by Carl Safina
Just outside, the rain is falling so hard and heavy, daylight dims. This is the dry season.
Nyk says, “If we go all-solar and use all fluorescent lights—if we emit no carbon dioxide at all—will the sea level go down? That’s what the elders ask, practical questions. And I cannot say, ‘If you do this, you’ll get your washed-away land back, or your house won’t get flooded.’ The people, they want results. I can talk about ‘helping fight global warming.’ But they ask, ‘If I do this, will I save a hundred dollars?’ Talking long-term—it doesn’t get their attention.”
Olai describes her experiences in international meetings, complaining, “Politics changed the whole science when I worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. I was sitting right there in Brussels that day. In the morning, the report said, ‘We are certain that a particular island will be flooded.’ And by afternoon, the report said, ‘We are uncertain…’ ” She looks at me wide-eyed, and nods to make sure I’m following. “I was sitting right there. This kind of thing was going on all day. It still boggles me that politicians can change a scientific report. They totally watered it down. I was so frustrated—and I could see how the scientists were so frustrated. I was thinking of places like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and atolls in Palau like Kayangel and Peleliu. I was thinking, ‘While we are replacing words—these places are drowning.’
“Then I was standing in line for lunch,” Olai continues. “And I meet the Saudi person. First time I met him. So he says, ‘Where are you from?’ I say, ‘Palau.’ I say, ‘It’s an island country.’ He says, ‘How many of you are there?’ I say, ‘About twenty-two thousand.’ He says, ‘Twenty-two thousand; that is nothing. Too bad for you.’ Later he says, ‘You will never convince me that oil is bad—because you need it; you want it. So don’t try to tell me you think it is bad. Your need makes me produce it.’ ” She adds, “It’s a hard day for me to forget.” She stirs her tea, then says, “David used a sling and a rock. How should David fight Goliath now?” She brightens, smiles a shy island smile, and adds, “But the right change will come.”
* * *
The first century of the Industrial Revolution, the 1800s, was powered by coal, whale oil, and slaves. The twentieth was the century of petroleum (though 40 percent of U.S. train freight is still coal). World electricity generation is still two-thirds combustion (40 percent coal, 20 percent natural gas, 6 percent oil), plus 15 percent nuclear, 16 percent hydropower, and about 2 percent other renewables. That’s how we get energy.
Here’s a taste of how we waste it: In the United States, where tap water is safe, bottled water costs about one thousand times as much as tap water and consumes tens of millions of barrels of oil a year (I’ve seen estimates from seventeen to fifty million barrels); it’s been likened to having each bottle of water one-quarter full of oil. It takes three times as much water to make the plastic bottle as the bottle contains. America’s refrigerators use twice the electricity of the European average, and four times as much as the most efficient refrigerators currently available. Using the most efficient appliances, worldwide, would eliminate the need to build the fourteen hundred coal-fired power plants that are projected to be needed by 2020.
Cars. With nearly the least miles per gallon of gas and nearly the most miles driven per vehicle, U.S. drivers—who own more than a quarter of the world’s cars—burn more gasoline than the next twenty countries combined, including Japan, Germany, China, Russia, and Brazil. If our average fuel efficiency merely equaled some of the better cars now on the market (forty miles per gallon), Americans would halve their gasoline use. Just like that. Going to plug-in hybrids would drop driving costs to the equivalent of one dollar per gallon; gasoline use would drop by 80 percent—without reducing the number of cars or miles driven. This isn’t sacrifice; we’re already sacrificing efficiency and wasting our money. Eventually, the electricity powering plug-in cars could come from wind or solar. Those are only some of the opportunities we’re missing.
Henry Ford reputedly noted that if he’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said “a faster horse.” What else might we be missing? Every hour, enough sunlight strikes Earth to power our world economy for a year. The upper six miles of Earth’s crust (people have drilled down seven miles) holds something like fifty thousand times as much energy as all the oil and gas. With an investment equaling the cost of one coal plant (about $1 billion) the United States could, by 2050, generate geothermal energy equal to 250 coal-burning plants. North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have enough wind to supply not just all of the United States’ electricity but all of its energy. (Denmark and parts of Germany already get 20 to 30 percent of their electricity from mere moving air.) On one windy quarter acre, a farmer can grow $300 worth of corn or allow a company to put up a wind turbine capable of generating $300,000 worth of electricity a year. If the company pays only 1 percent in royalties, the farmer still makes ten times as much by farming wind.
