I've never had the chance to snorkel, except with a mask without bottles...On beaches that don't have such an interesting underwater world.
I hope that someday I will go to a coast that has a developed underwater world. I was looking at pictures of some of my buddies diving off the coast of Egypt... Beautiful...
Luckily, even for those who never dive, there are aquariums....
There's a lot of nice places around the world to snorkel and dive and I'm fortunate to have one of the best, The Great Barrier Reef, nearby. I hope you get to do some eventually, it's pretty incredible.
I watched a good documentary a couple of years ago, about the planting of corals in order to fill the part of the reef that was damaged. I'm just not sure if it was damaged by us or as you stated, other animal species...
Very serious project, I really have to look at the status, whether it was successfully implemented...
Humans influence the oceans in many ways (negatively) and on the Great Barrier Reef container and bulk cargo ships emptying bilge water from all over the world has brought invasive species which is killing the reef. There's efforts to mitigate it but I'm not sure enough is being done. Time will tell.
We are slowly killing this planet of ours, and later, when it is too late, we will say: "Oh, we didn't want to, we didn't know..."
But then it will be too late...
It's already too late I think. The residual effects just haven't happened yet. Humanity are in for a surprise and as you say, will make excuses when it happens...or simply won't be around to make excuses.