Is outside in the festival marketplace where you see all those tents out there. Please take this time to silence your cell phones. And were going to talk for a little bit and then well open it up for some. Questions from the audience, okay. So first im going to read. The description from the back of this book because i think it gives you a very good overview of what is in here. But this is what it looks like in hardcover. So go and buy that its gorgeous. So coral reefs are microcosm of our planet extraordinarily diverse deeply deeply interconnected and full of wonders. When theyre thriving these fairy gardens hidden beneath the oceans surface burst with color in life. They sustain entire ecosystems and protect valuable coasts. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented dieoff. Be set by warming oceans pollution damage by humans and a devastating pandemic. Julie burwald travels the world to find the scientists and activists desperately fighting to prevent their loss. Through rescue missions unexpected partnerships and risky experiments. She even helps rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her own struggle with Mental Illness. Were wild explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whos outcome is uncertain life on the rocks is an inspiring lucid meditative ode to the reefs and the beauty of small victories. I couldnt agree with that more and julie received her phd in Ocean Science from the university of southern, california. She is the author of spineless and a science textbook and is a science textbook writer and editor and she has written for a number of publications including the New York Times nature National Geographic and slate. So welcome, julie. Thank you. So julie, i think. First would be good to start with something. That sounds really basic, but i actually think that its also something a lot. Most people dont know. So, can you tell us what is coral and how do you describe it biologically and scientifically . Yeah, so thank you for that. Thanks guys for being here. Its such a pleasure to be at the san antonio book festival. Coral are animals just like we are which is when you look at them. Its a little surprising because they have this incredible like they look floral. You know, this looks like a bouquet but theyre not theyre animals. Theyre very very closely related to jellyfish, which was the topic of my first book. So ive kind of stepped over one one family to the anthazowans which are which actually translates as flower animals. So coral, you know, everyone always knew they looked flowery, but that it wasnt until like us in the 1800s. They just figured out no, theyre animals. They have nervous systems. They have digestive systems. They have muscles, you know, theyre like us but a coral is a colony and each individual is called a polyp in the colony and those polyps are networked together through their nervous systems and their digestive systems. So if one polyp over here eats a plankton, which is what they eat, you know, the nutrition gets shared among the colony and then the colonies together form reefs. So theres a lot of collectiveness in coral, but probably the most like kind of superpower for the coral is this fact that they have made this incredibly intense partnership with algae. And so these algae are singular single cells. Theyre just like plants like trees they can photosynthesize so they can take sunlight and water and Carbon Dioxide and mix it up and get sugar and its its magic right . Its the most amazing thing that happens and the algae live in the corals tissue literally like tattoo embedded in their tissue. And they photosynthesize and then feed 90 of the sugar that they make to the coral and that is the corals main source of nutrition. So while the coral can eat and it does eat it fires stinging cells just like jellyfish do and gets planked in most of its nutrition comes from the energy and this symbiosis is so important and so powerful and so just mmm impressive that the coral have so much extra energy that they can actually use that extra energy from the sugar to build stone. And the stone comes because they have so much energy from the algae. So the algae really are their superpower and the stone becomes the sketler skeletons. Which over the millennia become the reefs and those reefs support a quarter of all marine life in the ocean. So coral, im coral or sort of constrained to the tropics so you can see those dots are where all the coral reefs in the world are and they go between 20 south and a little more than 20 north just because of the way warm water moves in the oceans, but you can see they dont take up very much of the ocean. And in fact those dots are probably oversizing how big some of the reefs are so the coral take up about less than a percent of the oceans area. But like i said disproportionately important for marine ecosystems a quarter of all animals somewhere around people estimate a quarter million animals a species species not animals, but species depend on the coral reefs. So super duper. Important outside is important. The reason you see that those reefs kind of hugging the shorelines is because the coral need to be locate themselves in places where they are shallow enough that theres sunlight for the algae that are like the main source of their energy and theyre also located in the tropics because thats where the dag lengths are longest most of the time right so its all about gathering giving their algae a chance to gather the sunlight. They need to produce so much sugar that they directly feed to the coral. The problem is okay. This is really the only graph but i promise so this graph shows. Okay on the black just pay attention. So 1975 to 2020 one ish on the bottom axis, right . So starting the 70s and then what you see in that brown line that kind of wiggles up and up and up. Thats the temperature of our oceans. So you can see how its been increasing over time the ocean. Has a very high heat specific heat capacity, so it absorbs. Again, an outsized amount of the heat that weve added to our planet through Climate Change through burning fossil fuels and so the ocean is you already at around a degree degree and a half warm or 90 of the heat that the Carbon Dioxide holds that weve emitted from