i grew up by the sea, and i sailed as a very young girl, would go out on a small,

12-foot boat and just loved being in the middle of the ocean. narrator: after spending over a decade at sea studying whales, dolphins, and marine life of all kinds, at age 26, gaie alling was invited to take part in a unique experiment. together with her partner, 25-year-old engineer mark van thillo, and a small team of experts, gaie lived for two years inside biosphere 2, a scientific working model of the earth's biosphere. alling: biosphere 2 was a manmade, contained, closed system that was trying to re-create the global ecology of earth's systems. so this manmade world had all the living components necessary to be another biosphere. it was extremely complex, very biodiverse. nothing could go in and out of this system from our earth's biosphere except

information, so it was materially sealed off as a laboratory to study earth's ecology. van thillo: we had a million-gallon ocean with an entire coral reef that came from southern mexico, from yucatan. we started to look at the health of the corals. what we discovered--and gaie was in the ocean every day--what she discovered was that if we are healthy, our biosphere is healthy, or if our biosphere is healthy, we are healthy. it became written in our bodies, so to speak, because our little biosphere cycled so much faster. carbon cycled faster, water cycled faster, all of these things, so it became a real way of thinking about how everything connects, how the water connects everything, how the atmosphere connects everything. what was amazing was you could actually look at the health of your

biosphere by looking at the corals. biosphere foundation was founded inside biosphere 2 with the idea--if our coral is healthy, our biosphere is healthy, well, let's go take a look at the health of our corals in biosphere 1. a ship is the best analogy for a biosphere because you have a crew, you have so many people that are on the ship. you have "x" amount of water, you only have so much food that you take with you, and you have to survive. because you're not living by yourself, you're living with 10 other people day in, day out, 24/7, you know? alling: we have indonesians, we have singapore people, we have europeans, we have americans, plus all the local people from bali we work with. van thillo: we have whale recording system, all our dive

setups to dive on coral reefs. studio of the sea is on mir, which is a traveling video studio that makes educational film. and we can sail everywhere, so it's a perfect platform to study the ocean. dustan: corals, what we think of as stony corals that build reefs, are actually a symbiosis of the animal and a microalgae that lives in its tissues. the animal captures food from the ocean, like plankton, and that supplies nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients. the algae, like a plant, carries out photosynthesis and utilizes those nutrients. when the water gets too hot, the algae are producing so much oxygen because their rate of photosynthesis increases with temperature, that the oxygen they produce is sort of toxic, there's too much, so they become expelled. if the water gets hotter still, the coral turns white. it's bleached, lost its algae, and the coral may die.

so the plants see it as a place to live, and they just begin to grow there. if we don't have fish to eat them and to eat the algae, then it's like weeds overgrowing your prize vegetables in your garden. in the last 25 years, we've seen a big shift from what we think of as coral reefs to algal meadows. narrator: since 1974, phil dustan has documented the demise of the once vibrant coral reefs along the florida keys and the caribbean islands. dustan uses photography, transect measurements, a species checklist, and continuous water temperature monitoring. on bali's menjangan reef, dustan worked with coral reef scientist carol milner. milner: the biodiversity in this area of southeast asia, within the coral triangle, is the highest in the world. we started this reef in 2011 and

again in 2016 to make an objective, unbiased comparison of the reef at those times. we've used transects, so we lay a 50-meter tape measure, and every 50 centimeters, we record the substrate directly below-- whether it's live coral, whether it's dead coral; whether it's rock or sand, whether it's algae--to as much detail as we can. so for every tape measure we lay, we get a hundred points, and we can work out a percentage of coverage. we also go along one meter either side of that tape measure, so it's a 2-meter width that we look at the reef and record all the damage, all the disease, the crown of thorns, the recruits, the small babies, and any breakage of the live coral. woman: are we ready?

