Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. Marking Earth Day 2026, the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI) released its 2025 Healthy Reefs Report Card, revealing early signs of recovery and renewed hope for Little Cayman’s reefs after the most extreme coral bleaching event on record in 2023.

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever measured, and it brought with it one of the most extensive global coral bleaching events in modern history, decimating reefs from the Caribbean to the Indo-Pacific and casting their future in doubt. CCMI’s Healthy Reefs campaign has tracked Little Cayman’s reefs since 1998, and the 2024 surveys delivered the bleakest numbers in the program’s history: coral cover had collapsed to 9.8 percent, down from 26 percent before the marine heatwave.

This year’s data tells a different story. The 2025 surveys, summarized in the new Report Card, show coral cover edging back up to 13.4 percent. The shift is not yet statistically significant, but the direction is unmistakable: recovery in Little Cayman has begun.

A site-by-site picture

Zoom in from the island-wide average and the recovery looks more layered. Twenty percent of surveyed sites posted a significant increase in coral cover between 2024 and 2025. One site, Coral City, held the line entirely through the bleaching, exhibiting no significant loss. In total, 30 percent of sites have either maintained pre-bleaching coral levels or demonstrated significant recovery this year. The remaining 70 percent show either minor, non-significant recovery or no recovery at all.

Reef recovery is rarely visible on a 12 to 24 month horizon. Corals are slow-growing animals, and even after a disturbance ends, biologists typically expect at least three years before measurable rebound, and a minimum of seven years (sometimes nearly thirty) for a reef to return to pre-bleaching baselines. Against that timeline, what CCMI is recording in 2025 is striking: the resilience built into Little Cayman, with strong protections and minimal local disturbance, appears to be doing exactly what reef science predicts it should do.

Fish populations holding the line

While coral cover is still climbing back, fish populations have continued to thrive. CCMI has documented consistent increases in fish density since 2016, with a dramatic jump in density and biomass in 2024 that held through 2025. That matters more than it might sound: herbivorous fish keep macro-algae in check, and when algae is left unchecked it can smother corals and block new recruits from settling. A healthy reef-fish community is, in many ways, what makes coral recovery possible at all.

A Hope Spot earning its name

Little Cayman is a Mission Blue Hope Spot, a designation that frames the island as a small-but-mighty example of what marine protection can look like when conservation is prioritized. Under the pressures the ocean is now under, that framing reads less like marketing copy and more like a working hypothesis the reef is steadily proving out.

The island has form here. Little Cayman’s Nassau grouper spawning aggregation rebounded from roughly 1,000 individuals to nearly 9,000 over a decade, one of the most cited recovery stories in the Caribbean. The early coral signal in the 2025 Report Card could become another chapter in that record.

The nursery, and three resilient genotypes

CCMI’s coral nursery was hit hard during the 2023 bleaching, losing close to 90 percent of its stock. Genetic work in the aftermath identified three staghorn coral genotypes that survived nearly 20 degree-heating weeks. Since 2023, those three genotypes have rebuilt the nursery from just 17 fragments to nearly 300 as of March 2026. CCMI’s nursery likely represents one of the last remaining populations of the critically endangered staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, in Little Cayman.

Why this matters beyond Little Cayman

Hope Spots like Little Cayman do not just protect their own waters. They function as larval source populations, exporting recruits along ocean currents to less resilient reefs downstream. In a warming ocean where many sites have lost their capacity to bounce back unaided, these pockets of resilience are increasingly the difference between regional collapse and regional recovery.

The 2025 numbers do not erase what 2023 took. Coral cover is still well below pre-heatwave levels, and the recovery is partial, uneven, and fragile. But for the first time since the bleaching, the trendline is pointing in the right direction. As CCMI puts it, research and science-based actions are critical right now to understand the ecological processes driving this resilience and to translate that understanding into management and protection.

Acknowledgments

CCMI thanks this year’s Healthy Reefs sponsors: Wheaton Precious Metals International, Foster’s Supermarket, Cayman Water, and Ugland Properties; and the Restoration program sponsors who made the work possible: The Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust, Artex Cayman Islands, Walkers, and Marfire.

