The Madness of John Pandolfi and Michelle Gunn
The Madness of John Pandolfi and Michelle Gunn Jennifer Marohasy Next time you read that such and such a percentage of the Great Barrier Reef has already been destroyed by humankind, laugh out loud! I say that not to offend, and not because I don’t care about the corals, but because it is better to laugh than to be drawn into their madness. According to a completely mad research paper published by John Pandolfi and ten other reef researchers – each a high-profile marine biologist including Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Research – the Great Barrier Reef was pristine before the arrival of humans. According to Pandolfi et al. published in the prestigious journal Science in 2003 (entitled ‘Global Trajectories of the Long-Term Decline of Coral Reef Ecosystems’) a rather large 25 percent of the inner Great Barrier Reef was destroyed with the arrival of Australian aborigines. Except that when the Aborigines arrived much of the region