Heading South: The Faces of our Changing Oceans by Jessica Cockerill 2017

Thank you to the Tasmanian Writers Centre and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies for providing me with the opportunity to write this piece.

I am also very grateful to Gretta Pecl, Scott Ling, Curtis Champion, Emma Lee and Mick Barron for sharing their stories with me; Kelly and Aaron for giving me a home and a car in Hobart; my parents, who have always supported me in my writing; my volunteer proofreaders; and Barbara, who urged me to take this on in the first place.

The serendipitous ... EDEN

All things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.1 John Steinbeck

Thoughts of the giant kelp forests once kept me cool through hot school afternoons: fantasties of great towering marine metropolises, where each languid frond harbours a multitude of fish, invertebrates, plankton and algaes. I’d heard they grew in the Pacific Ocean off Monterey, California, far from my Western Australian classroom. When my year eleven biology teacher described the kelp it was with diagrams and textbook terminology. We learnt their trophic cascades, food webs, predator- prey relationships. They were the domain of Steinbeck’s mythic scientist Ed Ricketts, the existential unknown of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, a model Darwinian paradise. I wanted so much to see them for myself. But I had no idea that my underwater eden could be found closer to home.

Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) once flourished in the cool waters of our southernmost state in Australia. Tasmania, better-known for its dramatic onshore vistas, is one of the few locations worldwide where Macrocystis can grow, along with New Zealand, both American continents, and South Africa. It’s easy to overlook our planet’s submarine cities - excepting, perhaps, conservation superstar the Great Barrier - but they too are experiencing the brunt of global warming and climate change, Macrocystis included. This isn’t just a philanthropic problem. The Tasmanian kelp forests are nurseries for shellfish, including abalone and rock lobster: the two major wild fisheries among the state’s $168 million annual seafood export.2 Ocean mean so much to so many, both culturally and economically, and their transformation will be felt deeply in both our hearts and our stomachs.

Climate change in the Anthropocene is not as simple as species death. To put it plainly, the planet’s climate bands - long-term weather patterns that prevail at particular latitudes - are creeping gradually towards the north and south poles. In some cases, species are able to pursue their preferred climate, either by physically moving, casting their offspring into uncharted territory, or adapting rapidly in-situ. For others, the rate of change will be too quick to keep up. When foundational or habitat-forming species are subjected to range shifts, the effects pervade throughout the communities they support.3 Macrocystis is home to a myriad of organisms, each with different degrees of ability to follow their preferred climate or adapt to a new one.

1 John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Viking Press, 1951. 2 International Merchandise Exports (2017), Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmanian Government, 2017. ABS Cat No 5368. 3 Gretta Pecl et al., ‘Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human wellbeing’, Science, vol. 355, 2017 The giant kelp forests are fragile. They can only grow to depths of thirty metres. They require cool waters with high nutrient levels, and a rocky seafloor for their gnarled holdfasts to cling to. In a southward migration, Tasmania really is the last post for Macrocystis. With no appropriate substrate further below, Tasmania’s giant kelp forests are, quite literally, falling off the face of the earth.

We’ve dealt with major environmental change throughout human history, though climatologists emphasise that nothing quite compares to that of our present epoch. While scientists remain undecided on the basis for a supposedly global flooding event, the Christian allegory of Noah’s Ark offers an interesting model for responses to environmental change, and serves as a reminder that weather, climate, and especially oceans have always been fickle.4 The story also reminds us of mankind’s inherent connection to and responsibility for our fellow species, and this ethical conclusion is echoed in world literature throughout history. In the 21st century, we sit in the midst of a very real, very rapid sea change. In the metaphysical ark of the Anthropocene, the mass migration of species is, at this late stage, unavoidable. But how we - the unusual, communal, electricity-powered Homo sapiens - choose to respond is what will determine the outcome for both our non-human neighbours and our own communities.

4 Genesis, 7:1-24, 8:1-22. King James Version. THRESHOLD

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you5 Crowded House

Gretta Pecl [pictured above] has spent much of her life diving off the east coast of Tasmania. As a marine biologist, her particular fascination was with the movements and migrations of undersea species. Her first focus were squid species, then fish. The ocean’s inhabitants move vertically to access or escape light. They can traverse great distances using currents and to find food or family. They might chase after bursts of nutrients, or seek out pockets of ideal in the vast cold matrix of the sea. Others spend their entire existence fixed to a rocky shelf, with only a shell to protect them against the perilous extremes of the intertidal zone.