Read the full 2025 Healthy Reefs Report Card at tinyurl.com/CCMI-25HRR and learn more about the Healthy Reefs campaign at reefresearch.org/our-work/research/healthy-reefs/.

Adapted from a press release issued by the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI), April 22, 2026. Photo credit: CCMI.

“They came back,” says biologist Donald Webster. “This year.” His voice has a wistful note, wondering if the king of ducks, as the beautiful, crimson-headed canvasback is known, will return to rule Chesapeake Bay winter after winter. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the U.S. and the third largest in the world. It’s one of the globe’s most productive waterbodies.

Bundled in parka, gloves and hat, Webster, who recently retired as a waterfowl habitat biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), raises his binoculars near a seawall at the confluence of Chesapeake Bay and the Choptank River. The Choptank is one of the bay’s 19 major tributaries. The overlook is a mecca for wintering canvasbacks and other ducks.

“Canvasbacks, the ducks everyone comes to see, are usually here in force by Christmas,” Webster says. “They stay until just before St. Patrick’s Day, then they’re gone, heading north to nesting grounds.”

Skeins of Waterfowl

On this January morning with northwest winds and temperatures that hover just above freezing, the canvasbacks’ red heads stand out in winter-dark waters. The ducks glide near the seawall, where photographers jostle for the quintessential shot of an iconic Chesapeake species. “This place is known as the ‘wall of shame,'” laughs Webster, “because it’s almost too easy to get great canvasback pictures here.”

Chesapeake skies fill with migrating seaducks – canvasbacks, buffleheads, greater and lesser scaup, and many others – from December through March. The bay is the Atlantic Coast’s most important waterfowl migration and wintering area. The Chesapeake offers refuge to 24 species of ducks as well as Canada geese, greater snow geese and tundra swans.

“Long-term worsening of the bay’s water quality, however, and loss of habitat, especially the seagrasses so many of these birds depend on, have contributed to declines in wintering waterfowl populations,” says Webster.

Seesawing Seagrass Estimates

An estimated 82,778 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) remained in the bay and its tributaries in 2024, the most recent year with available data, down from historic levels that may have reached more than 600,000 acres. Globally, seagrasses have declined almost 30% since the late 1800s; a football field worth of seagrass now disappears every second.

There’s good and bad news in the 2024 Chesapeake Bay SAV estimate. It’s a significant increase over the 38,958 acres observed in the first survey in 1984. But it’s a large decrease from 2018, with its 108,078 acres of underwater grasses. Although the exact reasons for the decline aren’t known, one culprit may be high river flows that reduce water clarity and block sunlight from reaching the grasses.

“This is a dynamic ecosystem with natural variation in SAV from year to year,” says Chris Patrick of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “In the context of the decades of data we’ve collected, we remain on a positive trajectory.”

In 2011, the Chesapeake’s SAV declined to 48,195 acres, a result of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. The storms sent a flood of sediment cascading into the bay. After 2011, conditions became relatively dry, reducing the flow of grass-smothering sand and mud. More sunlight reached submerged grasses, allowing them to rebound. In return, the SAV filtered runoff, helping keep Chesapeake waters clear.

Forty years ago, SAV reached a low point in parts of the bay. Another major storm, Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972, nearly wiped out the SAV at Susquehanna Flats, an expansive bed of grasses where the Susquehanna River widens and becomes Chesapeake Bay. The rush of floodwater from the roiling Susquehanna uprooted grasses at the Flats’ edges and deposited sediment there, blocking sunlight and photosynthesis. Then the storms of 2011 exacerbated the damage to the relatively shallow “Flats.”

The grasses, however, fought back. Their blades impede the river’s flow enough to prevent erosion of the beds’ inner cores. The plants create clear water in the middle of the beds, which promotes their growth and improves overall water clarity. When clean water sluices out of an SAV bed’s center into the surrounding bay, more light is available for the grasses to grow, allowing them to shoot up faster.

Duck Feast to Famine

Over Chesapeake Bay’s history, SAV has foundered and flourished. Canvasbacks and other waterfowl species have done the same. As recently as 1950, half the continent’s population of canvasbacks – more than a quarter million – wintered in the Chesapeake, relying on aquatic grasses as favored food sources.

