Ending: Coral/Cultures

After seven chapters of increasingly distant yet intimate flight, the conclusion comes home, reconsidering how conservation technologies and their enhanced intimacy and capacity to invoke care and control alter the relationship between nature and culture. The conclusion draws from aerial and underwater drone survey of a protected island in the southern Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia, to explore the limits of blue governmentality while documenting coral and green sea turtles. The fieldwork here of uncomfortable human explorers in a marine park during seabird and sea turtle hatching season between tropical cyclones shows the wild actualities of an ocean/culture, legally defended yet fiercely different from human culture.