5 Crowded House, Weather With You, in Woodface, Capitol, 1992. Gretta was working on squid at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) in Hobart when she began hearing strange anecdotes from fishermen across the state. They reported New South Wales fish species turning up in Tasmanian catches. Conversely, the world-renowned giant kelp forests were vanishing, with the purplish long-spined sea urchins (Centrostephanus rodgersii) appearing as guards of the kelp’s eerie gravesite. When Gretta spoke to international scientists about these changes, it became apparent Tasmania was not an isolated case. Alaskan moose were following a growing shrubland northwards as permafreeze melted. The mangroves of Florida were spreading into salt marshes, where they were previously excluded by a seasonal freeze. Tropical fish in South Africa were turning up further and further south, to follow the warmer waters. In Madagascar, thirty different species of reptiles and amphibians had moved forty metres up their mountain to escape the rising heat.6 Clearly, Tasmania’s changing waters weren’t an isolated case.

“I started to get more interested in how reflective the patterns that we were seeing were occurring in other parts of the world,” Gretta told me over coffee. “There is no part of how we operate as a planet that won’t be affected in some way.” But despite the prevalence of climate-driven species migration, study in this area had been loosely scattered across traditionally siloed research fields: , terrestrial ecology, environmental law, social sciences. Gretta saw a need for researchers from all corners of the globe to share what they knew about this phenomenon. And where better than Hobart, the world’s southernmost state capital, and locus of that southernmost site of Macrocystis?

The first ever Species On The Move (SOTM) conference began on February 9, 2016. A public lecture at the waterfront Grand Chancellor Hotel fell on a warm Tuesday evening by Hobart’s standards, the sky shrouded with the haze of recent bushfires. Gretta had teed up five short presentations from leading SOTM researchers - Will Steffen from the Climate Council; Camille Parmesan from the University of Texas; Stephen Williams from James Cook University; Tero Mustonen, a Sami man and representative of Snowchange Cooperative; and of course, Gretta herself - so the public could begin to understand the magnitude of this phenomenon.

The mood at this conference was surprisingly upbeat given the somewhat apocalyptic subject matter. Speakers told analogous narratives of cultural loss and environmental disaster to a diverse and varied audience of over 400 members of the public. Gretta said they were just glad so many people had made the effort to show up. “It was incredibly reassuring to see that many people interested, because ultimately that’s what will turn the situation around,” she said. “I think it’s very easy for people that aren’t connected to nature or maybe don’t have a scientific background, not to realise that even at a local scale, like your backyard, the global climate shapes what our planet looks like. That was the point of our public forum, we were trying to get people to make connections between what they see and how everything’s changing... that it’s part of that bigger global pattern.”

6 Gretta Pecl et al., ‘Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human wellbeing’, Science, vol. 355, 2017

At the end of the four day conference, forty-one researchers from all corners of the earth pitched in to write Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human wellbeing, a review published in Science magazine. The paper points out that the rate of climate change in the twenty-first century exceeds that of the last 65 million years, with unprecedented climate and species shifts globally.7 Despite the upbeat tone of the SOTM conference, Gretta and the other forty experts who wrote the paper showed deep concern. While species have always changed and adapted to new conditions in the past, this time around we’re not giving them any time. “The planet has been hotter, but it’s never changed this fast,” Gretta said. “There’s never been a point in the past where the world looked like how it will in the future… there’s been nothing like it in terms of the combination of , acidity, and other conditions… We’re going into a no-analogue future.”

7 Gretta Pecl et al.., ‘Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human wellbeing’, Science, vol. 355, 2017 EXILE

He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides.8 Yukio Mishima

IMAS marine biologist Scott Ling [pictured above] grew up in Hobart and spent summer holidays at Bicheno with his family. While there’s no doubt Scott’s a man of science, his knowledge of the local ocean surpasses surveys and stats. “As a kid I used to be a very keen angler… at twelve I’d stake out at the jetty and catch as many [fish] as I could,” Scott said. “I was just seeing what’s there, poking them and throwing them back… I was just mad keen on fish.” Scott’s boyhood fascination is not uncommon in Tassie, where recreational and

8 Yukio Mishima, The Sound of Waves, Vintage, 1954. diving have long been a part of the island’s cultural identity, in spite of - and perhaps obstinately because of - the wild weather and harsh coastlines.

While Scott’s observations of Tasmania’s giant kelp go back thirty years, his formal research dates back to 2001, when he began to study Centrostephanus rodgersii, the long-spined sea urchin. Quite like land herbivores, whose eating habits tend to form open ranges and grasslands, the urchins’ voracious appetite for kelp leads to the formation of urchin barrens, ghostly patches either thinned or entirely cleared of kelp. These spiny herbivores typically live in waters up to thirty-five metres deep: kelp territory. But their barrens, with an eerie desert-like aspect, are in stark contrast to the lush forests of Macrocystis and other temperate reef kelps.