During Colonial times, as many as 1 million of the ducks may have spent wintertime on the bay. In the 19th century, their abundance and, to many, good taste made them a favored selection in many East Coast restaurants, says Matt Kneisley, a regional director at Delta Waterfowl, a waterfowl conservation and hunting organization.

Canvasbacks congregate in large flocks on open waters, leading to easy – too-easy – harvesting. By the end of the 19th century, commercial hunters with batteries of weapons went after rafts of the ducks, often killing dozens with one shot. The “cans,” as hunters call them, were shipped by boxcar to markets from Baltimore to Boston. Such market hunting was outlawed with the passage of the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

“Canvasbacks were a favored quarry because their meat was considered the tastiest of all the ducks due to their consumption of wild celery,” writes Guy Baldassarre in Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America.

Large beds of wild celery once attracted thousands of the ducks to Susquehanna Flats and elsewhere on the upper bay, according to Kneisley. Then a decline in the Chesapeake’s water quality greatly reduced the amount of wild celery. Tropical Storm Agnes was the final blow. “After the storm, wild celery was virtually impossible for canvasbacks to find,” says Kneisley.

The waterfowl switched their foraging efforts to small clams on the Chesapeake’s shallow bottom. A less nutritious diet of such shellfish as Baltic clams, scientists believe, may affect the ducks’ winter survival rates.

A Common Future

Annual bird counts, Webster says, “give us a very good picture of how much declines in SAV have affected wintering waterfowl.”

Half a century ago, 4 to 5 million ducks, geese and swans spent time on Chesapeake Bay during the winter. Now, that number is less than 1 million, according to results from an annual midwinter waterfowl survey. The nationwide count has taken place every year since the 1950s.

On the Chesapeake, survey teams of biologists from the Maryland DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fly transects to make visual estimates of waterfowl in the bay and along the nearby Atlantic coast. In 2026, the teams counted 926,900 ducks, geese and swans, higher than the 563,800 birds observed five years earlier in 2022. The best recent year was 2018, at 1,023,300.

Estimates of canvasbacks in 2026 were 25,300, and in 2022, 7,700. In 2023, the total for canvasbacks was 57,800. “Waterfowl are continuously responding to environmental cues, including weather, food availability and habitat quality,” says Karina Stonesifer, director of the Maryland DNR’s Wildlife and Heritage Service. Seven decades ago, in 1955, 225,450 canvasbacks were sighted. Nonetheless, says Webster, the Chesapeake “is still one of the best places on Earth to see waterfowl in winter.”

From Midwest Bird Nursery to the Chesapeake

Many of the bay’s wintering ducks began life in the prairie pothole region, which extends from the U.S. Midwest’s northern tier states into Canada. There, about half North America’s ducklings hatch.

As the ice sheets of the last glacial period retreated northward, tens of thousands of landlocked icebergs were left in their wakes, writes Michael Furtman in On the Wings of a North Wind: The Waterfowl and Wetlands of North America’s Inland Flyways.

These small icebergs melted into the soil. As they faded, Furtman states, “they became the foundation of the prairie potholes. An estimated 10 million glacially carved depressions once pockmarked the landscape of the prairie-pothole region of the United States and Canada.” As climate warmed, the potholes evolved into a habitat so enticing that more than 130 bird species have used a single pothole in a year.

With millions of potholes from which to choose, waterfowl had plenty of room to find nesting sites. “The diversity of potholes, ranging from small spring ponds to large permanent wetlands, provided ducks with the habitats necessary for each stage in their breeding and brood-rearing cycles,” Furtman states.

As wetlands in the region made way for agriculture, however, the number of potholes has decreased, especially over the last 40 years. In North Dakota’s pothole region, where as many as 100 of the basins per square mile once existed, “60 percent of the original 5 million acres of wetlands have been lost,” Furtman reports. “Ninety-five percent of that loss is attributable to agriculture.”

Is Past Prologue?

If increasing agriculture isn’t challenge enough for waterfowl, rising temperatures may result in more frequent and severe droughts in the prairie pothole region, with a significant effect on breeding ducks.

“Decades ago,” Webster says, “the Chesapeake was full of wintering canvasbacks. But no more. I’d like to see the days again when their dark red heads line up as far as you can see.”

