Restore Coral speaks at TEDx Black Rock City

A conversation with Roberto Cerda about where the project came from, and why a festival in the desert has anything to do with a reef.

On 29 August, Restore Coral takes part in the Burning Man festival. Roberto Cerda, the organisation's project leader, gives a talk about the challenges coral reefs face and the work being done to restore them. We spoke with him beforehand.

Roberto: Restore Coral is influenced by the experience of having been at Burning Man — the contact with such inspiring people, and the ideas about social transformation that circulate in that ecosystem.

Much of what we took from that, when Marcel Julien and I met José Lindo Solís in Europe, became a conversation about the possibility of creating a project that would have a positive impact on humanity through the preservation and restoration of the ocean.

We built on that hypothesis, drawing on the things we were passionate about — music, and art as tools for social transformation — but with methodology and argument behind them.

The opportunity came out of exactly those two things. We were identified by the Burning Man community through work we had done with them, and we managed to connect with people far more experienced than us.