In the waters of New South Wales, where urchins have been ‘native’ for as long as Western scientists have been paying attention, the barrens take up about half of the reef, with the rest a thriving kelp forest.9 According to Scott, a serendipitous temperate reef would be full of large predators like big reef fish and crustaceans, thick kelp beds, and some large urchins grazing peacefully in their small, isolated barrens. In this scenario, two factors stop the urchins from overpopulating the kelp forest: large predators, and cold winters. Before 1978, urchins were never sighted in Tasmanian waters, but since then there have been some major changes.10 For one, the very large crayfish and other predators that would feast on the urchins during the early stages of their life cycle have fallen prey to Tasmania’s booming seafood industry, with only smaller crays left behind.

But those predators wouldn’t be so important if the urchin larvae hadn’t reached Tasmania in the first place. Scott’s research into temperature shifts found the urchins’ larvae - which drift around through several stages of metamorphosis before maturing and settling onto the seafloor - cannot develop in waters below twelve degrees celsius. While water temperatures around Tasmania have typically fallen below the urchin’s twelve degree minimum, climate change has brought southward shift in the Eastern Australian , meaning those cold winter waters essential for killing off urchin larvae before they reach Tasmania are no longer guaranteed.

“Since about the mid-1980s, when these urchins started to turn up, we’ve moved into a much warmer winter regime,” Scott said. “The physical data is showing that the coast of Tassie is now warming towards [the urchin’s] optimal range, and it hasn’t even reached that yet, it’s a fair way off it.” He said that means Tasmanians can expect far more urchins to come, and with the spiny shellfish’s insatiable appetite for kelp, that’s bad news for Macrocystis and every other species associated with it. “In terms of drastic changes to the reef, the barren formation here is just as dramatic as the coral bleaching of the Great Barrier,” he said.

9 Kylie Andres, Sea urchin invaders, abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/31/3811486.html, 2013, (accessed October 23). 10 Kylie Andrews, (ibid).

Interviewer: Why did you have to go and eat everything? Urchin: What else was I supposed to do?

Conversely, some new species arriving are far more desirable that Centrostephanus. In 2016 an article in Hobart’s local paper The Mercury announced ‘Warmer waters makes Tassie a hotspot for new fishy friends,’ reporting on record catches of New South Wales table fish species including snapper, yellowtail kingfish and broadbill swordfish that summer.11

Curtis Champion [pictured above] is a young, blond and beaming marine biologist who grew up in a mid- northern NSW town called Foster, where he regularly surfed and swam alongside these fish species in what’s considered their normal range. But Curtis’s career as a marine biologist drew him to study in Hobart too, aptly following his chosen focus species - the yellowtail kingfish, Seriola lalandi - on its poleward migration. Records of kingfish sightings in Tasmania only date back around ten years. However, using data from 1996-2017, Curtis has found that the kingfish’s suitable habitat has shifted poleward by about 200 kilometres, a phenomenon he puts down to human-induced climate change. Assuming the fish will follow their favoured habitat (an assumption substantiated by evidence from

11 Mather, A., Warmer waters makes Tassie a hotspot for new fishy friends, themercury.com.au/lifestyle/warmer-waters-makes-tassie-a-hotspot-for-new-fishy-friends/news- story/b8e42dbad2c1231e273782e6f75eeac5, 2016, (accessed October 30). Gretta’s fishermen friends), he figures the species have migrated down Australia’s east coast by about 105 kilometres each decade.

“We’ve got a new kid on the block, and it’s a highly welcomed newcomer because it’s tasty and delicious,” Curtis said. “There’s already a small but rapidly growing recreational fishery growing in Tasmania.” Whether it’s really such good news or not depends on who you ask. “From an ecological perspective, we’re still unsure whether the shifting of a lot of marine fishes directly into Tasmania is having a negative effect,” he said. Varying rates of range shifts mean some species are coming in contact with neighbours they’ve never met before, and there’s really no way of knowing how they will go living together until it’s already happened. Mark Reynolds from the Nature Conservancy in California touched on this point in his keynote at the Species On The Move conference:

“It is a relatively young field. We don’t know an awful lot about the effects of climate on species interaction… migratory species challenge us to develop new strategies, new approaches, that are as dynamic as the patterns of their movement.”12

Curtis said further up along the east coast, there’d been problems with tropical surgeonfishes and rabbitfishes coming down the coast, eating habitat-forming macroalgae on temperate rocky reefs around Sydney. But to his knowledge, he said, there hasn’t been any evidence of negative ecological effects from range-shifting fishes in Tasmania.

