During winter break four years ago, our family rented a condo on the beach in South Padre Island. Stretching along the Texas coast, it’s the world’s longest barrier island, infamous for its spring break debauchery. But in the winter, it’s a low-key getaway of soft sand and seashells. Reclining on a lawn chair on our rental’s porch, with the sound of the surging waves as background music, my 17-year-old tech-savvy son, Ben, lifted his head from his cell phone and said, “SpaceX just launched a GPS satellite into space for the Navy. First one.” He gestured south in the direction of Boca Chica Beach, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX had built a behemoth rocket-launch site.
“Everything go okay?” I asked.
“Perfect,” he said.
“You know,” I said, hoping to catch my son’s fleeting teenage interest, “there’s going to be an X Prize for saving coral reefs.” During a recent reporting trip to Florida to cover the future of coral reefs, I’d learned that the nonprofit X Prize foundation, which offers cash awards for technological innovation—including a $10 million purse for the first team to launch a reusable rocket into space—was looking to create a competition to save the coral. “No one thought a private company could send a spacecraft into space. Now, it’s a full-scale industry. So, they are going to try to monetize saving coral, in hopes it creates technology that can evolve into a business.”
Keith, my husband, was sitting at the sun-bleached breakfast table, his head similarly buried in his cell phone. But now he lifted his eyes from the addictive word game he’d been playing. “It’s called a market,” he said. “You create a market. That’s where innovation comes from.”
JULI BERWALD is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Texas Monthly, and Wired, among other publications. Her most recent book is Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs.
“No one has ever tried to use the free market to save an entire ecosystem before,” I said.
My capitalist husband smiled back at me before turning back to his word game. “So, we don’t know what’s possible.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted. His comments were precisely aimed at one of the major points of conflict in our otherwise healthy relationship, a chronic disagreement that I doubt we’ll ever settle. Keith believes wholeheartedly in the power of capitalism and the market to inspire creativity and move the world forward. He admits to capitalism’s imperfections, but he believes that no better system has ever
