I reached him by phone a while after that. “Well, I’m sixty-four years old,” he explained, “and the probability is that if I remain healthy and active I will see this process in my lifetime. I’ve got two young children, and they’ll certainly see the end of the Great Barrier Reef if they live a normal life. That’s how immediate this is. There is no doubt about it. If there was a doubt, boy, I would jump on it, and so would a lot of other scientists. The thing is, though, that there isn’t any doubt.”

I should stress that this is the conviction of a man who has probably spent more time in direct communion with coral reefs than any other human being who has ever lived. Something like 7,000 hours, by his own estimation — the equivalent, in terms of more common careers, of more than three full years of forty-hour workweeks. Breathing underwater, immersed in the teeming life of the reef. I think I can safely state that there is no one on earth more fully invested in its survival.

This is why there’s a certain kind of uncommon heroism in the simple fact that Veron’s response to this existential threat to his spiritual home has been to commit himself wholeheartedly to the act of trying to save it. It’s a quixotic if not wholly futile mission, according to his own well-founded scientific convictions. To know better than anyone the vanishing slimness of your chances and to take action anyway — Sisyphus would recognize that choice. It is an act of faith in the human spirit, its ability to adapt and renew, one as wholehearted and profound as any I’ve known.

It could be the cornerstone, all by itself, of an enduring Anthropocene ecological consciousness — to act knowing much of the loss has already been tabulated, because not to act would be to deny the basic right of humanity to its own survival, to deny our children the right to their dreams. “I’m not trying now to talk up saving the Great Barrier Reef, because I think it’s a lost cause” — this is how Veron puts it. “I am talking up: Look at the Great Barrier Reef and think about it. Do we want the rest of this planet to follow suit?” Still, lost cause or not, the Great Barrier Reef remains dear enough to him that he couldn’t stand idly by and let it be defaced for no good reason. And so it’s understandable that he would react with utter contempt upon learning of the plan to bring industrial oil drilling equipment to the Great Barrier Reef — “an exceedingly dumb thing,” in his estimation — and that’d he’d leap at the chance to unfurl a banner in its defence, as conventional an act as that is.

The most salient thing about his protest for me, though — the detail that points the way toward a sturdier new frame for Anthropocene ecological action — is not the banner or the reef, but the apparatus that permitted Veron to breathe freely as he posed there. The scuba gear, I mean.

This is indeed one of the most curious and surprising things about Veron’s career: after he finished his Ph.D. in the neurophysiology of dragonflies back in the early 1970s, his sole qualification when he applied for a vacant post as a coral researcher at James Cook University on the Queensland coast was that he was a certified scuba diver. Had he not become a recreational diver while he was a student down south near Sydney, he’d never have found his way to the Great Barrier Reef.

What’s more, he became pretty much the first coral taxonomist to conduct extensive underwater field research. The whole body of knowledge on the nature of corals and the reefs they build was to that point based on the lab-based study of specimens. Veron’s scuba-aided work quickly dispelled a whole range of faulty theories. We simply wouldn’t know how the reef works as a living system, nor the true nature of the trouble it’s in, if Charlie Veron hadn’t learned to breathe underwater.

Another Anthropocene irony: neither Veron nor anyone else would have been able to breathe underwater in the first place were it not for the whole smog-belching mess of modern industry. There are indeed few things a human being can do that are as wholly industrial — as totally dependent on the development of an industrial society so complex and muscular it has changed the very chemistry of the seas — as scuba diving.

This is why, to my mind, Veron’s underwater protest got the framing all wrong. We’re not trying to keep the reef great, and his own writing attests to the fact that we’re past saving the reef in anything like its present condition. We’re trying, actually, to save scuba. To conserve a place on this planet for nearly seven billion people and counting, and for the whole baroque industrial society that permitted us to swell to such ranks, and to produce industrial quantities of the rubber and tempered glass and polyurethane and neoprene that have enabled us to come to know the reef firsthand.

This is no semantic exercise. This is a fundamental redress of environmentalism’s assumptions and priorities — of its basic frame. A focal shift from the pristine and natural to the unnatural and artificial, from salvation and conservation to self-preservation, from primordial ecosystems to modern industry. And so it might as well begin with the profoundly unnatural, self-preserving, industrial-grade act of scuba diving itself.

sanary-sur-mer, france / 43°7’ n, 5°48’ e / depth: variable / june 1943

In the winter of 1942, a French engineer named Emile Gagnan developed a special demand valve that would allow motor vehicles to run on cooking gas. Conventional gasoline had become nearly impossible to obtain in Nazi-occupied France, and Gagnan’s valve was designed to automatically feed cooking gas into a car’s motor at the steady rate it required to run properly. When his friend Jacques Cousteau came to him around the same time, coincidentally looking for assistance with a similar problem regarding airflow for an underwater diving system, he adapted his cooking-gas valve to solve it. Gagnan’s demand regulator — a valve held in place on the diver’s face by a mouthpiece — was the final, essential piece of equipment needed to permit safe, effortless breathing underwater. Gagnan shipped a complete “aqualung” system to Cousteau’s home on the French Riviera the following June, and Cousteau and his small cohort of diving pioneers logged more than 500 dives in the picturesque coves surrounding Sanary-sur-Mer that summer alone. In the summer of 1943, in the shadow of catastrophe, they invented scuba diving.