Such a range shift raises the question of whether a fishery is being lost at the tail-end of the species’ range - for instance, in towns like Foster - but according to Curtis, that also varies from species to species depending on their suitable habitat and ability to cope with change. In the case of kingfish, it’s looking more like a range expansion, with the population persisting at the northern end, while also spreading further south. Other organisms may lose habitat at the equatorial edge, with little expansion poleward. But when it comes to who will survive under these new conditions, we really are headed into unknown territory, with resource supplies thrown into precarity in communities worldwide.

12 Reynolds, M., 'Dynamic conservation and multiple objectives: delivering cost-effective habitat for migratory birds in agricultural landscapes', Species on the Move Conference (2016), Hobart, 2016, speciesonthemove.com/videos HAUNTING I (Hunger)

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.13 Werner Herzog

Tasmania has long held a gothic, rugged, adventurous appeal for international visitors, but it is only in recent years that the economy has begun to reap rewards. In the 2017 budget was identified as a major contributor to Tasmania’s economy with visitor spending up eight percent in the past five years.14 The Eaglehawk Dive Centre benefits from these travellers’ curiosity. Owner and dive instructor Mick Barron [pictured above] is an archetypal stoic. Bearded, gruff, and fatherly, he runs his business

13 Werner Herzog, original source unknown. 14 Tasmanian Economy: Economic Outlook in Budget Paper No. 1 (2017-18), Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmanian Government, 2017. out of a simple shed at the back of a sloping, forested property, overlooking the magnificently steep scarp of Pirate’s Bay. The shed is utilitarian, with tanks and hung neatly, but a small door leads us through to a wood-panelled room lined with bookshelves on marine species, maps and charts, biological illustrations. It’s an office suited to a Steinbeck or Verne character, with a dramatic view of the cliffs that face us, crowned that morning with a thick cloud bank.

Mick set up the business in 1991 to offer tourists a chance to see one of the world’s very few giant kelp forests, much to the chagrin of local fishermen (tourism tows in its wake the libertarian hunter’s worst fear: environmentalism). Mick said most of his clients were seeking an escape from their urban lives in busting, smog-ridden cities like Beijing and Hong Kong. “I’ll ask them the question: of all the places in the world, why do you come to Tasmania?” he said. “And they go, nature. Nature. That’s what it’s for. They’re looking for places that have not been changed.”

Mick finds it hard to fathom inner-city life. He said an impulse for adventure in wide spaces and rough oceans was in the psyche of young Tasmanian men. “As a kid, up in Penguin, which is where I come from, I would’ve been about twelve years old swimming around in the summertime and trying to get stuff… the only reason you’d learn to dive is to take stuff: abalone, crays,” he said. “Because we lived right up on the waterfront I just became mad keen on the water. So then I got a scuba certificate up there when I was seventeen or something... I’d come down here every weekend, with some mates or two, we’d be out in the water, somewhere, wherever we could, we’d just go somewhere.”

By the time they’d all moved to Hobart for studies or work, their attitudes about hunting shifted. One of his mates got hold of an underwater camera, which was an expensive and rare toy at the time. “Your whole perspective changes, because you’re looking for different stuff,” Mick said. He rarely takes anything from the sea these days. Instead, Mick and his friends’ features on coastal signage right through the Tasman National Park, giving terrestrial visitors a glimpse at the seals, sea dragons, handfish, crays and kelp that make a home beneath the hellish surf. Sadly, even these recent photos are quickly outdated, becoming memorials to an ecosystem that’s no longer there.

Kelp forests are known to die out in extreme weather events - storms, for instance, or the marine heatwave that hit the Great Southern Reef in 2016 - and as one of the world’s fastest growing species Macrocystis is incredibly good at coming back.15 Mick’s seen these fluctuations time and again. But with the urchins proliferating without predators, the kelp’s shown no sign of returning. As of 2017, only five percent of the original Tasmanian forests remain.16

15 Rita O’Clair and Sandra Lindstrom, 'E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Plants of British Columbia', North Pacific Seaweeds: Macrocystis pyrifera, linnet.geog.ubc.ca/Atlas/Atlas.aspx?sciname=Macrocystis%20pyrifera, 2000, (accessed November 13). 16 Craig Johnson et al., 'Knowing when (not) to attempt ecological restoration', Restoration Ecology, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, pp. 140-147. “It’s a total disaster, the fact that it’s gone… we lose a percentage of business. People call and say I’d like to dive with the kelp, and I go sorry mate, there’s none here,” Mick said. “When we started, all those years ago, there was forest everywhere, all the way up the coast… Fortescue Bay was chockers with it, you couldn’t even drive a boat through it.”

