Michael Goldberg and his team of volunteer divers are resurrecting reefs, one coral at a time.

Ken Budd https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/08/saving-and-underwater-world/

Thirty years ago, when Michael Goldberg would dive in the glimmering blue water of the British Virgin Islands, the reefs were teeming with life. “The expanse of these reefs was astounding,” says Goldberg, a cofounder of I.CARE, a Florida-based reef restoration organization. “The corals were so thick and lush.”

Today those reefs are dying. In much of the Atlantic Ocean, including the Florida Keys, where the 61-year-old Goldberg lives, roughly 70-95 percent of the coral is gone, devastated by disease, rising sea temperatures, and other existential threats.

By 2015, as the reefs declined, Goldberg faced a decision. He would either leave the scuba industry — since 2004, he has owned Key Dives, which provides diving and snorkeling on the Keys’ Islamorada reefs — or take action to restore the coral. Fortunately for Florida, the ocean, and humanity, he chose the latter.

In 2019, Goldberg cofounded I.CARE (Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education). The mission: To restore and maintain Islamorada’s reefs by teaming with local businesses, residents, and visitors, including local dive shops and recreational divers. Activities range from underwater trash clean-ups — since 2021, divers have lugged 20,000 pounds of debris to the surface — to coral transplants. Over the past three years, I.CARE has planted over 15,000 corals on six different reefs.

The need is urgent. Coral reefs provide food and shelter to thousands of organisms — crustaceans, fish, anemones, sponges — and protect shorelines from storms and erosion. The reefs’ economic benefits include tourism and commercial and recreational fishing. Coral has even been used in medical technologies such as “bone grafting techniques and possible treatments for diseases including Alzheimer’s and cancer,” I.CARE notes.

“I love educating people about the importance of this, but the most gratifying thing for me is seeing the coral grow,” Goldberg says. “I love seeing little baby corals thrive in a harsher environment than I ever imagined, and knowing that despite all the challenges, we’re seeing success.”

Goldberg’s career initially focused on money management rather than ocean management. His love of the water began when he was a boy in Los Angeles, but his family moved to Chicago when he was 10, and he later studied finance at Northern Illinois University. On a summer trip to Acapulco, he dove for the first time, purely, he says, “as a lark.”

“Someone got me some gear, and I wasn’t certified, and I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. Acapulco is not known for stellar diving experiences, but he loved it: “I was just so enamored with being underwater.”

After that, he was hooked. He earned his diving certification and then moved back to one of L.A.’s beach communities and became an instructor. Before long, he and his wife decided to move to the British Virgin Islands. Eight years later, the couple returned to the United States and opened Key Dives in Islamorada.

Goldberg has made over 10,000 dives, swimming not only with dolphins and schooling sharks, but within 15 feet of a humpback whale as it breached. And yet the vast coral reefs have always intrigued him most, whether diving alone or taking clients off the island of Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands.

“There was this one unique piece of coral that I would swim underneath — it was like a tree,” he says. “Most people want to see fish, but to me, that coral was always the highlight of the dive.”

In 2017, Goldberg met Kylie Smith, who was working on her Ph.D. at Clemson University and studying coral in the Florida Keys. Smith would fill her tank at Key Dives, and Goldberg, who was “already shifting my business toward conservation,” would tap into her aquatic expertise.

“When I met Dr. Smith, I would pepper her with questions — she couldn’t walk in my store and leave in quick fashion,” Goldberg says. Their discussions eventually moved from the dive shop to a beer garden at The Florida Keys Brewing Company. “We would sit and chat, and I kept saying to her, I’ve got an idea to empower recreational divers so that they can become citizen scientists — not only because they want to be part of the solution, but because they need to be a part of the solution. That’s the largest potential boots-on-the-ground army that can enact so much of what we do.”

Those discussions led them to co-launch I.CARE. By January 2021, volunteer divers had transplanted I.CARE’s first corals.

For the coral restoration, divers use coral raised in nurseries. Once it’s planted on the reefs, the coral will, hopefully, reproduce into a coral colony — but the process is slow. It can take 20-50 years for coral to grow large enough to spawn.

To speed up reproduction, I.CARE uses a process called micro-fragmentation. Larger corals are cut into thumbnail-size pieces and grown in a nursery. When those pieces grow to about the size of a 50-cent piece, they are planted edge to edge on a living coral structure. After a few years, the coral fuse to become one larger coral, and they’ll start to spawn in about 7 to 10 years.

For the micro-fragmentation work, I.CARE rescues coral that has broken free from the main reef structure due to storms and substrate erosion.

“What is cool about these corals is that these are the survivors. They are the most resilient, the ones that have persisted despite all the disease and heat,” says Goldberg. “It’s survival of the fittest in the truest sense, and the ones we are using to rebuild our precious reefs.”

Despite the advances, the challenges are huge, both for I.CARE and the planet. During the intense heat of summer 2023, most of I.CARE’s seemingly healthy coral fragments died at one of Goldberg’s favorite reefs. “I cried underwater,” he admits. But he prefers to focus on the organization’s victories. Seventy-seven of the fragments survived and are thriving.

“If I wasn’t optimistic, I wouldn’t keep doing this,” he says. “We’ve had successes, and we can build on those successes.”

When it comes to restoring the reefs for future generations, he offers a simple vow: “We’re not gonna give up.”

Ken Budd has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, and many more. He is the author of an award-winning memoir, The Voluntourist.

This article is featured in the July/August 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.