burning fossil fuels 90 of that gone into the ocean. And so the ocean has really like buffered us against some of the worst effects of Climate Change and that is problematic for coral. So if you can see those dots on the bottom those places where i put stars those are places where theyre those are times when there have been what are called mass bleachings. And what a bleaching is. Is im just going to go forward to the next slide. So. Here on the left side. We have a healthy coral and so those little green bubbles up at the top. Those are supposed to be the polyps the individual polyps and then the little green dots inside. Those bubbles are supposed to be the algae. And you can see in a healthy coral everythings green and the algae are happy but in a stressed coral. The algae leave they leave. And they take with them when they leave. Their color which is green the color of chlorophyll for photosynthesis but they also take the sugar that they usually apply the corals so suddenly in a bleached coral there are no algae. Theres also no nutrition or very little nutrition the coral can survive for a few weeks bleached. The cut the symbiosis can be reestablished. But if the heat goes on too long, the coral are white, they remain white and so im going to just pop back to that previous slide for oops. Sorry for a second so you can see that. In the 1970s the and you know 80s there was one mass bleaching in 1983 and this is a place where like a whole region of the ocean will lose their algae and then starting in the late, you know 1990s through the 2000s into the more recent years. Theres been more and more of these mass bleachings and since maybe around 2015 weve been in basically a constant state of mass bleaching somewhere in the world. So the coral of and the algae symbiosis is very very close to the thermal tolerance, and we dont know why but its its this is the fundamental problem for coral around the world. And this is what a bleached reef looks like. Its just looks like a pile of bones and so when a reef bleaches, like i said if the water doesnt cool down, soon enough the eventually the coral will starve to death and i and along with it all of the animals that make their homes on the reef. So thats kind of the critical position that were in right now with the coral reefs. And i hate to leave this ugly picture up here, but well look for a moment in the book. You do describe the trouble that coral is in because of Climate Change, but another thing i got is that coral is also highly adaptive which it seems can give us the knowledge that we need to be able to save them and you describe a lot of the technology that to me pointed to Something Interesting which is that humans are causing. The Climate Change thats causing these problems, but we also have the the capacity to invent solutions right. So could you talk a little bit about that and you know what are some of these technologies and and inventions that people are thinking about yeah, so when i wanted to write this book about coral, you know, i knew this i was a scientist. I knew the the situation with coral was very bleak, but what i discovered in the book was that its not over. Coral theres a huge amount of diversity out on the reef whenever you have a mass bleaching there are always survivors. So theres genetic diversity. Theres species diversity. Theres probably 800 species of coral and they seem to respond differently and theres also different species of algae that can repopulate i believe bleached coral after a bleaching so theres so what the book does is i tried to follow some of the stories where i found hope and where i found successes around the health of coral reefs, and so ill share two of those with you this. Oops. Sorry, this is sulawesi. Its an indonesia. And this project is spearheaded by the Mars Candy Bar Company, which is a little unexpected, but they have chocolate factories and places where there are reefs in tropical places around the world and a lot of people who work in those factories. Benefit from fishing on the reefs about between a half a billion and a billion people get their primary source of protein from coral reefs, so its not just an ecosystem problem. Its a humanitarian problem as well. And so frank mars whos the grandson of the person who started the Mars Candy Bar Company was like what can we do to support the health of reefs in indonesia where they play an Important Role in peoples primary food source. And so this is what . A reef looks like in indonesia thats been destroyed and this is not Climate Change. This is actually something called last fishing. So in indonesia, and not just an indonesia in many parts of the world because of poverty. There are some fishermen who will use bombs to fish because its a its a i know its illegal, but you know, theres complicated its hard for we shouldnt. Necessarily judge in a way because theres a lot of poverty and corruption in these places too that and people need to speed their families so blast fishing occurs, and when theres blast fishing, it doesnt just get the fish near where the bomb is set. Its also destroys the reef and this is a 30 year old scar. So like this reef has been this it cant reestablish itself. But what the Mars Candy Bar Company did was they teamed up with some boat makers and engineered these the guy holding it up on the top right there. You can see they call them a reef star. Its simple to make its made out of rebar any boat maker in any island on the world could make it they cover it with boat resin and then you can see this family here. Theyre putting local sand on top of it so that the coral can grab onto it and then what they do is they pay local fishermen to tie the coral on and these are coral theyre called corals of opportunity fragments that are broken loose by Natural Causes on the reef through way back action and and then they network them together into like a galaxy of restarts and and then about 18 months later the reef recovers. And you can see that just one reef star is left here in the front of this picture after three years. The reef is healed and so there is this opportunity for as we move into a time when the corals we know theyre going to be stressed and the reefs are going to be stressed. Theres this opportunity for us to create