A giant kelp forest that dense protects itself: Mick noted that if you can’t drive a boat through it, you can’t put in nets or pots, or use hookah gear to fish. Aside from hunting with scuba, the forests were their own natural nurseries, harbouring crayfish in their infant stages, and giving shelter to abalone ‘like dinner plates’. But now they’re gone, it’s all fair game for desperate fishing businesses who are feeling the brunt of a fishery decline which, according to our urchin expert Scott, will only get worse as the urchin barrens spread.

It wouldn’t be the first time urchins have devastated a fishery. For the giant kelp forests in California, sea otters were hunted near to extinction and gave urchins a head-start on their kelp invasion. But by bringing the otters back through conservation efforts and breeding programs in the 1990’s, the urchins were munched down to a level that permitted a triumphant kelp return.

On the east coast of the United States, there were no otters, but like Tasmania, the fishing economy thrived on Macrocystis-dwelling lobster and reef fish. “Urchins took off, but then they developed fisheries, and the humans came and actually overfished the urchins,” Scott said. It’s easy to jump at this to the urchin barrens. It sounds so simple: turn the unwanted invader into a cash cow. A-grade sea urchin goes for up to $600 per kilo. However, IMAS research into sea urchin harvesting is yet to yield successful results. Urchins that live in barrens become spindly, thin, and inedible. Urchins are only considered A-grade when they live off healthy kelp, so although there’s some potential to harvest urchins that are on their way into remnant forests, at present, simply eating our way out of the barren problem doesn’t seem viable. “Nobody wants these urchin barrens,” said Scott. “They’re no good for abalone, they’re no good for crays, they’re no good for anyone.”

“A lot of the tourism is people coming to Tassie to experience those wild fisheries,” he said. “But the main reef fisheries, abalone and lobster, they export them because they’re worth so much money.” Scott said Tasmania harvests about twenty-five percent of the world’s abalone, and of that catch, seventy-five percent of it comes from one small patch of ocean near Hobart. “The urchins have started to turn up in that area, we found a couple there recently” Scott said, adding this quiet was one of the major reasons for his research funding. For Mick, his business will only stay afloat so long as he can offer dives with seals and sea dragons, but these have always been secondary to the draw of the kelp. “In the past, the priorities were: kelp forest; seals; and the weedy dragons. You’ve got to have an attraction, and that’s what we’ve got left,” he said. He doesn’t bother driving into the formerly thriving Fortescue Bay any more. There’s nothing left to see but urchins.

HAUNTING II (Country)

It is an interested biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exist in the ocean... We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea… we are going back to whence we came.17 John F. Kennedy

While Westerners might see the ocean as the terrain of adventurous - and sometimes reckless - boys, for the Aboriginal community in Tasmania the sea is women’s business.

Emma Lee [pictured above] is a warm and buoyant trawlwulwuy woman from tebrakunna country, in north-eastern Tasmania. She is also an expert on indigenous rights and land management working at the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Marine Socioecology. She talks like Maya Angelou: confesses her ‘ of personality’ is a deliberate strategy, to give indigenous issues a sense of immediacy. It’s

17 John F Kennedy, in address to America's Cup Crews, 1962. effective. It certainly worked on me. And yet, when I asked her how she felt about the loss of the giant kelp forests, her effervescence went flat; a storm rolled across her face. She ran her fingers lightly up and down her arms, tracing the veins, trying to think of a way to express her feelings without betraying women’s business to a whitefella like me. “I see those kelp forests like the arteries and veins in our bodies, our women’s bodies, and when those forests are gone, I know I’m going to feel that loss, within my own body… I fear for our, what we call, cultural keystone species” she said.

We met on-site, overlooking the sparkling vista of Opossum Bay. Before us she’d laid out the Marineer shell necklaces unique to Tasmanian Aboriginals, famous for their stunning blue-green iridescence. Below us, 6000 years’ worth of shell debris from Aboriginal meals were layered to form what is known in archaeologists as a living midden, ‘living’ not only because they change over time from winds, erosion, and new additions, but because they are used by Aboriginal people as pathways and markers, places to gather and remember, and are a living reminder of their identity and place in country. They also offer a detailed ecological record of what lies below the waterline. “In Tassie there’s anything up to about two dozen types of [shellfish] species, which when you think about what we eat as shellfish today, what are we eating, four to five species?” Emma said. “The majority of them of course are the larger species like abalone, crayfish, but also werriners, cat’s eyes, mussels, oysters, periwinkle, any big rocky platform species. There wasn’t too much we didn’t actually have a go at.”

