Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

John Fan (left) places his arm around the shoulders of FX after services at Christ Lutheran Church in Monterey Park, California, on Jan. 22, 2023. FX, who asked to be identified by his initials, was too distraught and anxious to sing after the nearby mass shooting the night before. To offer comfort, members like Mr. Fan prayed with FX. “Church is family,” says FX.

On the eve of Lunar New Year, FX was enjoying celebratory dumplings at the fellowship hall at Christ Lutheran Church in Monterey Park, where he sings in the choir.

The young man, who emigrated from China about 10 years ago, lives alone. The meal, attended by singles at the church, was a stand-in for the traditional meal that many Chinese, Vietnamese, and other families prepare to start their most important holiday of the year.

But that night, after more than 100,000 people thronged downtown Monterey Park at a happy street festival, celebration turned to tragedy – a mass shooting at a nearby ballroom dance studio that left 11 people dead and another nine wounded. FX, a computer worker who asked to be identified by his initials, was up all night. He lives just blocks from the incident, and a hovering helicopter kept him awake. So did his fears. The shooting was just so close. The suspect was still at large.

When he arrived at church for the English-language service the next morning, he was too anxious to sing. But a few members gathered around, hugging him and praying for him. “We told him: We can overcome this together. We know God’s love,” says John Fan, a longtime member of the church, where most congregants speak Chinese.

By mid-morning, the two men were practicing as a duo, accompanied by acoustic guitar and piano. At one point, Mr. Fan placed his arm around the shoulders of the young man. At the second service, FX was doing better and actually led the congregation in singing. “I’m still afraid,” he admits after the service. But he also feels the love of others: “Church is family.”

Over and over on that day after in Monterey Park, people spoke of togetherness and resilience as the way to heal from this tragedy – the largest mass shooting this year.

From early on, federal, county, and local law enforcement were coordinating. And one individual’s heroism prevented the tragedy from being even worse: At a second ballroom 2 miles from the mass shooting, the grandson of the ballroom’s founders sprang into action and wrestled a semiautomatic assault pistol away from the suspect, saving lives. By Sunday afternoon, police about 30 miles away surrounded the van of the suspect, Huu Can Tran, a 72-year-old man and former dance instructor, who then took his own life.

Less than 24 hours after the shooting, “we are able to say that justice has been done thanks to everyone working together,” said Mayor Henry Lo at a City Hall press conference.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Democratic Congresswoman Judy Chu is interviewed by China Global Television Network on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park, California, on Jan. 22, 2023. The site is just steps from the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where a shooter killed 11 people. “We are a resilient community,” says Representative Chu, who has lived here for 37 years.

That teamwork was evident at the city’s Langley Senior Center, where Sgt. Bing Han, who has been on the Monterey Park police force for two decades, was called in on his day off. Normally, he would be visiting his parents and in-laws on this first day of the Lunar New Year, honoring the elders. Instead, his wife and son went without him, he says from behind a strip of caution tape.

The facility has been turned into a trauma center to help victims’ families and anyone else needing counseling. On scene were members of the Los Angeles city crisis response team, the LA County Department of Mental Health, the FBI crisis team, the Red Cross, and volunteers. Sergeant Han describes Monterey Park as a “quiet” place, where “people feel safe walking their dog at nighttime.”

The tremendous response in this case reminds him of an earlier tragedy in August, when a rookie officer was murdered while off duty. Flowers and food flooded the Monterey Park police station. “The response from the community is pretty overwhelming.”

“We’re a resilient community”

Congresswoman Judy Chu has lived in Monterey Park for 37 years, including as a council member and mayor. Standing on the city’s main street of Garvey Avenue, just steps from the taped-off crime scene, she moves from media interview to media interview, emphasizing the city’s resilience and the need to work together to bring healing.

In an interview with the Monitor, she describes this city of 61,000 people as a diverse community (65% Asian), peaceful, and quiet, and a great place to raise kids and open a small business. Mini markets, restaurants, and other mom and pop shops line the street in a neighborhood of small single-family homes and garden apartments.

Living up to its name, a park lies within a half-mile of nearly every home. Indeed, on a huge expanse of brilliant green grass behind City Hall, a family is playing with their dog, and two women who emigrated from China four years ago are filming a video of their children. The kids are dressed in party clothes, reciting a poem about their homeland’s dynasties. These families weren’t going to let the tragedy stop them. “We are still celebrating because this is very important to Chinese people,” says Scarlett Shi, one of the mothers.

People are “stunned and shocked,” says Representative Chu, gesturing down the street to an area of empty vendor tents and a red banner welcoming the year of the rabbit. This was the first Lunar New Year festival since the pandemic and there was extra enthusiasm for it, she says. At the same time, “we’re a resilient community.”

Perhaps that comes from its history. In the mid-’70s, a local real estate developer advertised Monterey Park – just a 20-minute drive from LA’s Chinatown – as “the Chinese Beverly Hills.” In the three decades that followed, the city became a magnet for Taiwanese and then mainland Chinese, becoming America’s “first suburban Chinatown.” It also became a cauldron of tension over English-first issues, signs in Chinese, discrimination, and traffic.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Chinese immigrants Scarlett Shi (right), May Lan (left), and her daughter, Jenny, stand in a park behind City Hall in Monterey Park, California, on Jan. 22, 2023. Despite the mass shooting Saturday night, they went ahead with their plans to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

Today, Chinese-language signs are everywhere, and the city is a destination point in a broad valley heavily populated by Asians and known for its fabulous restaurants. On Garfield Street in Alhambra, steps from the ballroom where the gunman was thwarted, Sam is waiting for a takeout order of eight for him and his friends. He drove all the way from LA’s Koreatown to come to Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine, which serves authentic food from Indonesia – his home country. The tragedy “is definitely unfortunate,” he says, but he doesn’t feel personally threatened. “It doesn’t only happen to Asians. It happens to everyone.”