Canvasbacks and the many other ducks that winter on the bay have come a long way to get there, Webster says. “The least we can do is show them some hospitality by making sure the environment – on their wintering and their breeding grounds – is healthy.”

Otherwise, he says, the Chesapeake’s winter waterfowl spectacle may vanish, the seawall along the Choptank indeed becoming a wall of shame as the last canvasback’s wingbeats fade into silence.

This story is an update of an article that ran in Oceanography magazine.

Written by Cheryl Lyn Dybas

About the Author

Award-winning science journalist and ecologist Cheryl Lyn Dybas, a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers, brings a passion for wildlife and conservation to Ocean Geographic, BioScience, Natural History, Canadian Geographic, National Wildlife, Northern Wilds and many other publications, and is a Field Editor at Ocean Geographic.

Words by Andi Cross. Photography by Adam Moore.

Meeting Marie

I’d never seen colors like it. Red, orange, and yellow coming together over water. Resting over the horizon with a calm and still cerulean ocean below. The air smelled like coconut, probably because that’s all we’d been eating for a week, and probably because coconuts can be found everywhere in Vanuatu. I sat on the shore with Marie, her hand in mine. Hers were large, strong. Callused from years of experience. My other hand traced patterns in the sand, as if I might never touch this exact place again. And the truth was, I probably wouldn’t. That’s the struggle with being on a multi-year expedition around the world: you have to get good at saying goodbye to the people and places you fall in love with.

We sat in silence for a while before Marie asked me to read her the story I’d written about my partner, Adam Moore, and I diving her Little Bay. No one had ever gone far enough past the wave break to see what was out there, and she wanted to know what we’d found. After all, she spent her entire life protecting this stretch of ocean without ever catching a glimpse beneath its surface. I suspected she didn’t know how to swim, as that was common for Indigenous women of the South Pacific islands.

A sense of nerves washed over me. What if she didn’t like it? What if my descriptions didn’t land? These are the things that run through your mind when you step into different cultures, into alternate worlds. You’re always wondering when your welcome will run thin. I was hesitant to start, but I couldn’t deny the request. She had been so gracious hosting us for over a week, as if we were two of her own.

I cleared my throat, and with a shaking voice, began by describing the will power it took to get there in the first place. I had been the one to reach out to Marie wanting to learn more about the bay. I’d seen a single photo of it online in my research of the region, and in turn, found her—appearing as nothing more than an email address. I had no idea who she was or what she looked like. If she’d even respond at all to my random fascination with her home, in what some would call the middle of nowhere.

Marie had to travel 45 minutes from her village in the north of Espiritu Santo down to the provincial capital, Luganville, to even begin our correspondence. Our conversations came in fragments, half-understood words. There was a significant amount of waiting between messages. But after a few months, we had somehow made a plan. She agreed to open up one of her bungalows to me, and I agreed to show up.

Our instant connection was uncanny, despite coming from completely different worlds. Me, a New Yorker who had moved to the other side of the globe to become a scuba diver. Her, a ni-Vanuatu from a nation comprising 83 islands. I found immediate comfort in her warm smile. In her welcoming gift of a road-side coconut. She hugged me so tightly upon our first meeting, as if we were kindred spirits.

I went on to recount the small pranks she played on us throughout our stay. All our shared laughter. I told her how I felt more relaxed than I can remember sleeping in her handmade beachside bungalows—the sound of the ocean rocking me to sleep every night. How her cooking—from the coconut crab the size of my head to the fresh fish caught just down the road—would be forever embedded in our memories. I told her how both Adam and I valued every detail she so meticulously planned, all to ensure we felt like Vanuatu was a place we could call our own. Even if we all knew it never would be.

Looking back on that first plunge into Marie’s Little Bay, we were met with a reef untouched by time. Vibrant and alive, unlike anything we had seen. Colors that only nature can create, much like the Vanuatuan sunset, flooded our senses. It was hard not to get emotional. Adam and I had seen so much damage underwater—where even the most iconic reefs are struggling with bleaching, pollution, degradation. But this place was free from those scars. I was thankful to see something so wholesome and resilient could still be found in this hard world. Both on land and out to sea. The reef reminded me of Marie.

