Reef Life
By Callum Roberts
Pegasus Books, 2020

Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at York University, knows perfectly well that any prospective reader in 2020 who sees a book called Reef Life: An Underwater Memoir will immediately think “endangered.” Coral reefs are famously beautiful and multifaceted ecosystems, home to a staggering amount of biodiversity, but the Earth’s rapidly-changing climate is causing a massive die-off of these ecosystems, and naturally, this grim reality is invoked to set a kind of background tone for the book:

Coral reefs are such finely tuned ecosystems that a slight upshift in temperature can cause the death of almost all the coral. We have, in the last four decades, experienced three catastrophic pulses of global warming that have devastated reefs around the world. Scientists predict that without urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such events will increase in frequency and severity. By the end of this century, coral reefs could disappear, taking with them all the richness and wonder forged over hundreds of millions of years. 

Reef Life is a richly impressionistic personal tour of the coral reef world before it’s gone forever. Roberts travels to Saudi Arabia, Australia, the Caribbean … always taking in the color and variety with a keen eye, and always ready to dip into very companionable exposition. “An old ichthyological adage says that the average fish lives ten minutes, given the billions of eggs spawned and the minuscule number that make it to adulthood,” he writes at one point, about the profusion of fish life that always gathers around a healthy coral reef. “It’s not quite that bad, but eggs, larvae and juvenile fish are on the menu for a terrifying number of other reef creatures.” 

The “memoir” part of “an underwater memoir” can occasionally become grating or boring or both. Readers wanting to learn all about coral reefs from one of the world’s leading experts will be a bit frustrated by how often Callum’s novelistic tendencies draw them into petty office politics instead (“You’re fired!” we read at one such point. “Clear your office and get off campus immediately!”). In a Silent Spring-style ecological warning klaxon, this kind of folksy digression might  be inexcusable unless it was done as effectively as Rachel Carson could often do it, but memoirs are notoriously more permissive creatures. Instead, here the element serves to underscore what readers will have known but might have forgotten: it’s real flesh-and-blood people who are out there in the far fishy outposts of the wild world, trying to preserve something old and beautiful from the rising tides. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.