Paying their respects

Christine Terrisse is waiting at the cross signal at Garvey Avenue, her preschool son holding her hand. In the other hand, she carries a bouquet of blue-dyed roses, cradled in baby’s breath.

After she crosses, the writer says that she is from Whittier, about 10 miles southeast from here. She’s looking to place the roses at a memorial, but doesn’t see anything – perhaps a nearby church will do. She is one of several nonresidents to come to the crime scene, pay their respects, and join in the mourning.

“I have friends in the Chinese-American community,” she explains, while minding her son. “I was getting kind of numb with all the shooting news and so I came here. I just felt I wanted to do something.”

A couple from Pacoima expresses similar sentiments. The violence also hits close to home. Imelda Nancilla recently heard that three young girls whom she knows were shot dead in her hometown in Mexico. They were to be buried Sunday. “My heart is broken,” she says. After the dance studio shooting, she told her husband, Fernando, that they had to come to Monterey Park to show respect for the people, the families.

Police are still searching for motive, though news reports say Mr. Tran gave informal lessons at the dance studio, met his ex-wife there, and had a hot temper. Before these details emerged, many in this community thought this might be a hate crime. That’s been a great concern in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, with Asian hate crimes up 339% in 2021 over 2020. It has motivated many to step up and watch out for each other.

Watching out for one another

Drew, a young man from nearby San Gabriel, another heavily Asian community near Monterey Park, came with his friend San to “check out the situation” and see if they could help.

The two are part of a grassroots group of volunteers that for two years has been patrolling LA’s Chinatown as a deterrent to violence. They walk the streets once a week, helping shop owners and trailing behind seniors to enhance their safety.

“I think the Asian community, it’s like very hesitant,” says Drew, as they walk past City Hall, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows. “But I feel like these are the times to actually do something.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Imelda Nancilla's last name.

Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks via video link as top defense officials from the NATO alliance and Ukraine meet to discuss how to help Ukraine defend itself, at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, January 20, 2023.

As the defense chiefs of 54 nations gathered Friday to chart the next steps forward in repelling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reiterated the urgency of their mission. 

“Russia is regrouping, recruiting, and trying to reequip,” he warned, urging colleagues to “dig deeper” in their efforts to bolster Kyiv’s defenses with weapons and training as the first anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine – and an expected spring assault – approaches. 

He then patched in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy via video, who noted that the assembled Ukraine Defense Contact Group has done so much for his country that it would be “absolutely just” to tender “hundreds of thank-you’s.” 

“But,” he added in a pointed proviso, “hundreds of thank-you’s are not hundreds of tanks.” 

For days before – and after – the Ramstein meeting, the talk was of tanks: specifically whether the United States would greenlight its M1 Abrams for Ukraine. Such a move by the U.S. appears to be Germany’s tacit precondition for releasing its own Leopard 2 tanks, desperately desired by President Zelenskyy and his troops for their war effort.

Those tanks did not materialize at this meeting, though Poland vowed last week to send some of its own Leopards – never mind German arms export laws. The German foreign minister has signaled that Berlin won’t stand in Warsaw’s way.

Still, many military analysts say that such vehicles and more long-range firepower will ultimately be necessary. The new infusion of heavy weapons – and the intensive troop training that goes with them – buoys Ukrainian hopes of potentially turning the tide toward victory. At the very least, it raises the hope of Ukraine holding its own in the conflict’s next phase.

New equipment will continue to require “brutal prioritization” on the battlefield, however, says retired Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe. And those sorts of decisions about how to distribute scarce resources, he adds, like everything about this war, “will be hard.”

Ukraine seeking firepower and mobility

The goal for the extensive – if accelerated – training that Ukrainian soldiers began this month is to give them the skills to penetrate Russian positions that have been hardening for months and, in some cases, years. 

This will be particularly necessary in the face of a new round of Russian mobilizations, which will “probably bring a lot of new recruits into Ukraine in roughly April,” says Rafael Loss, coordinator for pan-European data projects at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Fabian Bimmer/Reuters/File

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivers a speech in front of a Leopard 2 tank during a visit to a military base of the German army Bundeswehr in Bergen, Germany, October 17, 2022. Germany has hesitated to send Leopards to Ukraine unless the U.S. also agrees to send M1 Abrams tanks.

More than ever, Ukrainian soldiers “will need to be able to move around under fire, and for that, you need armored vehicles,” he notes, adding that up to this point, troops have often been using pickup trucks. “Any piece of shrapnel shreds the aluminum.”

To help avoid this, the U.S. last week promised, along with other armored personnel carriers, 59 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, renowned not only for their ability to protect soldiers but also – given the 7-foot-long gun barrels mounted to their turrets – for their considerable firepower.

Equally important to this latest arms package, military analysts say, is the training that will come with it. It will focus on how to maneuver the new vehicles while wielding existing weapons – known in military parlance as “combined arms” training – “as opposed to just pounding one another with artillery,” a senior defense official said in a briefing earlier this month. “Equipment is one thing. Using the equipment is another.”

The idea, ultimately, is to “change this dynamic that you see right now where it’s inches forward” on the front lines, Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine, said in a Pentagon briefing this month. The point is to instead use the new vehicles, artillery, and other firepower together to “make greater progress on the battlefield and really push back on these Russian positions,” she added. “So that’s what we’re looking forward to seeing in the coming months.”

For NATO, the stakes involve not only aiding a democratic ally but also defending Europe more broadly against the threat posed by a more aggressive Russia under Vladimir Putin. 