The history of diving is a kind of shadow history of the industrial age, mostly incidental to the primary arc of the story but wholly dependent on it, culminating in the serendipitous development of the demand regulator out of wartime motoring necessity. The first diving suits were produced in the 1850s from canvas rendered waterproof by a layer of mixed rubber and naphtha (a by-product of oil refining). The breakthrough in medical science that would eventually make diving safe — the discovery of the cause of the bends and how to prevent them — came a quarter century later, during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge’s workers toiled on its foundations in “caissons” — giant, bottomless wooden boxes sunk into the bed of the East River and pumped full of compressed air to hold back the water. Several workers died and dozens more were gravely injured before doctors figured out that their patients needed to readjust more slowly to the lower air pressure at the surface to avoid decompression sickness. Another half-century later, in 1930, neoprene, the preferred material for modern wetsuits, became the first synthetic rubber ever invented when DuPont developed it for use in automobile gaskets and hoses. And so on, from the tempered glass of the dive mask to the polyurethane in the stiff, distended toe of the standard diving fin. Scuba’s raw materials were the by-products and afterthoughts of the great industrial powers’ quest for bigger and better bridges and cars and war machines.

In the towering shadows cast by this ever-expanding industrial order, another parallel history emerged. It began, more or less, with Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond — a deliberate, principled rejection of industrial society as a whole. Contemporary environmentalism traces a direct line of descent back through Greenpeace, Rachel Carson, and John Muir to Thoreau’s handmade cabin in the Massachusetts woodlot owned by fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and among its strongest links to Walden has been an enduring anti-industrial bias. With good cause, of course. The culprit in almost every environmental crisis the movement has tackled — from the despoiling of animal habitat to Carson’s ddt-poisoned birds to reef-killing greenhouse gas emissions — has been the resource-devouring, waste-belching march of modern industry. Thoreau’s cause was righteous, his critique of industrial society trenchant, and it’d be no stretch to argue that the acidification of the world’s oceans is a sort of ultimate proof of Walden’s profound, prophetic truths.

If, however, the goal of environmentalism in the Thoreauvian tradition was to halt the march of rapacious industry, that same pH imbalance might best be understood as the litmus test of the movement’s failure. After more than a century of advocacy and action employing Thoreau’s frame, the earth’s natural wonders have never been closer to collapse. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” — so goes a widely cited aphorism attributed alternately to Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Chinese proverb (it appears actually to originate with the American mystery novelist Rita Mae Brown). What if, instead, we followed the lead of another nineteenth-century prophet, a writer whose work predicted the advent of an eye-popping world of air conditioning, space travel, the helicopter, and — most famously — the untrammelled exploration of the subaquatic realm?

Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea was published in 1870, just sixteen years after Thoreau’s Walden diary. In one particularly prescient passage, Verne’s Captain Nemo describes to Professor Aronnax a new kind of “diving apparatus” — one freed of the rubber hose attaching it to a ship, instead employing an iron tank of compressed air worn like a backpack, feeding the diver through a mouthpiece fitted with a tongue-operated regulator. The diver would then use a sort of sodium-carbon lamp (analogous to sodium gas lamps not produced commercially until the 1930s) to light his way. “Thus provided,” Nemo informs the enthralled Aronnax, “I can breathe and I can see.”

In 20,000 Leagues and other fantastical tales, Verne imagined a glittering world of wonders made possible by modern science and its industrial adjuncts. In so doing, he created the literary genre of science fiction, which, despite its penchant for dystopian scenarios, has proven, in the aggregate, to be at least as rich a repository of hope for an enlightened human future as Thoreauvian environmentalism has. And certainly the world most of us live in today looks much more like a Jules Verne novel than a primordial New England forest.

And so an Anthropocene ecological consciousness, emerging from the daily more manifest observation that the natural world has become as much a product of human invention as submarines and flying machines, might — it follows — be more in keeping with Verne than with Thoreau. It might, for starters, pick up a thread common to almost all science fiction: the idea that our future will by necessity be very, very different both from today and from some idealized pastoral past, likely much more artificial, and yet luminous in the constellations of possibility it offers.