When ethanol made from corn pits people who need to eat in a bidding war against people who want to drive, drivers win. But some nonedible plants also produce oil. The seeds of Jatropha curcas are about one-third oil. Some algae yield up to thirty times more fuel than other energy crops. Airlines are already testing algae-based jet fuels. “The airplane performed perfectly,” one test pilot said. “It was textbook.”
These aren’t even all the options. Compared to the possible oceans of improvements, humanity is still dog-paddling in the shallow end of the kiddie pool. Sometimes we seem determined to drown there just because we won’t stand up.
* * *
Perpetua Tmetuchl goes by the nickname Tua. She’s an upright elder, poised and calm. Her gray hair, pulled back and pinned, is adorned with a big flower. She wears a long floral skirt. Her face is relaxed, her gaze alert.
She’s been farming taro in the same place since the early 1980s. It’s the traditional staple, a starchy root so crucial to island survival for so long that it’s still ubiquitous in ceremonies, revered and nearly sacred. Tua grows it commercially. Her main buyer comes from Guam.
As we are walking downhill to her taro patch, I tell her that her place, with its commanding views of the water and islands, scenic with coconut palms, fragrant with tropical blossoms, is like paradise.
“It is paradise,” she corrects. But paradise is seldom trouble-free. She explains, “In 1996 my husband—he died a few years ago—he and I took a walk down to my taro patch, just like you and I are doing. But that evening, we were amazed. The high tide was coming inside, flooding the taro with saltwater. You know how water is; we couldn’t do anything. That was the first time. Then, it started coming every few months. Now, it’s almost every full moon.”
We walk down to her three acres of broad-leafed plants, bordered with ditches to direct freshwater. Taro needs to be seasonally wet, so it’s grown near freshwater. But it also has to dry out. And it can’t grow in seawater.
People have been growing taro for about five thousand years, and here some areas might trace an unbroken line of cultivation back fully three thousand years. Numerous varieties exist.
Growing it is guided by custom and taboo. Men are not allowed into the taro patch at the time of planting. Women do not sleep with their husbands the night before, for fear that they will wake late, in the wrong frame of mind for hard work.
Until the 1960s, most Palauans relied on local food for survival. Taro was the main source of calories. For older and poorer people, it still is. It’s starchy and satisfying, like potatoes, but the flavor—quite good—is different.
Looking at the flooded portions and the yellowed leaves, Tua says, “All the villages close to the shoreline have this same problem. With the seawater coming up, and so much rain, the water doesn’t drain.” Tua has an explanation: “The Bible does not mention taro, but it says, ‘Things you have not seen, you will be seeing in the end times.’ ”
“So,” I ask, “you see this as a sign that the world is ending?”
“Ending.�
� She nods with a smile. “Yes. And God says, ‘I will protect the faithful ones.’ So, I don’t worry about it.”
* * *
Others worry. “Rain. Rain, rain, rain,” says Hilve Skang as we walk through a torrential downpour. A stout, bespectacled lady with short, curly hair, she’s wearing flip-flops and a brightly printed dress. She’s wielding a machete and chewing betel as she leads me down to her taro patch. And she’s quite agitated. Two pigs squeal as we pass. Hilve sputters, “Last night, full moon, highest tide we ever seen. It was about a foot over the mark we made last time it was the highest we ever seen.”
Her banana trees’ leaves look like they’re burning; who’d have thought seawater would scorch the earth? Her giant taro grows well above my head, to seven feet. But a big part of the taro patch is soggy and lifeless. Hilve complains, “Every time I fix—the tide comes. New moon and full moon, the tide comes very high. All die. The lady over there”—she points her machete to a neighbor’s bit of ground—“she already give up.”
* * *
Getting to the seven-square-mile island of Peleliu entails an hour’s boat ride from the main island of Babeldoab, across twenty wide miles of deep lagoon, toward lime-tinted clouds to the south. During the push to dislodge Japanese forces in World War II, Americans bombed and napalmed the lush island until it resembled a construction site. A few rusting tanks and bomb-pocked buildings remain. One large live bomb, too big to be detonated, sits to this day, merely cordoned off by tape. But otherwise the island is so quiet and sleepy, you feel you’ve stepped back a bit in time, even compared to the rest of Palau. Greeting me on the sandy shoreline: a Ruddy Turnstone, the Arctic-breeding bird that shadows me all over the world.