The new armored vehicles and other support are enough to equip the equivalent of two brigades of Ukrainian fighters, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at Ramstein Friday. Training on the Bradleys is now taking place in Germany.

Across the Atlantic, in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Ukrainian soldiers are learning to operate Patriot missile defense systems, to allow them to shoot down incoming Russian air attacks. While such instruction can take up to one year, the U.S. Army is “expediting” this training for Kyiv to “several months.”

“The longer these troops are off the line,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder observed, “they’re not actually engaged in combat.”

Can you “maintain it, operate it, fuel it?”

Key to this operation will be Ukraine’s ability to keep these ever more powerful and complex vehicles and weapons systems running – and that will take practice, too.

Some of it will involve “tele-maintenance,” which is “exactly what it sounds like,” Ms. Cooper says. The near-rocket-scientist skill level required for repairs of the M1 Abrams has been the chief reason the Pentagon has raised for not giving Kyiv its much-coveted tank to date.

It’s “a very complicated piece of equipment,” Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, has noted. “It’s hard to train on. It has a jet engine.” Plus, it uses “about three gallons to the mile with jet fuel.”

Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley hold a news conference at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, January 20, 2023. The U.S. announced it will send 59 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine and will train Ukrainian forces in how to use them along with other vehicles and weapons.

This could prove a disadvantage on the battlefield, says Brigadier General Ryder. “If I’m going to provide you with a piece of equipment, are you going to be able to sustain it, maintain it, operate it, fuel it? Is it going to be an albatross around your neck, so to speak?”

That said, Ms. Cooper acknowledged, “We absolutely agree that Ukraine does need tanks.” 

For now, NATO allies are helping to refurbish Russian-made T-72 tanks for Ukraine, which currently has some 800 Soviet-era tanks on the battlefield, says retired Col. Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has made a comprehensive study of armaments in the war.

One problem, however, is that “the production line for T-72 ammunition is really limited outside of Russia,” says Mr. Loss at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “And Russia is of course not going to sell that to Ukraine.”

Pressing Germany

Great Britain has provided 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks – widely seen as an effort to spur Germany to provide its widely lauded Leopard 2 tanks. But a dozen or so such tanks won’t turn the tide of battle, analysts say.

The benefit of the Leopard 2 tanks is that “there are enough out there, hither and yon, that you could cobble together numbers that are significant,” Mr. Cancian says. Ukraine would like at least 300 of them, and “you could definitely get 100,” which, he adds, “is enough to outfit a significant part of the Ukrainian armored force.” 

Countries that use the Leopards would likely come together to build a coalition to supply the tanks as well, “ensuring a steady supply of ammunition and spare parts,” Mr. Loss says.

For these reasons, Germany is under heavy pressure to let their tanks go to Ukraine.

Secretary Austin was asked, repeatedly, at Ramstein whether Germany was showing “real leadership” in the war effort. “Yes,” he replied. “But we can all do more.” 

Still, as the latest round of equipment and training flows into Ukraine, its soldiers build their skills. And as that happens, analysts point out, Kyiv is in an ever-better position to lobby President Joe Biden and other allied leaders for the big guns of their respective arsenals.

For this reason, it is likely not a matter of whether Kyiv will get more tanks, they add, but when. 

“The Ukrainian people are watching us,” Secretary Austin said Friday. “The Kremlin is watching us. And history is watching us.”

Soon after sunset one evening in August, a few days after the late-summer full moon, the coral species Acropora cervicornis decides it is time to breed. 

During an approximately 140-minute window, this coral – commonly known as staghorn in a reference to its branchy, antler-shaped structure – releases a snow globe display of gametes into the water: packages of egg and sperm that ride the ocean’s currents toward nearby but genetically distinct reefs. There, they will meet other staghorn gametes that have also spawned, coordinating somehow across a watery expanse with guidance from the moon, the currents, and each other.

In a best-case scenario for the coral, these mixing gametes will fertilize, exchanging the sort of genetics that allow for resilience in what has always been a changing ocean world. They will develop in the water for a number of days, then the larvae will sink and settle on clear patches of reef substrate – the real estate available for coral babies – where they will grow and live for the rest of their lives, forming a key part of the ecosystem that protects and supports coastal communities worldwide. 

But for coral these days, it is far from a best-case scenario. 

Over the past decades, humans have disrupted this finely tuned dance of coral procreation. Because of damage from both climate change-charged storms and climate change-accelerated die-offs, reefs are often so far apart that wandering gametes simply never float into mates. The substrate is also more likely to be covered with seaweed thanks to changing water temperatures and pollutants, which leaves fewer places for coral to settle. And those baby corals that do find homes are increasingly stressed by warming ocean waters. 

STEPHANIE HANES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Natalia Hurtado, lead scientist with the Bahamas Coral Innovation Hub, on the quest to grow coral species that can survive rising ocean temperatures

Which is why Natalia Hurtado, lead scientist with the Bahamas Coral Innovation Hub on the southern side of the island of Eleuthera, is trying to give the coral a bit of help.  

Ms. Hurtado, who grew up in Colombia and has worked on coral research around the world, is part of a loosely connected international army of scientists, conservationists, and policymakers who are trying to boost coral’s resilience. She and others on her team – a collaboration between the Bahamas-based Perry Institute for Marine Science and the Cape Eleuthera Institute, as well as The Nature Conservancy – are working to record and predict the dates and times of coral spawning, from the once-a-year event of the staghorn to the monthly efforts of the grooved brain coral.

From this research, they have made a chart that helps other scientists and divers do what’s called larval propagation. That basically means taking an evening dive, scooping up floating gametes, fertilizing them in a laboratory, giving them a good place to live, and eventually returning them to the reefs. 