There is indeed a whole emerging school of futurist thinking inspired by this aspect of sci-fi, one particularly prevalent in the pronouncements of digital-communications prophets. Sci-fi, so this line of reasoning posits, is the last real “literature of ideas,” because it alone allows sufficient room for speculation on the limitless possibilities created by modern technology. Sci-fi-inspired futurism is not inherently materialistic: it is not about gadgets but rather about the staggeringly broad options for new ways of life being created in the digital age. In recent years, the Verne school has come to commingle with certain strains of post-Thoreau environmentalism — ones rooted mainly in urban spaces, interested as much in city planning and the energy economy as in whales and rainforests. And in that cross-pollination, we’ve begun to see the scaffolding of a new frame.

“Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism,” argues sci-fi author and futurist Bruce Sterling. “Like the New Age mystic echo of Judeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn’t do or say anything conceptually novel — nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.” In place of these Thoreauvian hair shirts, Sterling argues for a new frame constructed on the foundation of “sustainability,” broadly defined as that which “navigate[s] successfully through time and space.” Like certain of Jules Verne’s amazing machines, perhaps. Or like any given diver on any old reef, breathing freely underwater.

Or like that exhilarated fatigue I’ve always felt at the end of a dive — a sort of quiet triumph, a sense of wonderment at having gone somewhere so far from the workaday norm and passed through without incident, emerging finally, reborn, to see the world with anointed eyes.

koh phi phi, thailand / 7°46’ n, 98°47’ e / depth: 16 metres / january 2006

The record in my log of my fourth open-water dive reports my time at depth, breathing underwater, at just forty-four minutes. I find that hard to reconcile with the vividness and variety of the memories. We were diving a fringing reef not far from the cluttered resort island of Koh Phi Phi in southern Thailand. There were four of us on the dive — three students plus our instructor — and we’d intersected with another foursome from our boat down at the base of the reef wall to form a rapt, floating semicircle around a slumbering leopard shark for what felt like half an hour all by itself. We’d also taken advantage of the seeming weightlessness of neutral buoyancy to stage a mock punch-up in the style of The Matrix for the dive shop’s digital underwater video camera. And then our instructor had taken us, finally, on the one part of the dive he’d told us ahead of time we shouldn’t note in our logs. Because we weren’t yet licensed open-water divers, we weren’t technically allowed to navigate a coral cave.

He led us up the coral wall to a jagged oblong opening midway up the face. The cave was shadowed and dense with what seemed like an impenetrable mesh wall of inch-long silver fish. I remember only a twinge of anxiety in the wave of dawning exhilaration. The tiny fish, I’d later learn, are called silversides, and as they bobbed in the current their bodies would flip in undulating waves from shadowy blue-black to brilliant silver when they caught the mottled light from the surface. They formed a shimmering curtain at the cave’s mouth, and they parted as I entered, as if responding to some automated infrared sensor, the vast shoal forming a perfect, swirling outline of my body to let me pass. They must have numbered in the thousands. For a long time, researchers believed that schools of fish had leaders, that each individual was responding to some chain of near-instantaneous cues, like a precision drill team. But more recently, they’ve come to understand that in anything but single digits the fish form a kind of unified collective, “more like a single organism than a collection of individuals.” (The researcher Brian L. Partridge was specifically describing a school of silversides when he wrote that.)

For some indeterminate, fleeting moment that stretched out toward eternity, I was part of their unity. I was completely enveloped in them, a second skin of wriggling fish separated from my own by a few centimetres of sea water, nary a single one so much as brushing against my flapping fins. Wrapped in neoprene, freighted under a tank of some heavy steel alloy, ten metres below the nearest breath of fresh air — poised, that is, in a position beyond human experience for all but the past few decades of our existence — I felt a moment of communion with nature as close to total as I’ve ever had, and as transcendent as I could ever hope for.

I returned from my sacred rite with the silversides to the patio of a concrete tourist bungalow along the dense waterfront pathway of Koh Phi Phi, where I watched the sun set in a gentle orange sigh as the bars and clubs up and down the beach growled to life. Not even a tenth of the average night’s tourist population could fit aboard all the island’s dive boats, and no doubt only a tiny minority had bothered with the reef. One fundamental goal of the past 150 years of industrial age environmentalism has been to convey somehow a sense of wonder and respect for the natural world — the same soulful quietude Thoreau discovered after many months in the woods — to those who have lost or not yet found it. To raise the collective consciousness, thus to alter and finally invert forever our sense of humanity’s place in the natural hierarchy — no longer seeking dominion and depletion, but instead pursuing rehabilitation, preservation, harmony.