(Not) saving the Great Barrier Reef from disaster: Media then and now

The Great Barrier Reef is the most recognizable of the Australian properties on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage List. At the time of its inscription in 1981, the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted that “if only one coral reef site in the world were to be chosen for the World Heritage List, the Great Barrier Reef is the site to be chosen.” The listing followed the “Save the Reef” campaign, which ran through the 1960s and 1970s and highlighted threats from rapid industrialization and a nation riding a resources boom. Nevertheless, in recent years, the Reef has teetered on being named a “World Heritage Site in Danger,” with similar economic conditions driving its deterioration. Successive mass coral bleaching events have led to the premature reporting of the Reef’s “death,” adding to local and global anxieties about last chances to conserve this doyen of ecological biodiversity. This chapter juxtaposes recent media activism to protect the Reef against the earlier campaign to compare and better understand how these campaigns engaged publics and policy makers by representing and communicating threats, and concludes by considering their capacity to influence long-term conservation policy.