Chasing Coral, Missing People

I still remember the first time I watched Chasing Coral on Netflix almost ten years ago. Like many ocean advocates, I was transfixed. The visuals were stunning—time‑lapse coral bleaching, underwater photography that bordered on art, heroic scientists racing against time to document a crisis before it disappeared. The movie did what it was supposed to do: it made coral reefs feel immediate, fragile, and endangered.

And yet, as the credits rolled, something felt wrong. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but eventually the discomfort resolved into a simple question: where were the people?

Not the scientists. They were everywhere— wetsuits, GoPros, dramatic voiceovers about sacrifice and discovery. The people missing were the ones who live with coral reefs every day: the communities who fish them, pray with them, argue over them, and depend on them not just for livelihoods, but for identity. I remember talking to my friend and colleague Dr. Steven Manaʻoakamai Johnson about it. He said, “we should write something.”

It took us ten years, but that moment became the seed for a paper we recently published Representation and Power in Ocean Conservation Documentaries: A Decolonial Analysis. The paper examines popular ocean documentaries—including Chasing Coral—and what their stories leave out – and how they can evolve to tell the whole story behind the people living conservation.

Ocean conservation documentaries tend to follow a familiar script: There is a place in crisis. There is a charismatic ecosystem. There are scientists, armed with data and technology, who bear witness or experience loss. They form a plan, interview some experts, and then there is a call to action, usually aimed at audiences in the Global North: change your consumption, support conservation, care. This formula works. It moves people. It also wins awards. But it also quietly reproduces a very old story about the ocean, one that casts outsiders as heroic agents of change and reduces local communities to victims or threats—a narrative I’ve deemed the White Saviors and Noble Savages framework

In film after film, the ocean is framed as remote wildernesses—places that are pristine until they are broken by overfishing, plastic pollution, and climate change. The crisis is often presented as global and abstract. Colonialism and militarization are almost never mentioned. When people who live alongside reefs do appear, they are often depicted as victims or threats—communities at risk, fishers who need regulation, “local stakeholders” whose voices are summarized rather than heard. Rarely are they framed as knowledge holders, political actors, or protagonists in their own right. My friend Francisco Blaha put it succinctly when tweeting about the film Seaspiracy, “the Asians are villians, the browns are victims, and all the people who get speaking roles are white.”

But coral reefs are not empty places. They never have been. They sit alongside islands and coasts shaped by colonial rule, forced labor, war, slavery, nuclear testing, and extractive economies. Many of today’s reef systems are embedded in struggles over sovereignty, food security, climate migration, and environmental justice. When documentaries erase those contexts, they don’t just simplify the story—they reshape it. Coral bleaching becomes a tragedy without villains and saving reefs becomes a technical problem instead of a question of justice, power, and repair.

This was the pattern Steven and I kept seeing as we watched ocean documentaries closely. As the camera lingers lovingly on sharks and dolphins, mostly white scientists narrate the story: what is happening, why it matters, what needs to be done. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples and coastal communities exist at the edges of the frame—if they appear at all.

This isn’t about blaming individual filmmakers. Many of these projects are made with genuine care and urgency, but intention doesn’t determine impact. When popular ocean stories consistently center Western scientists as the primary agents of knowledge and action, they reinforce the idea that solutions come from outside—from western capitals, institutions, labs, NGOs, and donors—rather than from the places most affected by ocean change.

That narrative has real consequences. It influences funding priorities and shapes policy. It legitimizes conservation models that restrict access to coastal spaces while claiming moral authority and it makes it easier to imagine conservation happening to communities instead of being led by them.

Chasing Coral is a powerful film. I know grown fishermen who told me they cried when they watched it. It helped bring coral bleaching into global consciousness, but it also crystallizes many of these patterns. The reefs it shows are treated as universal symbols rather than culturally specific places. Climate change appears as a force of nature rather than the product of political and economic systems. And the people whose lives are intertwined with those reefs are largely absent.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. And once you start noticing these absences, they show up everywhere. This, by the way, is the original definition of “woke.”

Our paper doesn’t argue for fewer ocean documentaries. We need them—desperately. What we need are better stories. Stories that treat coral reefs not just as ecosystems, but as homelands. Stories that locate environmental collapse within histories of colonialism and inequality. Stories that center Indigenous and local voices not as background color or moral seasoning, but as co‑authors of the narrative. This means showing local governance in action, or documenting generational knowledge about the reef’s shifting health, rather than solely focusing on a scientist’s data collection. Coral reefs have always been social places, shaped by human relationships, governance, and power. Any story that pretends otherwise is incomplete by definition.

We are living through a polycrisis—climate change, biodiversity loss, political instability, and deepening global inequality. The stories we tell about the ocean shape how we respond to those crises. If our most widely watched films can’t imagine people alongside coral – especially the Indigenous peoples who have known these places for millenia – it becomes easier to imagine saving reefs without addressing justice, easier to imagine conservation without accountability, and easier to imagine futures where reefs survive but the communities who depend on them do not.

If there’s one thing I hope readers take away—filmmakers, scientists, and audiences alike—it’s this: pay attention to who is missing from the frame.

Conservation is always going to be about people.