Help Titouan Save The Reef By Adopting Your Very Own Super Coral Here :
https://bit.ly/39aFAyT
A couple years back, on our very first trip to French Polynesia, where our main focus was filming Humpback Whales, while at the same time keeping our eyes and ears open for any inspiring locals with a rad story to tell. Almost upon arrival just such a person reached out on instagram , a local kid named Titouan Bernicot.
Titouan is, like most local Tahitians, a passionate surfer. The surf in his home waters are generated by large ocean currents slamming into shallow coral reefs. One day at his favorite surf break, he noticed that a lot of the corals were bright white. Curious as to why, he asked around and found out that this meant that the host organisms had vacated their skeletal structure and the corals were essentially dying, in a phenomenon known as coral bleaching.
Shocked and disgusted, Titouan asked what could be done to save the reef, everyone told him to spend his next ten years getting a PHD and then start fighting. That time horizon didn't mesh well with his get it done attitude. So Titouan took on this battle the only way he knew how. He got his closest friends together, dropped out of school and started on his mission to save the reef. The first step was launching his non profit, Coral Gardeners.
When we first me him he was about a year into this project. It was being run from his bedroom in his parents house, and being a 17 year old local kid it was inspiring just to see him care enough about something so much bigger than himself at that age when most are spending their free time chasing short lived pleasures without much thought towards long term consequences, let alone quite literally, trying to save the world.
Fast forward a couple years to when we finally connected with intent to make a short film on his work saving the reef and Titouan has scaled Coral Gardeners into a global power house that focuses on raising awareness on the global destruction of the worlds coral reefs.
What his organization does is take small pieces of coral and plant them in their coral garden, which is a plot of reef in about 10 feet of water about 100 feet behind his parents house. Here they clean and nurture these small coral fragments until they become large individual coral heads which he then takes out onto the reef in order to replant them and repopulate the struggling local reefs.
While this part of his project is extremely exciting, Titouan is wise beyond his years, and realizes that the reality of replanting all of the worlds reefs in a sea that is constantly warming and acidifying, two of the main causes behind coral bleaching and death sentence of so many of the worlds reefs.
Beyond the sheer scale of such a project, replanting corals in the same conditions that killed their brethren doesn't make much sense so he spends every waking hour working tirelessly to raise awareness around this issue in order to stop the problem at the source. If you think his garden is inspiring you should see this dude network!
In only a short few years he has built his bedroom project into a global phenomenon with its own ocean front headquarters, a team of over 20 paid employees, and a social following over half a million strong. He works tirelessly doing everything from educating the kids in his local schools to hosting major influencers to help spread the word and even sponsoring major sporting events like the local world surf league event held in his home waters on the very reefs he's working so tirelessly to save.
This dude is making major waves to the point that this year he was even written up in National Geographic. Not bad for a homegrown project launched from his parents bedroom on his tiny island home in French Polynesia.
Doing everything he can to save the reef he loves so dearly, and seeing what he's accomplished in a few short years before the age of 20, while the state of our oceans at times can seem dismal, with people like Titouan picking up the fight the future seems brighter and brighter by the day.
We had a blast rolling around with him and really getting a deeper look into his operation and how he's managed to accomplish so much with so little. We are really proud of the film that we made and honored to have been given access to such an epic story. Make sure you check it out when it's released in a few weeks. In the meantime check out his website www.coralgardeners.org and adopt a coral of your own.
*THANKS TO RYAN BORNE FOR THE IMAGES FOR THE THUMBNAIL*
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