While the middens can tell us much about both the culture of Aboriginal Tasmanians and the ecosystems they steward, Emma also sees their potential as indicators of climate change. Living middens, she pointed out, are not created to be underwater. “We actually have this amazing marker of climate change and sea level rise,” she said. “Two years ago I was down in the southwest, and middens that had been recorded there twenty years ago are completely gone. Not a sign, not a mark of them. They’ve been washed away.” Science has been slow to pick up on just how much information these middens store: very little study has been done on their cultural value, let alone ecological. “All across Australia we’ve got these heritage registers of middens, and they’re all going… When we’re talking about coastal, saltwater ones, we’ve got an in-built monitoring mechanism,” Emma said. She is worried that just at the point in time where scientists might recognise that a midden could be an invaluable marker of climate and species range shifts, they’ll be washed away by rising tides. “And when part of my identity is connected to these middens, and they’re gone, how does that affect my identity as an indigenous person?”

The jewel-bright Marineer necklaces, too, are icons of the Tasmanian Aboriginal identity. Collected and strung by Aboriginal women over many years, each shell on a necklace must be almost the same size, with the shells harvested live. “Men and women wore them, but they are representative of womens’ governance, because they are of the sea,” Emma said. “These necklaces actually embody our sense of gender roles.”

The Marineer shells come off the kelp; so too do the midden species. Emma perceives that in a future of climate change and species on the move, Tasmanian Aboriginals will lose out twofold. Not only will they lose the kelp forests they are so closely tied to: their scope for cultural adoption of new species and new ecosystems will be limited. “We’re gonna come up against this thing of authenticity, because we won’t be allowed to adapt to new species, because that won’t be seen as being ‘black’ enough,” Emma said. “Adaptation is not seen as a cultural characteristic in the broad scope of popular opinion, and yet I know adaptation to be the number one characteristic of indigenous peoples. “Some of these New South Wales species with the range shifts might actually be OK for us. There’s part of me that’s a bit excited because I know snapper is coming into Tasmanian water, and I love eating snapper… but that’d be held against me because it’s not authentic, it’s not the restoration game, the snapshot on the map is that I have to exist as something from 200 years ago.” Emma jokes that maybe they’ll have to start stringing urchin necklaces, but beneath her laughter we both know it’s a cold comfort. Both kinds of shells - Marineer and midden - make up an integral part of Aboriginal life in Tasmania, and have been crucial to the deep cultural recovery of these peoples who were subjected to the very worst of Western colonial impacts. These traces of culture are what they have left, and it’s no small inheritance.

“I see those kelp forests like the arteries and veins in our bodies, our women’s bodies, and when those forests are gone, I know I’m going to feel that loss, within my own body” Emma Lee

ROUSE

Whatever has the nature of arising has the nature of ceasing.18 Gautama Buddha

Poleward-shifting species pose a tricky conservation question. Take, for instance, the concept of an invasive species: a weed, a plant in the wrong place. This weed might have come from a place further north, and now it turns up on the shores of a foreign continent. Traditional conservation practice would lean towards removing the weed, lest it compete with native species and begin to cause environmental

18 Kimsuka Sutta: The 'What's It' Tree (Ki.msuka) (SN 35.204), Maurice O'Connell Walshe (trans), Buddhist Publication Society, 1985. degradation. However, with species on the move, ‘native’ organisms themselves may no longer be suited to the landscapes they evolved in.

Humans are the only species aware of our own boundaries: marine conservation areas, national parks and state borders. These invisible lines we meticulously guard mean little when the climate itself can escape through them like a runaway ghost, enticing the species that have come to depend on it to follow its poleward path. Trying to restore a specific section of land to its supposedly ‘pristine’ state, a conservation attitude borne out of the American national park tradition, becomes a sisyphean task under these conditions.

Gretta believes this will be a large part of ‘species on the move’ as an emerging field in science. “Putting a box around something and trying to keep it the same is not going to work, because you’ll have things moving in and out of the box,” she said. “So do you want to protect the box? Or do you want to move the box, to protect the things inside it?”

As an indigenous person, Emma said she struggles to accommodate the old-school ‘fences and fines’ conservation approach, particularly where it conflates restoration with beauty and authenticity. “To me this idea of beauty, it hamstrings us from realising the value of a species,” she said. “Home can be beautiful, but it’s not the purpose of it,” she said. “I can’t fault country for coping, and I regret and I rue the fact that native species are being lost, but for being lost, does that mean we shut the door for others? “I think traditional knowledges are about managing change… I think the speed of it is something that indigenous local peoples are grappling with, but we haven’t said it’s beyond us. We’ve all been through it. There’s not an indigenous mob on the face of this earth that hasn’t gone through massive climate change.”

Range shifts bring uncertainty to the very definition of endemism. Does a species retain its native status through measures of climate, or latitude? Nationality or suitability? Should we continue to religiously remove invasive species ‘in the wrong place’, even if they’re climate migrants? Or should we in fact be assisting their migration polewards, helping them keep up with their suited climate band?

