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MARGARET AND CHRISTINE WERTHEIM [THE INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING] “IT REALLY DID SEEM LIKE A CRAZY CONSTRUCT.” Helpful things to have in order to crochet a coral reef: Knowledge of non-euclidean geometry Interest in embodied forms of reasoning A global sewing bee of serious science communication he one came out of the sciences, the other out mathematics, and the arts, disciplines that, to hear these twins of the arts, although that’s probably the wrong tell it (in their vividly infectious and enthusiastic manner), may way to put it, since they both came out of the themselves also be well-nigh identical under the skin. same mother in the same place on the same Such, at any rate, is the claim being advanced in their latest, day—identical twins, Australia in the late most ambitious (indeed, almost all-consuming) project: a vast Tfifties: Margaret and Christine Wertheim—such that their sub- crocheted coral reef that somehow manages to meld non-euclidean sequent divergence (physics and painting, respectively) may never mathematics, marine biology, evolution, environmentalist con- have been as wide as it seemed, and their coming back together cern, feminine handicrafts, and good old-fashioned community years later, in their adopted hometown of Los Angeles, to found activism into a dazzlingly colorful and ever-expanding mon- the marvelously inspired Institute For Figuring (IFF), may ument, one, indeed, that is fast becoming the global- warming never have been all that unlikely a prospect. The Institute, at any equivalent of the AIDS Quilt. It is as much a call to urgent rate, is one of those heterodox polymath L.A. wonders—close action as an occasion for hushed marvel: a creation almost as sibling of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for vivid and various and alive as the reefs whose perilous situa- Land Use Interpretation and Farmlab and Beyond Baroque—a tion it so urgently seeks to draw attention to. center, in its instance, for the identification, elaboration, and cel- In its latest incarnation, this ever-growing crocheted coral reef, ebration of all manner of delicious affinities between the sciences, having previously alighted in Chicago, New York, L.A., Lon- 58 Illustrations by Charles Burns don, Dublin, Sydney, and countless other venues, holds pride of MW: We were born in 1958 in Melbourne, though place in the Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian’s National we moved to Queensland when we were six and were Museum of Natural History, on the mall in Washington, largely raised there. D.C., through April 24—and it’s well worth a detour, indeed an entire expedition. Where it will go from there, and for that BLVR: Queensland, Australia, among other things be- matter where it came from in the first place, were among the ing where the Great Barrier Reef is—which, as we will questions I wanted to pursue when meeting with the twins a few presently see, becomes an important part of the story. months back—that’s Margaret in the pixie close-cropped hairdo, Christine with the wild leonine mane—as they were prepar- CHRISTINE WERTHEIM: The Great Barrier Reef ing to mount that show in Washington: a town, as much as any, starts about a thousand miles north of Brisbane. The where the fate of the world’s reefs, and for that matter the en- irony is that neither of us had ever been to see it while tire lifeworld they so precariously evince, may well be decided we lived in Australia. I’ve been there only since I’ve lived in the years immediately to come. —Lawrence Weschler in the U.S., and so has Margaret. Still, it’s very prominent in the consciousness of Queenslanders. We all feel it’s in I. CANARIES IN THE COAL MINE our hearts intrinsically. I guess it’s a bit like Americans feel about the Grand Canyon. THE BELIEVER: What is the Institute For Figuring? BLVR: So, admittedly skipping over all sorts of inter- MARGARET WERTHEIM: It’s an organization that esting other aspects of your lives—your early days as a Christine and I founded in 2003. It grew out of conver- physics student, Margaret, from whence you shifted over sations she and I were always having about the aesthetic to science writing; and your life, Christine, moving from and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. Fig- dress design to a decade as a painter, on through your uring is a word that Chrissie and I have both always current status as head of the MFA Writing Program at deeply loved because it cuts across not only science and CalArts—you are in the United States doing different art but also mathematics and cognition. We paint figures, work, and beginning to hear about what’s going on with we draw figures. Figures are diagrams that describe sci- the Great Barrier Reef. How did you start hearing about entific concepts. They’re also numbers, and we all per- the plight of the reef? sonally have a figure. We also speak figuratively and…. CW: The reef has been “in plight” since we were chil- BLVR: Both scientists and artists spend their lives figur- dren. When we were kids there was a huge infestation of ing things out. crown-of-thorns starfish, which had somehow been im- ported and had no natural predators, and they began to MW: Yes. As soon as we hit upon this idea of found- take over massive sections of the reef. ing an organization that might provide a framework for public events around this intersection of science and aes- BLVR: It occurs to me, by the way, that we should tell thetics, we immediately knew it would be called the In- people what the Great Barrier Reef is. Give us some stitute For Figuring. sense of its scale. BLVR: And you’re based in Los Angeles. MW: The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest or- ganism. It’s in fact the first living structure that can be MW: Yes. seen from outer space. It’s by far the biggest reef in the world, occupying about one hundred thirty-three thou- BLVR: But anybody talking to you can recognize that sand square miles, and extending over twelve hundred you both have Australian accents. miles along the coast. 59 BLVR: Which brings us to the terrible, seemingly cat- aclysmic threat currently facing the Great Barrier Reef, along with the world’s other reefs, which is global warm- ing. Give some sense of the nature of that threat and then also the extent of the damage recorded so far. CW: Recently, scientists have come to understand that one of the primary dangers facing coral reefs, in addition to overfishing, agricultural runoff, and other pollutants, is the fact that water temperatures are rising. Corals are very sensitive organisms, and the little polyps that make up the reef are like the canaries in the coal mine of global climate change. If water temperature around a reef rises by more than about one degree Celsius for even a few weeks, cor- als begin to get sick and go white, a phenomenon known as “coral bleaching.” If the temperatures drop back, they can recover to health, but if the temperatures stay high, they’ll begin to die, and stay white permanently. This is one way scientists realized there was something problem- atic occurring, because large sections of the Great Bar- rier Reef were getting bleached on a regular basis. When we were children, bleaching was rather rare, but over the past fifteen years it’s been happening on a massive scale every couple of years. The Bleached Reef by The Institute For Figuring. Photo © the IFF. BLVR: What percentage of the Great Barrier Reef has already been damaged? BLVR: Amazing. And, by definition, a reef is a congre- gation of coral and the organisms that they feed on and MW: Something like a third of the Great Barrier Reef that feed on them? has been seriously damaged. And in the Caribbean, since the 1970s, 80 percent of the reefs has disappeared. Coral MW: A reef itself is the conglomeration of what’s built reefs are dying proof that global warming is not some by all the coral organisms. The Great Barrier Reef is the distant danger; it’s here and happening now. world’s largest accumulation of these stony coral struc- tures, built up over thousands of years by tiny little crea- II. CRAFTING HYPERBOLIC SPACE tures called polyps. The reef itself is the structure that the polyps build, but then there is a whole ecosystem that lives BLVR: Margaret, around the time you were growing around this structure. There are only about a thousand spe- concerned about the reef, you were also working on a cies of stony coral in the world, but scientists estimate that book about the physical depiction of space, weren’t you? between 1 million and 9 million species live on coral reefs. It’s believed that close to 25 percent of all marine species MW: Yes. It was a history of Western concepts of space live in coral reefs, so if major reefs—like the Great Barrier from the Middle Ages to the Internet. I was interested Reef—are destroyed, it will probably lead to the collapse in how our ideas about what space is have changed of the ecosystems that depend upon them. through time. 60 BLVR: And in that context, one of the things you were BLVR: And a key person in that was Johann Carl delving into was the distinction between euclidean space Friedrich Gauss, right? and non-euclidean space.

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