I paused and looked over at her. She was crying, trying to hide away the tears rolling down her rounded face. “No one has ever written a story like this for me. I never knew what was in my Little Bay. Now you’ve shown me. My work protecting it was worth something. I’ll never forget you for this.”

For Marie, this newfound knowledge meant she had the ability to open her bungalows to divers. An alternate livelihood she, and her entire community, so desperately needed. The pandemic had hit Vanuatu’s tourism businesses hard, like it did throughout most of the Pacific Islands. She walked me through her grand plans. I had helped make them actionable and sustainable. And on my end, I was starting to realize Adam and I were on to something bigger with this expedition concept we’d conjured up. I’d envisioned a future where my calling was here, on the edges, helping people see what might be out of sight, even in their own backyard.

Discovering Our Edge

I met Marie in 2023, not fully understanding the gravity of that moment. I didn’t yet know that Adam and I would go on to meet many more people like her on what we had started calling the Edges of Earth expedition—an idea that first surfaced years earlier, in 2019. I didn’t know how many times we’d have to say goodbye. How often we’d leave places we had come to love.

It all started when I moved from the east coast of the United States to the far-flung remoteness of Western Australia. Perth, the only major city in the state, felt rugged in a way I couldn’t fathom coming from a city of nearly nine million. People went barefoot to the supermarket. Kangaroos were just as much neighbors as humans. Status wasn’t tied to what you earned, but instead to the size of the waves you could surf. At least, that’s how I came to understand it through Adam.

The more we explored this wild west, the more a question began to follow me: what else is out there? In the vastness of a state the size of half the US, with only three million people spread across it, I tapped into an insatiable curiosity. One that came less from ambition, and more from a desire to understand what I did not.

At the time, Adam was working brutally long days as an accountant while I was in strategy, selling things that didn’t feel like they mattered, to people who didn’t really need them. We had built clear, defined skills over the course of our twenties. But the way we were using them didn’t sit right. Was this really it? Was this how we were meant to spend our lives? Slaves to a computer screen? Selling our souls to whatever mega company we were to work for next?

As our relationship grew, so did our time mulling over those questions. We’d brainstorm on long car rides looking for surf about the life we wanted. And about what we could actually contribute to the cause we both passionately cared about: Earth. As we contrasted our workdays with weekends spent on Western Australia’s white-sand beaches, we watched as two completely different versions of life were unfolding.

At the same time, I was diving nonstop—what had brought me here in the first place. I was spending nearly as much time underwater as I was on land, documenting places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Triangle whenever I could. And with every dive, I started to notice where there was beauty, there was also destruction. Plastic caught in coral and damage where there should have been life. Every dive reminded me of the tension my life now held. The endless consumer products of my origins and the wilderness of my new home.

I was living in two worlds that didn’t reconcile. New York was the place that shaped me—centered around consumption, ambition, and always-on speed. And then there was Perth—a place that stripped things back, reconnecting me to nature while pulling me further from everything familiar. I couldn’t fully belong to either. I felt stuck between them, trying to figure out how to make sense of both without turning my back on one.

My dive guides, often locals, would unknowingly cut through that internal battle. They spoke about their work with a kind of actualization I didn’t have. Their lives were centered around protecting their home. They were fixated on restoring reefs by hand, removing waste piece by piece, pushing for policies to safeguard what remained. Not for recognition and certainly not for reward. Just because it was theirs to protect. They were doing it out of love.

I was struck by these narratives. By how deeply they could commit to a place, while I still had a foot in two worlds. Of all the questions building in me about our planet in decline, my purpose, and where I fit into any of it, one rose above the rest. Why weren’t these stories from the edges being told?

By 2023, Adam and I couldn’t ignore these questions anymore. We both wanted to feel something different in our work, and we wanted to understand how other people were building lives that felt aligned with what mattered to them. So we sold most of what we owned, cancelled our lease, and packed our lives into two bags. One for dive gear, the other for everything else.

The plan was to move from one edge to the next. Spend time with people doing the hardest work in the field. Instead of leading or talking, we were to listen and learn. And our hope was, with the skills and connections we had, we could help carry their impact further. A few people took a chance on us in those early days. Marie was one of them.

