Dean Jacobson is a real hero, standing up alone against the most powerful forces in the country to protect the irreplaceable coral reefs of Majuro from those irresponsible short-sighted persons who want to destroy them for immediate profit and who don’t care about future generations. I wish to fully back his many letters to you, and appeal to FAA to insist on responsible sourcing of landfill for the airport and mitigation for all damages already caused in the past and to happen in the future.

I speak from long personal experience of RMI reefs. My grandfather and father began photographing and doing research on Marshall Islands reefs in the mid 1940s. I filmed reef all around Majuro in 1997 and was shocked at the low coral cover and prevalence of disease on most. This site is one of the best remaining. In the last 5 years I have done numerous projects on RMI coral reef restoration. We get corals to grow much faster than normal, more resistant to environmental stresses including high temperatures, and grow back severely eroding beaches by growing back the coral reefs in front of them. This means that we can protect the islands from sea level rise, using their own untapped energy from the sun, winds, waves, and tidal currents. Not only can we mitigate the damages caused by ongoing and past unsound reef destruction practices, but we can actually grow building materials out of sea water so that reefs can be spared to provide biodiversity, fisheries, and shore protection. Doing so is not a luxury activity for RMI, it is literally a matter of life and death. For more on these alternatives and photographs of actual results in the Marshall Islands please see:

http://www.globalcoral.org/ARNO%20Project%20Report.pdf