Co-Relation

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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
In an email this morning, Mat Honan, Editor in Chief of the MIT “Technology Review”, writes:
Relationships are the stories of people and systems working together. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes for practicality. Sometimes by force. Too often, for purely transactional reasons.

Relationships connect us to one another, but also to the machines, platforms, technologies, and systems that mediate modern life. They’re behind the partnerships that make breakthroughs possible, the networks that help ideas spread, and the bonds that build trust…”
Our world is complicated by ambition and technology. Systems, invented for the efficiency of the managers, do not always serve the users well. And partners sometimes fail to remember that success is measured by the success of mutual, not singular, benefit. That MIT is addressing the issue in its eminent journal is a sign of a problem, perhaps a solution, of some significance.
I received the same day a review copy from the University of Minnesota Press of a new title from its Forerunners: Ideas First series of “short books of thought-in-process” scholarship, entitled “CORALATIONS”, by Melody Jue, an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a philosophical exploration of media representation of coral reefs, how various technologies can, through co-relation, expand our understanding of natural resources “beyond the dominant narrative about their endangerment.”
East coast. West coast. A co-relation or an accident?
What captured my attention first about Professor Jue’s book was the color of its cover: Pantone 16- 1546, an established hue from a systematic identification of color used by designers to maintain a consistent catalogue for universal use. Pantone 16-1546 is named “Living Coral,” and is a particularly beautiful expression of oranges and reds associated with some tropical corals familiar to us all. Like Red Coral, encountered in Nature, the brilliance, balanced by filtered water and light, demands attention.
But corals run the rainbow spectrum, and that co-relation, not just of color, but of shape and movement, is the life essence of an ecosystem connected by interdependency and functionality, identified as in Jue’s book as building, softness, coldness, grafting, and optimization. The pun, coral-ations, declares the author’s intent not “about applying abstract theory of co-relation to the study of coral, but about addressing the implications of co-relating corals with the tropics, color, symbiosis, books as archival media, and photography – and how this impacts how we write about climate change.” The book is smart, succinct, and provocative by its amalgam of media as means to understand something both real and ephemeral, distant and living, evoked by media presentation, published and broadcast as close and invaluable, articulated, not just for information and aesthetics, but more importantly for our understanding of coral as biodiversity, a multiplicity of life forms, source of ecological value, beauty, and surprise.
Professor Jue suggests even greater points of value: the synchronicity of natural systems, the impact of human systems, the extent of loss, the reciprocity in Nature, the moral dimension, the moral quandary, the cosmic beauty of it all, underwater, faraway but perceived through technical forms of media that, while distant, are as clear, and as inspirational as the galaxies far away.
I confess I was captured by this small book, by how complexity might be rendered simple, how invisibility might be made visible, how coral, as one form of Nature, might be made to stand for all forms, all colors, how the intellectual might be rendered spiritual by the openness of our minds, by emotion, commitment, and partnership expressed as systematic sustainability and co-related conservation, by the best of human nature, by respect, by love.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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