narrator: the biosphere foundation brings student groups from around the asian pacific region to learn about various threats to coral reefs, from coastal pollution to invasive species like the crown of thorns starfish. man: the crown of thorn is very poisonous. 1997, bali barat lose nearly 50% of coral life. and we make, like, big expedition to remove them away from coral. alling: nono is known as one of the greatest naturalists in the northwest bali region. he's trained as a lawyer, but his life's work, his care, is for the environment. suparno: and we kill more than 700,000s of crown of thorns. dustan: i went to bali in 2011 and was awestruck by the reefs i saw. this is in the very base of the coral triangle. it's sort of the mother, if you will, of coral-reef biodiversity and of

all marine biodiversity. and i've been going there annually since. and what this video depicts are the changes we saw before and after a very severe heating episode, caused in part by el nino and global warming. this is the story of what happened to the reef in one year. so this is a healthy coral. we call it the monument coral. we have a temperature probe underneath that records the temperature of the sea water every 30 minutes. so we have very good temperature records from this part of the ocean. so this coral is probably 500, maybe a thousand years old. it's like a big, giant redwood tree or a sequoia. and it's bleaching, and when it bleaches, it loses the algae in its tissue that allow it to grow faster and help its nutrition. it's sort of

like, if you went through a human, it would be like taking out a kidney. these white areas are bleached, and this brown area here is dead coral. these huge corals like this out on the far-east slope there have just died. so they bleached, and then the tissue died because it was so hot. now we see the coral being overgrown by algae. this is a beautiful area that we go to in the bali straits. these are animals. those aren't plants; those are animals in the current. they're soft corals, the big table corals, fish. this is a place with very strong currents. here it is a year later. soft corals are almost all dead, and those that are bleached are starving. they get smaller and smaller and smaller, like this

one, this huge coral. it's a soft coral. here's a healthy soft coral, and here it is a year later. they essentially die from the heat, and the skeleton just breaks up and fall down to the bottom of the sea. alling: menjangan is a sacred place in bali, and so the local people come and they pray, they make offerings, and it's a tourist destination because menjangan's probably the leading dive destination for bali. and they all use anchors, so they're all throwing them on the reef, and in the process of that, the reef is being destroyed. it's being gouged and broken and dug up. so we've tried to tackle this here with our friends, sutama and nono, to install and maintain year-round mooring buoys and

start to change the thinking of the local boat drivers about why it's important to take that mooring line, as opposed to put out an anchor. dustan: we have a big problem with plastic bags, of plastic waste, especially, in indonesia. these are mostly little wrappers that come from candy and packets, and in developing nations, they can't afford a bottle of shampoo, but a little packet for a few pennies, they can. but they're packed in mylar, and that mylar in plastic never, ever, ever goes away. suparno: so as long as people from the mainland, they are not very well-educated, and they still keep throwing trash into the river, it will end severe at menjangan and spoil the beautiful island here. dustan: everything you drop on the ground finds its way into the ocean. the ocean begins at your front door. suparno: but when it's in the water, fish can eat them. fish also can die, or if not die, maybe the bigger fish will eat

it, and then we will eat the fish. so it means, like, all the plastic will be back to us. we found a turtle, like, nearly, like, dying, and then we pick him up and we found plastic in the mouth. we really had to take it carefully, and then afterward, we release it again. low: man: my dream was always somehow how do i infuse my love of music with the ideas that the crew holds to be so important, which are--it's a love for our earth,

to--love for our planet, to love our biosphere, and to take care of it. low: i want to make a difference. i want to make a change. coming from a film background, i decided, "hey, maybe these two can come together. people are, like, watching films, movie, educate themselves." i'm like, ok, and then dolphin came up with this whole music from bob marley, and then we said, "how about we come up with a music video for kids? kids love colors, music, dance, video. i'm like, "yeah." [man singing in foreign language] low: and after we had created the dance move and we showed