Ms. Hurtado has also been evaluating the resilience of different corals growing from this sort of human-assisted mating, and from coral transplants that have come from nearby reefs. She maintains an underwater nursery a short boat ride away from the Cape Eleuthera Institute, which has some 22 “trees,” usually plastic structures covered with coral anchored to the ocean floor, as well as a land-based nursery of different experiment tanks. 

At both locations, her team records how the different coral genomes are faring, with an eye toward finding those most likely to survive rising ocean temperatures.

ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/TNS/ABACAPRESS.COM/REUTERS

A fragment of staghorn coral is part of an effort by scientists in the Bahamas to identify resilient reefs that can survive warming ocean waters.

“The ones we have are resilient,” says Ms. Hurtado. “But some do better than others.”

The goal, she and other scientists say, is to plant these particularly resilient specimens back onto the reefs. And that, they hope, will give the ecosystem a better chance to survive in a world changed by human-caused warming. 

Not long ago, this type of human-assisted evolution and rehabilitation would have been on the fringe of environmental work – the target of skepticism and critiques about heavy-handed intervention in natural systems. But in recent years, more conservationists have embraced this sort of human-animal partnership when it comes to adapting to climate change. It is a shift in the basic understanding of resilience – and not just for coral, but for climate-threatened species around the world. And while it may test the bounds of scientists’ and conservationists’ understanding of “natural,” it is also offering new connection and hope. 

“There are these natural adaptive capacities that are unique to this system that we can start to exploit,” says John Parkinson, a coral researcher and assistant professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “That might be also true in other systems. It’s a concept of working with evolution, not against it.

If coral is an example of a species that could be helped by genetic assistance, it is also unique.

Coral reefs, explains Elizabeth McLeod, who leads global reef work for The Nature Conservancy, are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Although they take up less than 1% of the ocean, they support about 25% of all marine life. Reef fisheries support the livelihoods of a half-billion people worldwide, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the ecosystems are hugely important for tourism. White-sand beaches are connected to coral.

MEGHYN FOUNTAIN

A volunteer reef diver checks out a nursery where researchers grow coral off the Bahamas’ New Providence Island.

Reefs also provide coastal protection by buffering shorelines against storm surges, floods, and erosion – dissipating as much as 97% of incident wave energy, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. This, scientists say, is increasingly important as climate change and warming ocean waters increase the severity of hurricanes.

But coral reefs are at risk. According to the United Nations, the world is poised to lose as much as 90% of its remaining coral reefs by 2050 if actions are not taken to reduce threats. Already, some scientific reports estimate that oceans have lost half of the reefs that existed in 1950.  

“There’s a huge knockdown effect if we lose coral reefs,” says Dr. McLeod. “That’s something to keep in mind when we talk about the potential to lose 90% of reefs. What that means is we’re losing the coastal protection that they provide; we’re losing fisheries habitat that they provide; we’re losing the tourism dollars that they provide. So their loss would have really significant impact.”

This worry is far from new, though. For decades, environmentalists have been warning about reef degradation. In the 1980s, nonprofit and academic organizations began joining forces to protect reef ecosystems after researchers discovered widespread coral bleaching – a phenomenon where coral expels the colorful symbiotic algae that live inside it. This happens when coral is particularly stressed, usually because of high water temperatures or pollution.

“The range coral can live in is narrow – the ideal is 82 degrees Fahrenheit, 28 degrees Celsius. There they do very well,” says Valeria Pizarro, head of the coral reef team at the Perry Institute. “If the temperature rises to 32 or 33 degrees in Celsius, the coral gets pale, or bleaches. ... That means they are dying.”

In 2000, the United States signed the Coral Reef Conservation Act to establish the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program. By 2003, the U.N. Environment Program’s Coral Reef Unit decided it should put together a document that outlined the growing number of worldwide conventions, treaties, and initiatives that had been formed to help coral reefs. It was intended to help scientists and the international community better coordinate this conservation work. 

ZBIGNIEW BZDAK/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/TNS/ABACAPRESS.COM/REUTERS

Researchers with the Shedd Aquarium in the Bahamas collect coral samples at a reef off the Exuma islands as part of a coral renewal project.

At the time, most of these efforts were focused on protection and preservation. That fit an early 2000s conservation ethos that often prioritized regulating human activity and setting aside “protected areas” to help sensitive ecosystems. Very few scientists at the time were trying to grow coral themselves. And those who were doing it were often seen as outliers, even dangerous.  

Part of that, explains Dr. Parkinson, is that for decades, conventional scientific wisdom was that humans simply shouldn’t meddle in nature. Growing coral for different attributes and replanting it on reefs could lead to unintended consequences; the logical outcome of these endeavors was a changed reef ecosystem.

But over the past decade, the effect of climate change on the oceans has become ever more apparent. Although much discussion about global warming focuses on air temperature, it is the oceans that absorb most of the heat generated by rising emissions – around 90%, according to the U.N. This has led to glacier melting in polar regions and sea level rise. It has also led to  marine heat waves. In 2021, nearly 60% of the world’s ocean surface experienced at least one spell of marine heat waves, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this, scientists say, has caused even more rapid coral loss. A 2021 study conducted by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network estimated that 14% of the world’s coral disappeared between 2009 and 2018.

But even as researchers panicked at the rapid loss of coral, they were beginning to notice something else: There were glimmers of unexpected resilience within this seascape of devastation. Some reefs, they realized, seemed to be doing just fine, despite the changing conditions. Others that had bleached and seemed to be in a death spiral actually recovered. And some individual corals in one place were faring far better than the same species nearby.

One scientist who decided to zoom in on this phenomenon was the late Ruth Gates. She directed the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and she wanted to understand these pockets of resilience. She believed that if humans could find and replicate the genetics behind these success stories, then reefs overall would be more likely to survive.  