A New Way of Life

The rest of 2023 was spent moving through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, each step across the eastern hemisphere testing us in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We learned quickly how to adapt—to unfamiliar food, to constant movement, to discomfort that slowly became routine. Nights on the floor of a makeshift cabin with Kanak families in the north of New Caledonia toughened us. A cliffside shelter in the Solomon Islands, with torrential rain hammering down for a week straight, showed us how little we actually needed. Sleepless nights camping in Thailand, sea lice lighting our skin on fire, made us appreciate our health in a way we never had before.

And it didn’t ease up. In Cambodia, relentless storms left us unsure what we’d wake up to. In Vietnam, pollution was inescapable—on land and underwater. The Andaman Islands brought food poisoning that stopped us in our tracks. In the Philippines, we came face-to-face with illegal fishing fleets that shook us to our core. It was physically draining in a way that could have broken us. But what hit us harder was the weight of what we were seeing.

It’s one thing to read about a changing climate. It’s another to live inside it. To see, up close, how the most vulnerable communities are carrying the consequences of decisions made far beyond their control. They would often be living among trash that has washed in from other countries that were far more populated than their slice of island. They would experience intensifying storms that would destroy their homes and deplete them of their savings. Large in part due to a warming planet that they had very little to do with based on their carbon footprint.

We’d lie awake at night, silent, trying to process it all. The damage and scale of it. The responsibility we started to realize was in our hands to ensure we weren’t extracting and giving as much as we could instead. By morning, we were exhausted—not just from the harsh conditions, but from our endless cognitive processing of what we had seen.

And still, we never questioned being there. Because every day, we were alongside people who refused to give up. We were diving, trekking, documenting alongside scientists, First Nations communities, conservationists, and activists. And over and over, there it was: that same connection I had felt with Marie. It didn’t matter where we came from or how different our lives looked. We were always welcomed with open arms when able to communicate our shared commitment to protect what was still here.

What was most potent, however, was the outlook of those we met. These were people living on the frontlines of the climate crisis, watching their ecosystems change in real time. Despite the drama of this loss, their stories weren’t well known; they weren’t social media stars and the contents of their days weren’t clickbait. And yet, their sense of purpose was unwavering. Instead of being stuck in place, paralyzed by what was happening to them, they were acting on it. It forced us to look at ourselves differently. When we showed up exhausted or overwhelmed, carrying the weight of the problem, while they carried only solutions, we had to check ourselves.

Take the Tetepare Descendants Association of the Solomon Islands. They pushed to keep their ancestral homeland free from the logging industry—one of the only successful holdouts of 1,000 islands in the country to do so. Or Andaman Discoveries of Thailand, helping the once nomadic Moken people reclaim their seafaring ways after the government revoked them in 2004. Or Marine Conservation Cambodia, which was warding off illegal trawlers that were killing off the country’s marine life.

These people became our colleagues and our friends. Our guiding teachers and our definition of heroes. Because of this, our expedition work was far from some pursuit of discovery, or a claim to something new—which is how we once understood expeditioning to be. This instead was a journey to stand alongside those already doing the hardest work, and to help it reach beyond the edges they were fighting to protect.

Finding the Positive Outliers

By 2024, we found ourselves driving the length of Central America in a car that was barely street legal, crossing rough borders from Panama to Belize. Along the eastern coast of Mexico, we dove the world’s deepest blue hole, spending time learning from the fishermen who had first discovered it on how they were now planning on protecting it. Further north, we dove through the cenotes—sacred sinkholes and caves that the Mayans called their underworld. We crossed the country to see how marine protected areas were being created and enforced by local communities, those deeply connected to this land so rich with biodiversity.

In South America, we moved through Patagonia and out to the Falkland Islands / Malvinas, where king penguins wandered close without hesitation. Off Argentina, elephant seals stretched across the shoreline, unfazed by our presence. It often felt like we had arrived at exactly the right moment for the perfect wild encounter. But for us it was never about that. We were always searching for the human connection.

By the time we reached the southernmost tip of the Americas, two years in, we had documented close to 200 of these progressive case studies. We called them this because, to us, they were blueprints for a better future—repeatable models that others could use, if experiencing similar challenges, in similar environments. Through this, we had met over 1,000 positive outliers, as we started to call them. People and teams facing their ecological and cultural challenges head on, and making a real difference despite the odds.

