View from Honolulu
We'll Be The First To Go
Islands Are The World’s Environmental Early Warning System
The great biologist and science writer E.O. Wilson has said that, “The probability of extinction is about 40 times greater on islands than continents. At least 2,000 species of birds have been lost on 800 major Pacific Islands.” In this Pacific Magazine environmental issue we investigate our region’s fragile environment.
Islands are often metaphors for one thing or another. We can be symbols of isolation or morality tales about the fragility of small communities. There is another well-worn environmental metaphor, which is the miner’s canary. These hapless birds were carried deep into mine shafts and, if they died, it was warning to the miners that they’d better get out of there fast. Too bad about the bird.
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Islands are the world’s ecological canaries. As we sink, or as our fish stocks crash or our forests turn to red dust, we foretell the fate of the rest of the earth. Island environments are usually degraded by outside forces. Globalization means capital moves easily into small places to tempt local villages or weak national governments to sell off their resources. Even former World Bank economist and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, has admitted that “Globalization is not working for much of the environment.”
Our lead story in this issue features Dr. Paul Cox, director of the National Tropical Botanical on Kaua‘i, and founder of Seacology, a non-profit organization funding environmental projects around the region. While national governments tend to look the other way on environmental issues, organizations like Seacology attempt to alter the free-market equation by helping local people resist the temptation to turn natural resources into cash.
Sometimes, the environment, private enterprise and the common good come together, as we see in Giff Johnson’s story in this issue about the privatization of waste disposal on Pohnpei.
There’s also a story in this issue about the next big thing in environmental worries, which is water. And we also present a special package by publisher Floyd K. Takeuchi and contributing editor Giff Johnson on the political and economic situation in the Federated States of Micronesia. It is, after all, politics and economics which will determine the fate of the FSM’s environment.
How much mining can New Caledonia support? How many visitors can the Cook Islands accept every year? The truth is, we don’t know. Like the miner’s canary, we’re in a trial-and-error operation in which our errors can be devastating. If Tuvalu sinks below the sea, perhaps the world will know it’s gone too far in letting the environment degrade. Too bad about those Tuvalu people. Environment, envelope, environs—these words from the same Middle English root refer to that which surrounds, that which is close. Environment is, in fact, inseparable from our own lives—air, water, coral, earth, fish, trees—these not only surround us, they are what give us our lives. Too bad about those Islands, the continental powers will say one day, not realizing that if we disappear, the world is not just minus one more canary. If we go, it means the whole earth is approaching its last, gasping breath. And there will be nowhere to run.
