Word: corals
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Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials, Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock, the most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous structures, both in Sydney: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the latter a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the world's most beautiful sites for a ceremonial building, a headland in Sydney Harbor, and surrounded on three sides by sapphire water, this great building...
...CORAL REEFS...
Gore's film presses the point that coral reefs are being bleached because of environmental change. But Burton maintains that the climate does not bear the burden alone. Overfishing and pollution are also to blame...
...coral reefs so important? They constitute a vast, global ecosystem of species of plants and fish that people depend on for food as well as tourist revenue; in some areas, healthy reefs help protect the shore from potentially destructive waves. But arguments about biodiversity don't excite people, so Hodgson, who's trying to get coral on the World Conservation Union's threatened-species Red List, likes to point out that several anticancer drugs are derived from reef species. "Maybe one day a coral will save your life," Hodgson tells skeptics. "That gets to people...
...area of the Philippines, for instance, local leaders asked fishermen who had been making a living by blast-fishing, which destroys reefs, to trade in their trawlers for dive boats. They did, the fish came back to the reefs, the local economy flourished and everyone - tourists, residents, and coral ecologists alike - was happy. In cases like these, one hand washes the other, says NOAA's Eakin. "If healthy coral reefs are your bread and butter, you're going to make sure they're in good shape...