Scott believes the latter, a ‘novel ecosystem’ approach, is often a simpler - and cheaper - excuse not to do conservation work. “They can say, everything is going to be different in the future, let’s just deal with it and adapt rather than conserve,” he said. “But it’s very hard to get back to what you had, and with these sea urchin barrens, once the system collapses it’s a very long road to recovery and there’s not a lot of political will to do that.”

Curtis on the other hand pointed out that a combination of adaptation and conservation may be our only option. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even if carbon emissions had stopped in the year 2000, the Earth’s average temperature would still rise another 0.6 degrees celsius in the next century.19 At the end of 2017, he said, we are already committed to some level of mass marine migration. As this plays out the character of our oceans will be changed drastically. “Ultimately, we need political will that engages people from all corners of the globe and basically contributes to less greenhouse gas pollution,” Curtis said. “But in the meantime, we could build seasonal forecasts for species shifts and try to develop adaptation strategies around those forecasts.”

To demonstrate his point, he described how the nesting of albatross on an three remote Bass Strait islands were disrupted due to climate change. Scientists set out to build artificial clay nests for the albatross, with improved breeding success as the result. I asked whether he thought these kinds of were sustainable. Surely we can’t afford to artificially assist every species that might be challenged by climate change? “I think it’s time to stop sitting around thinking nature’s nature, and it’s a natural system,” he said. It was the first time I’d seen ripples break across his laidback, surfy smile. “We’ve pumped out billions and billions of tonnes into the atmosphere. The precedent has been set for environmental modification. So I don’t see taking steps to help species, even small ones, as an unsustainable approach.”

19 Susan Solomon et al., 10.7.1 Climate Change Commitment to Year 2300 Based on AOGCMs, in Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007, edited, Cambridge (UK), New York (USA), Cambridge University Press, 2007.

But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.20 Rachel Carson

I asked Gretta if she thought we should be assisting species in their migration polewards. Assisted migration is controversial in a world where exotic species are considered inherently malicious. To be fair, Australia, now choked up with cane toads, foxes, rabbits, and the marine stowaways of ballast- water, has had a particularly bad run. So it’s no surprise Gretta was hesitant to give a definite answer. “It’s a really tricky one, because it ties into everybody’s values, and all these people that could or should be having a say in that will have different values,” she said carefully. “Some will want to keep things the same. Others will value the natural system more that the resources than we can get from it. Other people might say hang on a minute, providing people with food is the most important thing. “I think there’s going to need to be big discussions on ethics and values, and what do we want out of our marine systems, and who gets to decide that? On what basis do we decide that?”

20 Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, Oxford (UK), Oxford, 1951.

Gretta paints a striking picture of our future oceans. While the ecological gaps left by climate change may not be left entirely vacant, our oceans are likely to look very different from the diverse systems we’re used to. She expects we’ll have an ocean full of animals that are opportunistic, in terms of their life history; animals that grow fast, reproduce quick, and can take advantage of different environmental changes. “Squid are suggested to be a group that will do well, and that’s because they will eat anything, they’ll grow really fast, they’ll even eat each other if they’ll need to,” she said. “Jellyfish, they’re another one that lots of people suggest will do well.” In temperate zones like Tasmania, she hopes the influx of more tropical species will at least be sufficient in replacing lost fisheries and supporting the people who live there. But those same species are likely to be displaced from their equatorial homes, with nothing to fill the gaps they leave behind. “I don’t think we’ll have coral reefs any more, or they’ll be very small and patchy, remnant. And we won’t have lots of big areas of healthy reefs, which will potentially be very negative for people who rely on those fisheries,” she said. “Food security’s going to be really important, and we need to still try and be using what we can, but what’s sustainable and what isn’t might change in terms of conservation.”

REPRIEVE For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea 21 e.e. cummings

The ocean’s currents run deep and strong in the hearts of Tasmanians. Over the next century they will feel the ripples of this mass marine migration radiate through their work, their leisure, their identities. Living midden sites will be washed away. The precious Marineer’s shells will be harder to find. Divers may no longer explore the thriving Macrocystis forests, and instead float gloomily across barrens in the hope of sighting the very last seadragon. Children on the jetties will pull species from the water their parents never remember catching. The fishing industry may need to develop new markets for urchins, snapper and kingfish, while tourists who arrive for wild abalone and crayfish watch prices soar. While the loss of some species seems inevitable at this point, Tasmanians’ close bond with the natural world also gives them a lot of potential as champions for change.