reefs that are really healthy and just like us kind of going into the pandemic or us knowing were going to period of stressful time the healthier we are before we hit. These these rough stressful patches the better the more likely hood there is for survival. And so thats thats what a lot of people are working on in different parts of the world. Thats really beautiful to see that. Yeah, lets leave that picture. So, you know, youre so good at explaining the science, but i also this is my second time interviewing julie. I interviewed you about spineless, and i just i love your storytelling. Youre such a good writer and youre you do such interesting things with narrative. So, you know, this book likes find this also reads at times like memoir like travelogue the way you describe people. I mean it just like the way that you bring. Your experience to life. I just feel like im stepping into your shoes, and i was wondering if you could talk a little about your journey as a writer. How did you . How did you get into science writing, but also how did you get into this kind of writing and how do you see this genre . You know, how do you look at the genre that youre writing in . Um, so yeah, so as i mean i started off as a as a scientist and i i realized when i was in my ive always been a book person. Like ive always just read and read voraciously and i read a lot of fiction, i read a lot of memoir and every time i would read a science book, i would close it and i would be like, okay, i like the information. But i could never write a book like that. And i would put on my nightstand and be like, ah, i probably will never be an author like i could never get to the point of writing a book. And then one time i closed one of those books and i put on my nightstand and im like i could never write a book like that. I could only write a book that includes my voice and my story and telling my reader who i am and trying to include, you know, travel and what it is like to understand science and not understand science and try to figure things out. Thats the kind of book i could write and so i kind of like in this i could never write a book like that, you know changing the inflection made me realize. Oh, i have to tell my read i want my reader to want to turn the next page. I want my reader to follow along with me in my exploration of whatever im interested in and im gonna i could i need to be vulnerable. I need to say, i dont know and im confused or frustrated or whatever it is thats happening because i think thats part of the joy for me of thing is is being with whoevers you know, the author of the book in their their journey, and and so i started writing. Yeah a lot of kind of like this memoir science mashup thing, and i didnt know if it was gonna work but as soon it was the only way i was going to be able to write and yeah for spineless the first book i wrote i did have trouble selling it i i had agents tell me yeah, ill i would love to represent this book, but i you need to take all the memoir out of it and i said but thats not the book. In fact, i did go with an agent for a while who that was her vision and i had to break up with her which was very scary. But now i you know, but then i found both an age and an editor who really see my vision and are good with it and whered i see this sean were going i think its expanding right like i think theres more people who are writing in this way and i also have sort of a philosophical sense that i read this book in grad school. It was called the end of science. And it basically talked about how in the renaissance and science and art were connected, you know like davinci. Did everything right . Well heat i mean, but you know art and science they were they fed each other. They were part of each others story and and that was really a beautiful time in a lot of ways. It wasnt in other ways. But anyway, then we had you know this period of like Industrial Revolution and and scientific renaissance scientific revolution and the arts and the sciences became separated and they made a ton of progress that way, you know, the science really made a ton of progress and this book held that until we unite art and science again. Science is going to be stuck. Its going to get stuck and i think were seeing some evidence of that right now in people not believing science people. Feeling like science is able to be discountable and in scientists not being able to communicate that well. With people who need to hear science, so i do have yeah, its almost like a mission to bring these things together because i do believe progress can be made when art and science feed each other and i think they really do. Thats really fascinating. Can we hear a little bit . Okay. Yeah. Okay. Im just going to read a short little bit. So this book like i said, theres memoir in it and this is this book was written as the pandemic hit so my my experiences of coming through the pandemic are in this book and this a section where im trying to make sense of what . Learned about the genetic diversity of coral but also the fact that like i wasnt able to go to australia to talk, you know to be in the presence of the scientists who are looking at corals genetic diversity. Okay. As the quarantine were on i thought often of stories and their form. Stories follow waves they rise and fall and we are sucked into the energy of their action. When the wave crashes the story ends and we walk away satisfied with the ending. While all waves resemble one another inform like every story each wave is different. There are none the same height breath or frequency. There is variation from the slight ripple to the mass of tsunami. Corals live beneath the waves witness to the forever motion of the moons pool and the spinning of the earth. They house myriad stories, which they share through the generations. Spun together with the golden rays of the sun and recorded in the layers of stone at their feet. For them the stories form is not a crescendo falling to completion. It is an endless tale one that existed before the very notion of story and that will endure well beyond. For coral like the water receives like the water. He sees above the story will change form. It will likely fall to pieces contracting for a while into something less sub