STEPHANIE HANES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Coral is integral to creating white-sand beaches, like this pristine one near the Bond reef off New Providence Island in the Bahamas.

“Not all corals are created equal,” Dr. Gates said later in a university publication. “We will capitalize on those corals that already show a stronger ability to withstand the changing ocean environment and their capacity to pass this resilience along to new generations.”

She established a lab for what she called the human-assisted evolution of coral, and in 2013, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation awarded Dr. Gates and a collaborator from the Australian Institute of Marine Science its $10,000 Ocean Challenge grand prize. Two years later the foundation agreed to provide an additional $4 million grant to support their work.

“They had this idea at the time to increase the resilience of critical and highly vulnerable coral reef ecosystems,” says Lara Littlefield, executive director of partnerships and programs at Vulcan, which advises the Allen family foundation. “This was the type of work that people weren’t really talking about at the time; it was really considered fringe.” 

At first, Ms. Littlefield says, mainstream conservationists worried that focusing on genetic resilience would take away from the all-important effort of reducing the pressures on coral in the first place, whether that meant pushing for lower greenhouse gas emissions or stopping overfishing. But soon other academics and conservation groups began to follow suit, adopting a “you have to do both” approach.

The same was true for coral nurseries, says Dr. Parkinson. At first, conservationists in Florida, where his underwater nursery is located, looked askance at “coral gardening,” or growing coral on “trees” and other rebar structures. But over the past decade, a vast majority of research institutions have embraced the coral nursery approach. 

“It’s a big shift,” says Dr. Parkinson. “We’ve gone from thinking that we shouldn’t be involved – that we should just be marking off territory and saying, ‘This is a reserve and we won’t manipulate it’ – to ‘Active interventions are worth doing.’ Because we know now that if we don’t do anything, the risk is really high that you are going to lose coral. ... Restoration is ‘We want to preserve what was there in the past.’ I don’t think anybody thinks we can do that for coral anymore. The climate is changing too fast. The world is changing too fast.”

But the physics of coral resilience isn’t so straightforward – either scientifically or logistically.   

CARLIE SAVAL

Antlerlike staghorn coral is one of many rapidly declining species that researchers across the Caribbean are trying to save.

From a practical point of view, growing and raising coral – from catching the floating gametes to keeping nursery structures clean – is a massive undertaking. The science behind coral resilience is also immensely complicated, with researchers still decoding the secrets of why some individual corals seem particularly suited to withstand heat, acidification, and other changes connected to climate change.

Scientists, for instance, are still trying to understand the role of the algae that live in coral and whose photosynthesis provides a large percentage of the coral’s food. They know that most coral will expel its algae when the water temperature increases, but they are still investigating how the genetics influence that process – why one coral and algae pair will remain together when a nearby pair won’t. They’re also studying what happens when coral forms a relationship with other, more heat-tolerant species of algae.

Meanwhile, new research suggests bacteria, archaea, and fungi seem to have a substantial, yet previously unknown, impact on the ability of reefs to deal with changing water temperatures and disease, says Anya Brown, an assistant professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis’ College of Biological Sciences. New studies also suggest that microbiomes connected to other nearby species, such as seaweed, may impact coral vitality, even when not directly adjacent to it.  

In other words, there are connections, and resilience, throughout the ocean and reef ecosystems that science can’t yet explain.  

“Right now there are different levels of triage happening,” says Dr. Brown. “You have to grow corals and get them out there. Hopefully some will survive. The next question is, how do we optimize this process to maximize our coral survival and growth when they’re in the field or in nurseries? We don’t understand as much as we thought we did about some of these relationships.”

That even includes where reefs exist in the first place. Reef ecosystems, of course, are underwater, so scientists can’t use aerial photography to monitor them the way conservationists study forest canopies. 

Steve Schill, the lead scientist for the Caribbean division of The Nature Conservancy, has been trying to get around this by using satellite imagery and sensors, combined with underwater photo mosaics, to map the reefs around the Bahamas and elsewhere in the region. To find “super reefs,” those areas of coral resilience, he and his team have been merging that information with data on storm risk, water temperature, and other factors.

“We want to zoom in on where corals were more likely to survive,” he says.  

But coral is tricky, he points out. Just because a reef looks healthy today does not mean that it will be thriving tomorrow. The ocean is always changing. At a certain point, in order to understand and help coral resilience, people must go under the water to take a look themselves.

STEPHANIE HANES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Hayley-Jo Carr, a marine conservationist (left), works with volunteer researchers like Meghyn Fountain (right) on coral restoration projects in the Bahamas.

On a recent day off New Providence Island in the Bahamas, Hayley-Jo Carr, another researcher with the Perry Institute, asks her boat captain to travel to what scientists call the James Bond nursery. It’s named after a nearby shipwreck left over from the 1983 movie “Never Say Never Again.”

The water is glass-clear – enough so that a snorkeler can clearly see a nurse shark gliding by the shipwreck some 40 feet below. But she wants to get a closer look at the PVC trees growing the critically endangered staghorn coral. She also wants to show the nursery to Rose Rijnsaardt, a scuba diving instructor from Aruba whom Ms. Carr had previously trained as a reef rescue diver instructor. 

The Reef Rescue Network is a Caribbean-wide effort to bring scuba diving operations, resorts, and other businesses together to help with scientists’ restoration efforts. It’s based on the premise that there simply aren’t enough researchers – and there isn’t enough research money – for scientists to do all of the coral rehabilitation work themselves. If scuba divers, for instance, can be trained to be reef rescue divers, not only can they learn how to do tasks such as cleaning excess algae away from the coral nurseries and keeping an eye out for coral disease, but they can also instruct tourists to do the same. So far, she has trained some 70 reef rescue diver instructors like Ms. Rijnsaardt, who have in turn taught hundreds of other divers to help with reef rescue work. 