Gretta admits scientists find it hard to speak bluntly when their findings are as unpopular as climate change. She pointed me to glaciologist Jason Box, who became something of a pop science celebrity when his frank tweet - “We’re fucked” - went viral. Esquire magazine’s interview with Jason was titled When Predicting the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job.22 Gretta resonated, laughing at the irony of the regular greenhouse-heavy flight schedule her work demands. It’s something she still struggles to justify. But Gretta holds a conviction that the world has the capacity to change. As a mother of two who spends each day confronting a potentially grim future, she has to have some optimism. “I guess the parallels that I try and think of are World War One and Two,” she said. “The whole way that society operated changed very quickly. I know it’s a different situation, but we know society, and countries, can change very quickly if they need to.” Tasmania gives us a glimpse into the future of landscapes changed by species range shifts, but these peoples are not alone in their experience. However species migration manifests regionally, the ecological trauma of such a rapid change will be felt from the microbial plankton level right up to the distracted and complicated multicellular bodies of politicians in parliament.

“I don’t want us to arrive at a situation where there is pretty massive sudden disruption, but if we do, I think that there’s some hope,” she said. For her, this requires cooperation from all sectors of society, with the incentive that it’s in all our best interests to manage and mitigate species shifts.

21 E. E. Cummings, 'maggie and milly and molly and may', in George J. Firmage (ed.), The Complete Poems: 1904-1962, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991. 22 John Richardson, When Predicting the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/ 2015, (accessed December 10, 2017).

However you relate to the biosphere as it currently exists, you will feel this change. Maybe it’s a particular kind of fish you like to eat, or a fruit you hang out for each season. Maybe it’s a plant you grow in your garden, a street tree that flowers every spring, or the rain that raises your crops. Maybe it’s somewhere you went with your parents in childhood. Or maybe it’s the place you’d read about in a book long ago, that you always assumed would still be out there to discover one day. Already climate change casts its shadow on our doorstep. It determines our wealth, and defines our diets. It’s in our backyards, it’s on our plates, and it stains our hands. But even if our ark is small, it’s not beyond us to sail it. We just need to start building soon.

References 1. Steinbeck, J, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Viking Press, 1951. 2. International Merchandise Exports (2017), Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmanian Government, 2017. ABS Cat No 5368. 3. Pecl, G., et al., 'Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well- being', Science, vol. 355, no. 1389, 2017. 4. Genesis, 7:1-24, 8:1-22. King James Version. 5. Crowded House, Weather With You, in Woodface, Capitol, 1992. 6. Pecl, G., et al., (ibid). 7. Pecl, G., et al., (ibid). 8. Mishima, Y., The Sound of Waves, Vintage, 1954. 9. Andrews, K., Sea urchin invaders, abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/31/3811486.htm, 2013, (accessed October 23, 2017). 10. Andrews, K., (ibid). 11. Mather, A., Warmer waters makes Tassie a hotspot for new fishy friends, themercury.com.au/lifestyle/warmer-waters-makes-tassie-a-hotspot-for-new-fishy-friends/news- story/b8e42dbad2c1231e273782e6f75eeac5, 2016, (accessed October 30, 2017). 12. Reynolds, M., 'Dynamic conservation and multiple objectives: delivering cost-effective habitat for migratory birds in agricultural landscapes', Species on the Move Conference (2016), Hobart, 2016, speciesonthemove.com/videos 13. Herzog, W. Original source unknown. 14. Tasmanian Economy: Economic Outlook in Budget Paper No. 1 (2017-18), Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmanian Government, 2017. 15. O'Clair, R., and Sandra, L., 'E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Plants of British Columbia', North Pacific Seaweeds: Macrocystis pyrifera, linnet.geog.ubc.ca/Atlas/Atlas.aspx?sciname=Macrocystis%20pyrifera, 2000, (accessed November 13, 2017). 16. Johnson, C., et al., 'Knowing when (not) to attempt ecological restoration', Restoration Ecology, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, pp. 140-147. 17. Kennedy, J. F., in address to Dinner for America's Cup Crews, 1962. 18. Kimsuka Sutta: The 'What's It' Tree (Ki.msuka) (SN 35.204), Maurice O'Connell Walshe (trans), Buddhist Publication Society, 1985. 19. Solomon, S, et al., 10.7.1 Climate Change Commitment to Year 2300 Based on AOGCMs, in Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007, edited, Cambridge (UK), New York (USA), Cambridge University Press, 2007. 20. Carson, R., The Sea Around Us, Oxford (UK), Oxford, 1951. 21. Cummings, E. E., 'maggie and milly and molly and may', in George J. Firmage (ed.), The Complete Poems: 1904-1962, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991. 22. Richardson, J., When Predicting the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/ 2015, (accessed December 10, 2017).