This Changes Everything (27 page)

“The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out.”

—Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 2013
¹

“The open veins of Latin America are still bleeding.”

—Bolivian Indigenous leader Nilda Rojas Huanca, 2014
²

“It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.
Steady exponential material growth with no limits on resource consumption and population is the dominant conceptual model used by today’s decision makers. This is an approximation of reality that is no longer accurate and [has] started to break down.”

—Global systems analyst Rodrigo Castro and colleagues, paper presented at a scientific modeling conference, 2014
³

For the past few years, the
island of Nauru has been on a health kick. The concrete walls of public buildings are covered in murals urging regular exercise and healthy eating, and warning against the danger of diabetes. Young people are asking their grandparents how to fish, a lost skill. But there is a problem. As Nerida-Ann Steshia Hubert, who works at a diabetes center on the island, explains, life spans on Nauru are short,
in part because of an epidemic of the disease. “The older folks are passing away early and we’re losing a lot of the knowledge with them. It’s like a race against time—trying to get the knowledge from them before they die.”
⁴

For decades, this tiny, isolated South Pacific island, just twenty-one square kilometers and home to ten thousand people, was held up as a model for the world—a developing
country that was doing everything right. In the early 1960s, the Australian government, whose troops seized control of Nauru from the Germans in 1914, was so proud of its protectorate that it made promotional videos showing the Micronesians in starched white Bermuda shorts, obediently following lessons in English-speaking schools, settling their disputes in British-style courts, and shopping for
modern conveniences in well-stocked grocery stores.
⁵

During the 1970s and 1980s, after Nauru had earned independence, the island was periodically featured in press reports as a place of almost obscene riches, much as Dubai is invoked today. An Associated Press article from 1985 reported that Nauruans had “the world’s highest per capita gross national product . . . higher even than Persian Gulf
oil Sheikdoms.” Everyone had free health care, housing, and education; homes were kept cool with air-conditioning; and residents zoomed around their tiny island—it took twenty minutes to make the entire loop—in brand-new cars and motorcycles. A police chief famously bought himself a yellow Lamborghini. “When I was young,” recalls Steshia Hubert, “we would go to parties where people would throw thousands
of dollars on the babies. Extravagant parties—first, sixteenth, eighteenth, twenty-first, and fiftieth birthdays. . . . They would come with gifts like cars, pillows stuffed with hundred-dollar bills—for one-year-old babies!”
⁶

All of Nauru’s monetary wealth derived from an odd geological fact. For hundreds of thousands of years, when the island was nothing but a cluster of coral reefs protruding
from the waves, Nauru was a popular pit stop for migrating birds, who dropped by to feast on the shellfish and mollusks. Gradually, the bird poop built up between the coral towers and spires, eventually hardening to form a rocky landmass. The rock was then covered over in topsoil and dense forest, creating a tropical oasis of coconut palms, tranquil beaches, and thatched huts so beatific that
the first European visitors dubbed the island Pleasant Isle.
⁷

For thousands of years, Nauruans lived on the surface of their island, sustaining themselves on fish and black noddy birds. That began to change when a colonial officer picked up a rock that was later discovered to be
made of almost pure phosphate of lime, a valuable agricultural fertilizer. A German-British firm began mining, later
replaced by a British–Australian–New Zealand venture.
⁸
Nauru started developing at record speed—the catch was that it was, simultaneously, commiting suicide.

By the 1960s, Nauru still looked pleasant enough when approached from the sea, but it was a mirage. Behind the narrow fringe of coconut palms circling the coast lay a ravaged interior. Seen from above, the forest and topsoil of the oval
island were being voraciously stripped away; the phosphate mined down to the island’s sharply protruding bones, leaving behind a forest of ghostly coral totems. With the center now uninhabitable and largely infertile except for some minor scrubby vegetation, life on Nauru unfolded along the thin coastal strip, where the homes and civic structures were located.
⁹

Nauru’s successive waves of colonizers—whose
economic emissaries ground up the phosphate rock into fine dust, then shipped it on ocean liners to fertilize soil in Australia and New Zealand—had a simple plan for the country: they would keep mining phosphate until the island was an empty shell. “When the phosphate supply is exhausted in thirty to forty years’ time, the experts predict that the estimated population will not be able
to live on this pleasant little island,” a Nauruan council member said, rather stiffly, in a sixties-era black-and-white video produced by the Australian government. But not to worry, the film’s narrator explained: “Preparations are being made now for the future of the Nauruan people. Australia has offered them a permanent home within her own shores. . . . Their prospects are bright; their future
is secure.”
¹⁰

Nauru, in other words, was developed to disappear, designed by the Australian government and the extractive companies that controlled its fate as a disposable country. It’s not that they had anything against the place, no genocidal intent per se. It’s just that one dead island that few even knew existed seemed like an acceptable sacrifice to make in the name of the progress represented
by industrial agriculture.