“We want recreational divers to become involved,” Ms. Carr says. “There’s a lot of underwater work that divers can do.”

Resorts, dive shops, and other businesses, she says, might start finding ways to capitalize on this sort of conservation work. With 31 nurseries throughout the Bahamas, there are a lot of chances for collaboration – and a lot of opportunities for visitors to pay to help further coral resilience.

“We need to make nursery maintenance sustainable,” she says.   

Ms. Rijnsaardt nods.  

“It is something people will be happy to do,” Ms. Rijnsaardt says. 

STEPHANIE HANES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Rose Rijnsaardt, an instructor with the Reef Rescue Network, a Caribbean-wide effort to enlist volunteers to help with research, visits a coral nursery near New Providence Island in the Bahamas.

Ms. Carr jumps off the boat with Ms. Rijnsaardt and Meghyn Fountain, another research assistant. Ms. Fountain, who grew up in the Bahamas capital city of Nassau, has been working to assess the health of different reefs across the country, and spends a lot of time cleaning the nurseries herself. 

“You find yourself talking to the coral,” Ms. Fountain says with a laugh. 

Ms. Carr gestures below.

“The staghorn grows like crazy here,” she says, referring to the critically endangered coral species that spawns once a year.   

They dive down to where the trees are overflowing with coral. Just a short distance to the shore, the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation has built an underwater sculpture garden connected to the Clifton Heritage National Park, a protected expanse built on the site of a long-abandoned cotton plantation. The largest sculpture, 18 feet tall, is called Ocean Atlas, which depicts a Bahamian girl bent over and seeming to carry the weight of the ocean on her shoulders.

It was intended to be a monument that referenced climate change, and humans’ new role in supporting ecosystems.  

The three women emerge from the water.

“They actually look really good,” Ms. Carr says of her coral. Ms. Fountain and Ms. Rijnsaardt nod in agreement. “Really good. I’m happy about that.”

Tanned bare feet sticking out from a pair of loose-fitting blue Dickies, Joey Burnsed looks every bit the islander. The past few months, however, have shown another side of the lifestyle.

His usually packed charter fishing schedule blew away with Hurricane Ian. But like a true islander, he’s taken it in stride, coping with whatever challenges the day throws his way. Recently, that’s meant a new gig: steering his skiff to remote mangrove thickets on Pine Island, Florida, so cleanup crews can clear storm debris.

You could call that the Pine Island way – independent, resourceful, and a little stubborn. To some, the island is a modern-day link to “Old Florida,” a retreat for raconteurs, crabbers, artists, the funky and the frivolous.

But in the wake of Hurricane Ian, a decades-old question is emerging with new urgency: What will happen to the islander way of life?

Just across the sound is Sanibel Island, which has come to symbolize the “New Florida.” A $6 toll is required just to get on the island, and strict codes govern building and even what plants can be used in landscaping. When Hurricane Ian came, the damage was severe, but the island was well situated to bounce back.  

As other Florida communities deal with the physical and economic toll of the hurricane, the question of whether to leave or start over is less clear. For decades, Pine Island has embodied Florida’s can-do spirit. “Florida is built on confidence,” says historian Gary Mormino, author of “Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida.” “But a cumulation of challenges” is testing that way of life.

“One thing is for sure,” says Mr. Burnsed. “This hurricane has forced change. And change can be good.”

In many ways, American barrier islands and their people are independent by nature and prepared by necessity. The islands are nature’s storm absorbers. Someone who has lived here for 50 years is likely to have considered about 250 National Weather Service hurricane warnings.

But other forces are just as profound, and perhaps more complex. In a state heavily affected by climate change, smaller insurers have been going steadily bankrupt. Should the federal government help stricken Floridians rebuild – or give them a hand to leave the islands through so-called managed retreat?

“It is a moral question,” says Mr. Mormino, the historian. “There’s really no easy solution. For a lot of people, [after the most recent storms], we should basically say, ‘You’re on your own.’”

Gerald Herbert/AP/File

The bridge leading from Fort Myers to Pine Island, Florida, is seen heavily damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Oct. 1, 2022.

Pine Island: “The last of the old world Florida”

“On your own” is exactly how Pine Island has liked it. For 50 years, islanders have fought annexation attempts by neighboring Cape Coral. They see remaining unincorporated as essential to retaining a spirit of independence against rules and overbearing taxation.

When Florida banned gill nets in 1995, one legend goes, residents of one village blasted their fishing skiffs with shotguns, then lit the hulls on fire. The pyre could be seen from Sanibel.

Here, the Native Colusa tribe some 10,000 years ago built extensive canals as part of a fish husbandry project. Today, industrial shrimp farming follows the same template. Cattle grazes by the road. Bokeelia is the mango capital of the United States. And the island’s vast palm tree plantations supply Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate.

Pine Island, says island pitmaster John Petrus, is “about being country – and staying country.”

Islander Dave Bouwerman says it’s the kind of place where locals ruled an underground economy that relied on fishing, smuggling, and keeping lips zipped.

“There were some guys in town who if you got in a fight with them, you just let them win,” says Mr. Bouwerman. “Because if you beat them, they would get you in the end. They would always win. In that way, it hasn’t changed that much.”

But if Pine Island is insular, it’s also quick to help neighbors. After Ian, residents patched a breach in the Pine Island causeway using ladders and plywood. Other locals secured bulldozers and fill to rebuild the road, taking hours instead of anticipated months. Gov. Ron DeSantis credited Pine Island’s “special spirit.”