them parts of the video, they're like, "oh." and then a kid asked me, um, they don't really know what is organic, what is not, being thrown in the sea. and i said, "plastic is not organic. you can't throw it." and then they said, "what about a blue plastic bag? what about a red plastic bag?" and then to see, ok, they're trying to understand it, but they still don't really get it. and then, when we showed them the video, then, hey, the fact that a plastic bag-- whatever color it is, whatever shape, whatever pattern it is-- it still cannot be degraded. and then they finally get it, like, "oh, that's why we shouldn't throw the plastic in the ocean." van thillo: it's their way into the environment. why don't we throw plastic in the ocean? and then, once you start following that thread in a carpet, you

be--come to all the fish and to the coral reefs and to the ocean, which also supplies us this clean air, oxygen, that we're breathing. narrator: while global warming is the major threat to corals today, local action can help strengthen damaged reefs by reducing the human impacts from pollution, agricultural runoff, and fishing practices. another regional problem in the coral triangle is fishermen who use dynamite or pour large amounts of cyanide on the reef to stun and then collect valuable fish like the grouper. dustan: what the biosphere foundation has done in bali is to mobilize the locals, mobilize the people that live there and make their living off the sea, that understand the sea as a source of sustenance for themselves. sutama: don't touch anything again. dustan: when reefs begin to collapse, the people that rely

on those reefs get in their boats and they paddle off someplace else. they don't have anyplace else to turn except to other places that have coral reefs. alling: sutama is a former cyanide fisherman, so he understands the pressure that local fishermen are under. it's hard to make money on fish anymore. there's just not that many, and so resorting to cyanide fishing is a quick catch, so he understands that. and he also understands how bad that is for the reef, how devastating that is for the fish populations, so he's the perfect person to go and speak to the fishermen and explain to them why they've got to let up. [sutama speaking native language] alling: as the fish populations decline, there's less and less big fish. so if you take all the big ones, you've got no more babies coming in. and then, if you start taking the little ones, even the little few babies

you have that have made these little fish, they can't even get to make more fish. dustan: corals make the frame of the reef. the other animals live in and on that. they're like the trees in a forest; the fish live in the corals much like the birds live in the trees. the corals have specialized fish that live with them, and together they form the community of the coral reef. so we have a co-evolved community that's been doing this for 200 million years. it's like if you go into a small community in new england that's been around for maybe 200 years, everybody's very close-knit. there are all these people that have their little jobs, and they all fit together to make the community work well.

so imagine one day when we go into that new england community and we kill the gardeners, and the weeds begin to grow. and then we sort of randomly kidnap people, take away a couple lawyers who take away a couple doctors, we take a few mothers, we take the garbage collector. oh, all of a sudden, the garbage doesn't get collected. pretty soon, that community just falls apart. milner: it's this diversity that's key, that's keeping the reef alive, the reef as a whole, living ecosystem. alling: if we can't help reefs to maintain their diversity and complexity and richness of life, they will have enough information there, genetics there, know-how how to survive, that they will come back. van thillo: it's not just the reefs in indonesia. it's the reefs in the united states, it's the reefs all around the world, and they all are connected.

dustan: we need to focus every bit of energy we have on these issues and realize that the game is for keeps. extinction is forever. alling: we're all part of this biosphere, and it's all ours to care for. van thillo: planet earth is an amazing place, and we just need to wake up and take care of what we have. low: less words, but more action. yeah. [kids cheering] dustan: the easiest, quickest thing we could do right now is to become much more efficient; more efficient cars, buildings, light bulbs--more efficient everything to save energy. we could reduce a lot of the stress pretty much painlessly and drive a whole new kind of economy and get off carbon. that's really critical.

10/30/23 10/30/23 [captioning made possible by democracy now!] amy: from new york, this is democracy now! >> i wish god will have mercy on us and they were stops. you suffered a lot. we cannot bear what is happening to us. we cannot handle anymore. amy: the death toll in gaza has topped 8300 as israel intensifies its ground and aerial attack on the besieged territory.