When we immersed ourselves in places far removed from what we once called “normal,” the more living at the edges began to change us. It was showing up in what we chose to eat, forcing us to reduce our meat and fish intake. It crept up in the conversations we were having, finding ourselves in heated conversations about the challenges of open-net salmon farming instead of what’s trending on Netflix. It even started showing up in how we looked, as we rotated through four outfits and washed our clothes in buckets. We didn’t care. We loved it.

In return, we leaned into our role on behalf of those on the edges. We were never in these places to lead conservation work, but rather, to help move it forward. To connect these teams with the exposure and support they needed—whether through funding, media, or simply getting the right people to pay attention. We had the ability to do that because of our previous corporate careers, which was largely why I didn’t want to turn my back on home. Home gave me something valuable—a tangible skill and the work ethic to back it up. It just had to be harnessed and curated in the right way. Towards something that provided value to people who needed it most. And because of that, the relationships we built didn’t end when we moved on. If anything, they deepened.

I remember a stretch of road through Patagonia on the Chilean side, asking Adam if we’d ever be able to live like we once did back in New York, or even Perth. Perth felt large now. Would we care about what we wore, what we owned, how big our house was? Could we go back to small talk about the weather? Would we always be thinking about the intensifying storms we’d seen on expedition instead? Could we eat the same processed foods, knowing the true cost with every bite?

By the time we had crossed five countries in South America and were on our way to Africa, we had our answer. There was no “going back.” Even our physicality had changed—hardly recognizable to fair-weather-friends who knew us in another life. Our face and limbs were always lightly dusted with dirt. Hair knotted and sunbleached, from too much exposure to the elements. Our hands had hardened. They reminded me of Marie.

Our Future on the Edges

Today, we are three years into this global voyage. Six continents, 47 countries, 250 communities, and counting. We’re still meeting people on all kinds of edges, from the most remote to the most urban. Positive outliers exist everywhere, if you’re willing to look closely enough.

We measure success differently now. In the relationships built and in the tears we shed upon a goodbye. When we get to share with a woman, for the first time, what sits beneath the surface of her Little Bay that she spent her life protecting. That’s success. Marie was the one who showed us what life on the edges could be. She reframed why we explore. While it was never about the perfect shot, or the dopamine hit of Instagram likes, we didn’t have a full handle on the “why.” She showed us that, to explore, means to forge deeper human connection. Exploration means helping people see what has always been there, even if just slightly out of reach.

What we didn’t expect was how hard it would be to carry that way of living back with us. To sit in a city and not think about the coastlines we’ve seen changing. To have conversations that skim the surface after years spent in places where everything discussed is painfully deep about our planet’s future. To exist within systems of overconsumption and resource extraction that we once moved through so easily, now seeing them for what they are. We’re still learning how to live with that tension. How to exist in both worlds without turning away from either. How to let them benefit one another, instead of letting the never-ending contradictions pull us to shreds.

Escaping one life for another was never the grand plan. It was to understand how to bring them together. To take what we’ve learned on the edges—the way people commit themselves to something bigger than they are—and apply it to the lives we came from. To think more boldly and to question what we know. To act with intention, which we certainly didn’t fully grasp before this journey. Back then, we were more fixated on ourselves—what we needed and wanted—oblivious to the fact that even our smallest actions cause ripple effects reaching the ends of the Earth.

We’re not finished. There are still more positive outliers to meet and more case studies to carry forward. But our burning questions have changed. Gone are the days of chasing “what’s out there?” or “where do I fit in?” Those questions feel selfish now. Instead, we’re asking how far stories of human ingenuity can reach. Can they outshine the clickbait? Can they shift culture? Can they open our eyes to what we stand to lose if we don’t change our ways? We will keep showing up to play our part in it all. At home and on every edge that welcomes us next.

About the Cover Conservationists

Andi Cross and Adam Moore are the co-founders of Edges of Earth, a multi-year global expedition documenting the people, places, and practices shaping the future of ocean and land conservation. Three years in, they have traveled across six continents, 47 countries, and 250 communities, working alongside the scientists, First Nations leaders, conservationists, and local stewards they call positive outliers. Andi writes and leads the storytelling side of the expedition; Adam handles photography and field direction. Follow their journey at edgesofearth.com.