“We fight for our independence because we have to,” says Earl Wallace, a lifelong Pine Island resident and captain of a bait shrimp trawler. “The pressure to change is constant. We’re the last of the old world Florida.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bait shrimper Earl Wallace talks inside his bait shop in St. James City, Florida, which is part of unincorporated Pine Island, on Dec. 6, 2022. Mr. Wallace worries that changes on an island that takes self-reliance seriously will speed up in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which damaged and destroyed hundreds of homes and many businesses when it struck in late September 2022.

Sanibel: Elitist or visionary?

While Pine Islanders have taken each development fight as it came, Sanibel residents adopted an opposite approach. The city incorporated in the mid-1970s to thwart plans by Lee County to allow developers to build high-rise condos on the island. Then it tripled down on rules and regulations.

Culturally, the two are “like night and day,” says Mr. Burnsed. “I’m third-generation on Sanibel. But on Pine Island, I’m still an outsider.”

“You applaud [Sanibel’s anti-development] measures, but it’s elitist, I suppose,” adds historian Mr. Mormino.

Sanibel’s efforts were led by former CIA Director Porter Goss, who moved there in the 1970s. Today, he says Sanibel is a model for how the region can rebuild. Sanibel’s strictures help preserve community and natural resources, he says. Yes, the building rules are strict, but the island also provides community housing and makes concessions to longtime islanders who aren’t wealthy.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Sanibel Island charter boat captain Joey Burnsed takes a break from a morning of shuttling hurricane cleanup workers to a nearby mangrove thicket on Dec. 6, 2022. Even though he's a third-generation islander, Mr. Burnsed says he is still viewed as an "outsider" on Pine Island, which, unlike the city of Sanibel, is an unincorporated part of Lee County.

“A lot of people think Sanibel is elitist, that property values are incredible, but there are an awful lot of people who have been there a long time, a working-class community,” says Mr. Goss.

Instead of putting individual liberty above all as on Pine Island, Sanibel codifies the consensus of what Sanibel should be, including safeguarding community housing for less wealthy residents.

Such zoning and planning design guarantees “that there will always be a community in Sanibel,” says Mr. Goss. “Yes, a tourist economy is involved, but it’s not going to be a sellout to the Gulf Coast or tourists.”

At the same time, with progressive building codes, “Sanibel has showed that human beings can be part of nature and coexist with nature.”

Despite the differences in approach, Mr. Goss adds, the recovery will likely be guided more by the emotional bonds that people build with these buggy but beautiful sandbars.

“There are a lot of people who are or will be replaced, and who have lost a lot,” he says. “But on the other hand, the spirit is great and the resilience is there.”

“Everyone ... is just looking for people to [help] to nail some stuff back together.”

In 22 years of looking for them, Holly Smith had seen only one salmon attempting the upstream journey to spawn in Juanita Creek.

“Actually, my son saw one and I saw one,” she says. “Two fish in 22 years. I am not lying.”

Not seeing salmon spawning here was hardly a shock. Like the rest of this region, the city of Kirkland, a bedroom community across Lake Washington from Seattle, has seen more than its share of housing developments, condominium towers, office parks, and strip malls, generally to the incremental degradation of streams like Juanita Creek.

Environmentalists, the fishing industry, and Pacific Northwest tribes have warned of dwindling salmon fisheries for years. But Ms. Smith was about to discover that the quiet insistence of nature would conspire with values her parents had instilled in her and improve life for at least a few endangered fish. 

Swimming upstream

Ms. Smith is a nationally acclaimed chef, and her legendary restaurant, appropriately named Cafe Juanita, sits on the creek’s bank. After a windstorm toppled a giant maple that had stood between the creek and the restaurant, she watched the water erode more and more land.

She knew what she needed to do: shore up the bank. But environmental regulations – intended to protect salmon – led to bureaucratic gridlock. Meanwhile, the ravenous Juanita Creek kept eating its way closer to the restaurant.

“The erosion was pretty dramatic,” she says. That’s when she turned to the King Conservation District, a public, nonregulatory agency that partners with private landowners on conservation projects. 

Beginning in early 2021, Ms. Smith worked with Ashley Allan, King Conservation District’s riparian stewardship coordinator, to put together a plan. That included permits, a planting schedule – and a budget. It quickly added up to $75,000. 

Spawning season meant the creek work could only occur between July 15 and Sept. 15. And permitting took so long they missed the 2021 window entirely. 

By now the erosion had become so menacing that the state gave permission to plant some native dogwood and willow in the streambed. Ms. Smith enlisted her son, and “we put on waders and we went in and tamped them in.”

Dean Paton

Massive stumps chained to boulders line a section of Juanita Creek in Kirkland, Washington, Nov. 17, 2022. The stumps were installed to slow erosion, while willow and dogwood trees were planted alongside the creek to create a welcoming habitat for bees, insects, and other native species. The restorations are aimed at reviving the creek’s salmon, which had practically disappeared.

A spot for renewal

The bigger plan called for multiple stages. First came removal of ivy, blackberry, and invasive knotweed, a noxious plant with roots so shallow they encourage fast-moving waters to sweep them – and the bank – downstream. Next came improvements to the riparian zone, the land between the creek and the restaurant, by adding hundreds more plantings of native species. And finally it was time to bolster the bank with boulders and massive stumps with roots intact, which not only stop the erosion but also create deeper pools where fish can stay cool and rebuild strength for their spawning ordeal.

By that point, Ms. Smith was looking at a price tag of about $100,000, which represents a lot of prix fixe dinners in her restaurant. 

But to her, it was a simple matter of stewardship. “I grew up on about 50 acres,” she says, “and my parents were both keenly aware of the natural world. They didn’t litter. We planted trees.” And they imbued in her “the ideal that we’re responsible for our actions in the natural world.

“So,” she decided, “in having this piece of the creek, this is all I can really do.”

