Another Tale of Two Islands

I recently read Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything.  She relates a cautionary tale about an island in the South Pacific that is about the same size as Maury Island.  For thousands of years, the island of Nauru was a tropical paradise on which people thrived on the abundance of fertile forest and sea.  As with most tropical paradises, Nauru eventually became a European “protectorate” and eventually came under the aegis of Australia.  Sometime in the early 20th century, a European geologist discovered that the hilly interior of the island was almost pure rock phosphate.  As it turns out, for hundreds of thousands of years, the island was a main stopping place for migratory birds.  Well, the guano piled up, turned into rock, was covered with topsoil, and became the beautiful hills of Nauru.  As the science of industrial agriculture burgeoned, so did the demand for this scarce and valuable commodity.  By the 1950’s, they were grinding up and sending off shiploads of rock phosphate to fertilize the farms of Australia and New Zealand.

The people of Nauru were held up as a shining model of how a primitive society moves into the modern world.  Newsreels showed students in nice white clothes in new spacious schools, with safe water and sanitary systems, new roads, and so on.  In fact, as time went on, the people of Nauru became quite wealthy.  They became independent in 1968, and within ten years, they had the highest per capita GDP in the world!  They had expensive new cars to tour their loop road (a twenty minute ride for one complete loop), they had spacious air-conditioned houses, and they lavished each other with expensive gifts.  Along the way, they pretty much forgot about fishing, and the increasingly barren interior no longer provided much either.  Besides, why would anybody spend time grubbing for their food when they can eat at restaurants?  That is what they did.  They ate primarily processed imported food.  By the late 80’s, they had the dubious distinction of being the “fattest country in the world,” with almost half the population suffering from type 2 diabetes.  

As time went by, the barren center expanded as the phosphate disappeared and the living portion of the island was a mile-wide ring.  It doesn’t take too much imagination to see where this is going.  In fact, even early on, the leaders of Nauru were made to understand that an area of land in Australia would be given to them when Nauru was all “used up!”  They even invested a large portion of their profits so that they could live on that when the phosphate dried up.  By the 90’s, the phosphate was about gone, and their investments went very badly.  So, for a ten-year period, aided by recent financial deregulation, they went into the international money laundering business, with as many as 400 phantom banks operating completely unencumbered by monitoring, oversight, taxes, or regulation.  Ultimately, this went badly for them as well as they ended up $800 million in debt.  They sold off their assets in Australia to pay off one US corporation.

Now both ecologically and financially bankrupt, the Nauruans came to realize that sea level rise was slowly devouring the remaining ring of land from the outside.  More recently, in order to bring in much needed revenue, the Nauruans agreed to house a detention center for middle eastern refugees captured attempting to flee to Australia.  The conditions is these camps, as you can well imagine, is deplorable.  

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic and complete fall from grace. The people of Nauru are not unusually stupid.  I should mention that there were people that saw this coming and warned against it.  There were attempts to heal the wounds from the extraction of phosphate, but they were not enough to stem the profitable tide.  Remember that early on, Nauru was held up as a shining example of model development.

To consider what happened to Nauru to be a tragic exception rather than the norm would be a big mistake.  Just ask the people of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia about their mountain tops, precious streams, and hollers.  Ask the First Nation people in Alberta what the tar sands excavations have done to their pristine boreal forest.  Are we so desperate that we have to destroy our permanent assets for cash?

We made the right decision when we refused to allow our Maury Island gravel to be removed.  However, what if we had high value rock phosphate instead of gravel and that every resident of Maury Island was guaranteed a ten thousand dollar dividend?  Would we have shown the same resolve?