From loss to life: How a Canadian ocean scientist keeps her hope alive | Canada Voices

Canadian marine ecologist Karen Filbee-Dexter has grieved for a celebrated kelp forest scorched into extinction by a summer heat wave in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia.

She’s also discovered five-meter-tall sugar kelp flourishing under the ice in Canada‘s Arctic where such a forest was not expected to exist.

The cost of climate change has broken her heart. And the remarkable resilience of nature has patched it up again.

This is how it goes when you study the vulnerable life under an ocean we still barely understand. The damaged-yet-resilient sea makes you weep then laugh, fear then hope. Tossed in the waves, Dr. Filbee-Dexter says, you keep researching and publishing and hoping for stronger action.

Being part of the solution, even in a small way, “is an easier way to get up in the morning.”

Last November, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, Dr. Filbee-Dexter sat in a session, cuddling her five-month old daughter. A researcher was explaining a chart projecting the life-altering rise of global temperatures to 2100. Looking down at Ida, she realized her daughter would turn 75 that year. In that moment, her calling become personal, forever shaped by a mother’s responsibility.

“You want the world to be a good place for her, and you’re going to do everything in your power to make that happen.”

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On a Wednesday in May, with the tide falling, Dr. Filbee-Dexter, 36, hops across the silvery smooth boulders at Paddy’s Head, watching the water for leather blades of kelp to appear at the surface.

Finding none, she wonders if the ocean has become too warm so close to shore, and the kelp have already moved farther out.

Yet even this thought can’t dampen her joy at being back in Nova Scotia for a family visit. And the rocky cover at Paddy’s Head, 25 kilometres from where she grew up, is particularly special to her.

As a teenager, she sailed competitively in the bay, believing the best part of the ocean was on the surface. But while studying marine ecology at Dalhousie University, she learned to dive at Paddy’s Head. Where the water crashes into foam at the mouth of the cove, she swam into the silent beauty of her first kelp forest.

From a sailboat, the random restlessness of the Atlantic ocean is dark and opaque. But dive deep, Dr. Filbee-Dexter says, and the forest below sways to its own silent rhythm. Light beams spotlight the pink algae, red seaweed and golden kelp. Fish and sea life flicker past. “It’s an underwater cathedral,” she says. “I fell in love.”

Still, Dr. Filbee-Dexter is not one to romanticize reality.

Kelp forests border coastlines around the world. They make up about one third of the earth’s seaweed ecosystems, which altogether cover an estimated six-million square kilometres, roughly the same size as the Amazon rainforest.

Kelp provides a safe habitat and essential nutrients for sea life; for the land-lubbing animals like us, these forests are also valuable environmental safeguards, absorbing and storing carbon dioxide.

But like the land forests, they are shrinking, far faster than they can be restored.

Dr. Filbee-Dexter first witnessed the devastation caused by climate change in the ocean backyard of her childhood home.

In the 1972s, the science journal Nature published an article on a bountiful kelp forest off Lukes Island in St. Margaret’s Bay. Four decades later, Dr. Filbee-Dexter dove down to record its declining condition and found only turf and stone. “Imagine you go looking for a forest, and not a single tree is left,” she says.

Nothing humans can do now, will reverse all this damage, she says. In some places, scientists can restore or protect thousands of acres of kelp forest, but the world is potentially losing millions of acres more.

And yet, Dr. Filbee-Dexter still sees hope and possibility – under the sea and on the shore, and, especially, in her daughter’s bright, blue eyes. “The world is still wonderful, even if it’s changing.”

Every spring, at the University of Western Australia, where she is a senior lecturer, Dr. Filbee-Dexter gives what she calls the Ocean Optimism lecture to an upcoming class of marine scientists. She begins by presenting the signs that make her hopeful – the small increases in the population of whales and sea turtles, the growing support for protected areas.

Nature can still surprise us, she says. Consider that lush kelp forest, thriving under Canada‘s Arctic ice. “It was magical,” says Dr. Filbee-Dexter, recalling the laughter she shared with her diving partner at the unexpected sight of all those lasagna-noodle shaped clusters, teeming with diverse sea creatures.

New discoveries, public action, an acceptance of climate change science – this is all important progress since her own PhD work in 2008. “We are in the solution age,” she likes to say, and many of those solutions are within our reach.

In British Columbia, for instance, kelp forests have died because the loss of urchin-eating sea otters toppled the eco-system’s balance; bring the otters back, she suggests, and they will start the remediation for us. The public beach clean-ups, the advocacy for more eco-funding – these actions also make a difference.

The Ocean Optimism lecture is a chance for the students to discuss how to balance a sense of purpose against what is often demoralizing pessimism. Some restorations projects fail, some valuable science gets ignored. “It’s not your fault. you’ve done everything you possibly can,” she tells them. Share the results, and try again.

She reminds the students – and all of us – that there’s a human ecosystem not giving up.

“Imagine that you are part of a million other people and we’re all in our lanes,” she often says. Someone’s working on solar panels; someone’s saving the sea otters; someone’s restoring a kelp forest. “Everyone is sprinting and doing their very best. If you can make a tiny difference, and everyone else is doing the same, we’re going to get there.”