When the Nauruans themselves took control of their country in 1968, they had hopes of reversing these plans. Toward that end, they put a large chunk of their mining revenues into a trust fund that they invested in what seemed like stable real estate ventures in Australia and Hawaii. The goal
was to live off the fund’s proceeds while winding down phosphate mining and
beginning to rehabilitate their island’s ecology—a costly task, but perhaps not impossible.
¹¹

The plan failed. Nauru’s government received catastrophically bad investment advice, and the country’s mining wealth was squandered. Meanwhile, Nauru continued to disappear, its white powdery innards loaded onto boats as the mining continued unabated. Meanwhile, decades of easy money had taken a predictable
toll on Nauruans’ life and culture. Politics was rife with corruption, drunk driving was a leading cause of death, average life expectancy was dismally low, and Nauru earned the dubious honor of being featured on a U.S. news show as “the fattest place on Earth” (half the adult population suffers from type 2 diabetes, the result of a diet comprised almost exclusively of imported processed food).
“During the golden era when the royalties were rolling in, we didn’t cook, we ate in restaurants,” recalls Steshia Hubert, a health care worker. And even if the Nauruans had wanted to eat differently, it would have been hard: with so much of the island a latticework of deep dark holes, growing enough fresh produce to feed the population was pretty much impossible. A bitterly ironic infertility
for an island whose main export was agricultural fertilizer.
¹²

By the 1990s, Nauru was so desperate for foreign currency that it pursued some distinctly shady get-rich-quick schemes. Aided greatly by the wave of financial deregulation unleashed in this period, the island became a prime money-laundering haven. For a time in the late 1990s, Nauru was the titular “home” to roughly four hundred phantom
banks that were utterly unencumbered by monitoring, oversight, taxes, and regulation. Nauru-registered shell banks were particularly popular among Russian gangsters, who reportedly laundered a staggering $70 billion of dirty money through the island nation (to put that in perspective, Nauru’s entire GDP is $72 million, according to most recent figures). Giving the country partial credit for
the collapse of the Russian economy, a
New York Times Magazine
piece in 2000 pronounced that “amid the recent proliferation of money-laundering centers that experts estimate has ballooned into a $5 trillion shadow economy, Nauru is Public Enemy #1.”
¹³

These schemes have since caught up with Nauru too, and now the country faces a double bankruptcy: with 90 percent of the island depleted from
mining, it faces ecological bankruptcy; with a debt of at least $800 million, Nauru faces financial bankruptcy as well. But these are not Nauru’s only problems. It now turns out that the island nation is highly vulnerable to a crisis it had virtually no hand in creating: climate change and the drought, ocean acidification, and rising waters it brings. Sea levels around Nauru have been steadily climbing
by about 5 millimeters per year since 1993, and much more could be on the way if current trends continue. Intensified droughts are already causing severe freshwater shortages.
¹⁴

A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from
which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on “solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” He explained that although this particular form of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived
in sacrifice zones—lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging—it was fast becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a “new abnormal” wherever we happen to live. “As bad as local and regional negative transformation is, it is the big picture, the Whole Earth, which is now a home under assault. A feeling of global dread asserts itself as the
planet heats and our climate gets more hostile and unpredictable,” he writes.
¹⁵

Some places are unlucky enough to experience both local and global solastalgia simultaneously. Speaking to the 1997 U.N. climate conference that adopted the Kyoto Protocol, Nauru’s then-president Kinza Clodumar described the collective claustrophobia that had gripped his country: “We are trapped, a wasteland at our
back, and to our front a terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions.”
¹⁶
Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside
in.

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on
the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.”
¹⁷
Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of
hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere—because we can’t see them—will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have
made.

And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and
arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can’t afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse.

At every stage our
actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing—a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us. And Nauru knows all about this too, because in the past decade it has become a dumping ground of another sort. In an effort to raise much needed revenue, it agreed to house an
offshore refugee detention center for the government of Australia. In what has become known as “the Pacific Solution,” Australian navy and customs ships intercept boats of migrants and immediately fly them three thousand kilometers to Nauru (as well as to several other Pacific islands). Once on Nauru, the migrants—most from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan—are crammed into a rat-infested
guarded camp made up of rows of crowded, stiflingly hot tents. The island imprisonment can last up to five years, with the migrants in a state of constant limbo about their status, something the Australian government hopes will serve as a deterrent to future refugees.
¹⁸

The Australian and Nauruan governments have gone to great lengths to limit information on camp conditions and have prevented
journalists who make the long journey to the island from seeing where migrants are being housed. But the truth is leaking out nonetheless: grainy video of prisoners chanting “We are not animals”; reports of mass hunger strikes and suicide attempts; horrifying photographs of refugees who had sewn their own mouths shut, using paper clips as needles; an image of a man who had badly mutilated his neck
in a failed hanging attempt. There are also images of toddlers playing in the dirt and huddling with their parents under tent flaps for shade (originally the camp had housed only adult males, but now hundreds of women and children have been sent there too). In June 2013, the Australian government finally allowed a BBC crew into the camp in order to show off its brand-new barracks—but that PR attempt
was completely upstaged one month later by the news that a prisoner riot had almost completely destroyed the new facility, leaving several prisoners injured.
¹⁹