Complicated thoughts after diving Wayaka II

Complicated thoughts after diving Wayaka II

Today, we rented a truck and with our good friends Matt and Christine from Sugar Shack in order to explore the national park here in Bonaire and dived the Wakayama II site.

First the drive through the park was amazing. Surreal, stark landscape of huge cacti and thorny bush over scrublands. Being such a low island, Bonaire is quite arid with the bulk of the fresh water coming from desalination. It was also fun to allow Kyle to get some hours of driving practice on an impressively hard to negotiate dirt road with typical speeds of 5-10 mph.

The site itself was beautiful with a cliff looking over a postage sized beach nestled under very shallow sea-caves. We enjoyed some cold drinks and sandwiches while wading a large yellow angelfish would gently nibble your fingers to see if you had some food. Even with a half dozen of swimmers in the water that angelfish would just hang out with us. Nearby, the absolutely largest parrotfish any of us has ever seen was cruising around – almost four feet long, dark red head and dark green body making it a Rainbow Parrotfish in their terminal phase.

To dive Wayaka II you swim out past piles of dead coral, and not just a little bit of piles, but a catacomb mini-maze of dead coral, then you come out onto a plane that has more dead coral at the bottom in about 20 feet of water. Plenty of parrotfish and sergeant majors, ocean surgeonfish – all of these doing their best to nibble away at the endless amounts of Red Algae covering all the dead coral. Why is this coral dead? This spot is on the NW side of Bonaire inside of a national park, with no history of ships anchoring at this location, no human activity other than diving and snorkeling, and yet it looked bleak and devastated. Perhaps a storm smashed this place. I guess. I hope.

For our dive we swam out to the marker buoy, and then dropped over the shoulder of the reef and went down to 70 feet and turned south. I enjoyed another great traffic flow of Creole Wrasse very busy Going Somewhere. The sponges seemed healthy and there were some brain corals making nice caps between 40 and 80 feet, and the wall was nice. Perhaps in another place it would be a fantastic dive, but in Bonaire due to their incredible stewardship going back to the 1970s you usually get to see healthy coral and a diverse set of wildlife. Here it was mostly dead coral and red algae.

Before we reached the turning point, I gestured to Max for him to stick with Christine for a moment and with Kyle we dropped down a sand chute and took a peek at what at the bottom of the wall where it gave way to sand at 112 feet. Not much different. Our computers warned of our NDL reaching 4 (meaning we had 4 minutes left before we would be under a decompression obligation), so we swam back up and joined the rest of the group at 70 feet. There Matt found a large Spiny Lobster and nearby I found a decent sized Green Moral Eel. Time to turn the dive, so we came up to about 30 feet and followed the shoulder of the reef back to the mooring. All the way, so much Red Algae making me frown.

Later this evening I was reading a thread on a scuba forum that ended up being two climate deniers trolling 3-4 scientist divers. The scientists were so patient and offering so much, and the trolls were even more masterful. But the willful denial and ignorance of the human caused climate change that I was looking at with my own eyes just hours before was very frustrating to read. I chose not to wade in and help the scientist divers with the debate, because why? There is very likely no possible way to change the mind of a denier, and so you are just wasting your own time. Climate change is our greatest existential threat, and if anything I feel that the global scientific community is not being alarmist enough. So shouldn't we get these deniers on board? No. Look at racism. Can you talk someone out of being a neo-nazi or a bigot? Rarely – yes. But Online? Never.

Going forward I am just going to focus on all the things we are doing right to address the challenges of climate change. If I run across a denier, I will not stop and debate and try to get them onboard. We do not have time for that. We did not, nor do we now have time to reason with every sexist or racist before we move towards a more equal society. We do not have time to get every anti-vaxer back in the bus. Yes, I think we must call these deniers out and actually give them a hard time. Yes some public ridicule. Yes. Think about it. If we continue to entertain the “both sides”, well there are some Alberta based geo-scientists and some flare-gas capturing engineers that think there is no climate change issues – let's give them equal footing with the entire rest of the scientific community. That path just leads to more power for those that want inaction and support even more fossil fuel consumption. No way.

Heck, there is a growing movement of people who believe that the Earth is flat, that the moon landing was faked and so was 9-11. I am not going to spend my time debating with any of these forms of ignorance. But I will call them out. They are idiots. Maybe nice idiots, maybe friends or family, but still they are idiots for choosing to follow the easy path instead of acknowledging facts and understanding that science is not belief system. Just like misogynists, and bigots, deniers need to be tossed in the same bucket, and the rest of us just need to get on with handling the existential challenges as best as we can manage. And enjoy the planet we have at the moment – if anything to motivate us in the darker hours of the future.

Originally posted on Facebook on September 21, 2017.