Before she needed to sign any big checks, she had some good news: Ms. Allan of the King Conservation District called. The state conservation commission had funding available for salmon recovery projects. Ms. Smith’s met all the criteria, and Ms. Allan helped her get a $63,000 grant.

Now the race was on to line up a team that could install the stumps and boulders within that small window permitted by spawning season. Ms. Smith emailed Adopt-a-Stream Alliance, a local nonprofit that has worked on hundreds of similar projects. Tom Murdoch, the executive director, said yes.

“If [others] would follow Holly’s example to protect and enhance Juanita Creek,” Mr. Murdoch says, “the result of those collective actions would significantly enhance the salmon run in that creek, and also improve the quality of the water, which also makes it safe for kids to play in the creek.”

In two weeks last September, Mr. Murdoch’s team installed those huge tree roots chained to massive boulders so water would stop eroding the creek’s banks, which not only stopped the erosion but also turned the stream into an ideal refuge for salmon and trout. The team’s bioengineering also keeps sediment from flowing downstream, where it could cover shallow gravel bars in which salmon lay their eggs, potentially suffocating salmon fry.

“This is amazing”

In concert with the bioengineering, Ms. Allan helped re-imagine the riparian elements of the stream bank: planting some 500 willow and dogwood saplings and, wherever possible, replacing lawn with other native plants.

“Holly doesn’t just cling to that vision of grass,” Ms. Allan says. “She just really wants to create a more natural habitat along her stream,” explaining that diverse, native plantings alongside creeks encourage more bees, birds, edible berries, and flowers.

The morning Adopt-a-Stream completed its work, Ms. Smith met with a local reporter who had heard about the reclamation project. 

“We walked to the stream, and I looked down – and I’m like, ‘Oh, my!’

“And the reporter’s like, ‘What?’”

Ms. Smith pointed to the creek’s clear water.

“This is amazing,” she told the reporter, who didn’t seem to believe all these salmon swimming past were not everyday visitors. They counted 12 salmon in those 45 minutes. There had been none in the two weeks leading up to this, when Ms. Smith and the Adopt-a-Stream crew worked on the project every day. 

Their good work was right there in the current. 

“You’d watch [the fish] rest, because they’d bust their butt and try again, and then they’d go back down and you could tell – they were exhausted,” Ms. Smith says. “And they’d just sit there for 20 minutes and then come back and do it again. I saw that happen four or five times.”

Perhaps as a reward for her responsible citizenship, Ms. Smith saw her costs drop even further when the King Conservation District came through with more funding. In total, she figures she spent about $34,000 out of pocket. Her money, time, and effort add up to much more. 

“These streams, even in the city, are important,” says Jesse Dykstra, habitat biologist for the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, who issued the project’s permits. “Holly did just what we want to see in these smaller urban streams: pockets of habitat.”

Ms. Smith is no stranger to accolades. She’s a five-time semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s outstanding chef award, and winner of the foundation’s best chef in the Northwest. Her restaurant, too, has a long list of national and regional honors. But she says it would be even better to be remembered as a conservationist.

“I’d be happy to be an example of what is possible. ... If I could be a little nagging reminder to people and say, ‘You could do it. You should. Why don’t you try?’

“That would make me happy.” 

Reuters

A woman stands in front of a General Electric sign during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, last September.

Big and new ideas in scientific research don’t always originate in well-equipped labs or with more money. Sometimes the greatest resource is freedom. To see why, look at the exodus of people – especially creative innovators and entrepreneurs – from Russia and China over the past year.

Russia’s exodus of talent began with Western economic sanctions imposed after the Ukraine invasion, new restrictions on the internet, and later a harsh military draft of young men. Tens of thousands of high-tech workers fled to Israel, Georgia, or Kazakhstan, where they could find opportunities and free expression in safe havens. Those countries welcomed them as potential founts of innovation.

The exodus from China began with a crackdown on its biggest tech companies, especially their founders, as well as a draconian lockdown of cities against COVID-19. Many of the country’s most creative people moved to the United States, Singapore, and Japan to avoid China’s increasing techno-authoritarianism, or a top-down approach to research.

“Now that they have lived free of fear in other countries, they are reluctant to put themselves and their businesses under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party again,” wrote The New York Times. One founder of a crypto banking startup cited the need to have a say in how government makes rules. “There are many other places [than China] where you can do things,” said Aginny Wang, a co-founder of Flashwire who moved from China to Singapore.

These two waves of talent emigration, both of which may set back each country’s science and technology, are timely reminders about the most basic element for breakthroughs in scientific thought: freedom. They come as yet another study suggests global science has been in a slump in producing “disruptive” discoveries, such as lasers, airplanes, and transistors.

The study, conducted at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona, looked at 45 million papers and 3.9 million U.S. patents from 1945 to 2010 to see which research pointed to groundbreaking disruptions in fields from physics to social science. This “disruption index” showed a decline in basic discoveries after World War II and then a leveling since the 1990s. Also noted was an increase in the use of words like “improve” and “enhance” over language such as “make” and “produce.”

As in China and Russia today, many researchers may feel less free to pursue novel and radical ideas. In the West, scholars are publishing research more than ever but in increasingly narrower silos of knowledge. Many spend half their time applying for government grants, which are often given out based on demands for immediate, risk-free results.

“Rather than minting revolutionary ways of thinking, science and technology are increasingly polishing the same conceptual pennies,” writes science commentator Anjana Ahuja in The Financial Times.

The study’s authors say scientific workers can find greater freedom in undirected research and more sabbaticals. Long-shot research begins with short-term liberties to think, explore, make mistakes, and share ideas freely. The best research centers are small in number with high trust and no compulsion for conformity. Or just the opposite of what authoritarian leaders prefer. More freedom may be the greatest disruptor in the world of science seeking disruptive ideas.