After the trauma of war, the specter of food shortage left a scar that remains. The five hundred people of the island live under a self-imposed ban on taro export, except for ceremonial purposes. During funerals, the bereaved family prepares food baskets for each attendee, with five or six pieces of taro. So prized is the yellow taro of Peleliu—it is said that the soil makes it distinctive—that a woman from Babeldoab confided, “I’ve gone to funerals when I didn’t even know the person who died—just so I could come back with a basket of Peleliu taro.”
Just a few years ago, the president’s inauguration featured Peleliu taro. But at the most recent inauguration, there was none to be had.
Peleliu is much flatter than Palau’s main island. That means more flooding. “Even people digging graves have begun hitting water,” complains seventy-six-year-old Isor Kikuo, her lined face distressed. “Look,” she says, her hands gesturing. “The water won’t go down.” Much of her own taro crop has died. She pulls up one plant and shows me the starchy root that has fed islanders for millennia. She demonstrates how she has to cut away rotting portions. “See—?” The root should be hard; it is mushy. It smells terrible. She carefully cuts the bad parts away. She cuts until she tosses the whole thing away in disgust, muttering, “This is all rotten. This is good for nothing.
“Taro and fishing,” she continues. “The old people, we rely on that.” She says that children with distant jobs are sending their aging parents money for rice. But Isor explains that the children’s rents are high; sending money to feed their parents puts additional strain on them, and the price of rice has nearly doubled in the last year. She is careful to say that not all the taro is so badly affected. “Patches in the middle of the island”—she waves her machete inland—“they don’t have any ocean in them.”
Eriko Nalone, who has joined us, adds, “And I’ll tell you what: this high water since the late 1990s, it has changed the time when the fish come to spawn. In April we go to the beach from three nights before till three nights after full moon, expecting the big trevally. No fish. Later, when you’re not expecting them, then they come. The crabs used to come out on the road in March, April. No more. The Trochus snails used to come up on the reefs starting in May. This year they opened the season in June, but the snails didn’t come until July. The tide is coming at, like, an hour from when we expect. Tide tables are no longer accurate. Sometimes they predict weak tides, but then it comes two feet higher. It’s weird.”
* * *
Like all problems, rising water hits poor people hardest. Over the bridge from Koror, in Malakal, the videographer Kassi Berg shares some unedited interviews she recently obtained from Falalop Island, part of Ulithi Atoll, of the Federated States of Micronesia. A woman named Tess comes on camera. She appears to be in her early twenties, with flowers in her hair and the kind of lips Gauguin traveled halfway round the world for. Gauguin, by the way, asked in one painting of Pacific Islanders, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” That’s what the islanders are asking. Tess is saying, “The island used to be so big. Now it’s small. The water is really rising. For the children growing up now, the island will be, probably, gone. I don’t know what will become of our children. They’ll probably go to somebody else’s place. They won’t know of our island. They’ll be eating food from the store. But that costs money, and not everybody has a job.”
An older man, with a puffy, grizzled face and sad eyes, comes on camera, saying, “All the gardening areas on the windward side are gone. Five or six rows of coconut trees washed away. Already five hundred feet of land washed away. Our wells taste salty. The new road is already in the water. There is no way to control it. We’re going to have trouble feeding all the people on this island. We have a very bad situation. And if there is a typhoon coming, we will be underwater.” A chief adds, “I’m an old man now. I don’t know what happened to the world. Maybe the scientists can fix the damage you have done to our atmosphere. Please be kind enough to solve the problem.”
* * *
The world may try shirking off the problems of thousands of Pacific Islanders. But that won’t be possible. While I’m in Palau, the Australian government issues this press release:
AUSTRALIA PROVIDES EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE
Australia will provide immediate emergency assistance to each of the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, in response to tidal surges and storms that have inundated the low-lying Pacific Islands since early December … flooding the cities of Majuro and Ebeye in the Marshall Islands, destroying homes and submerging parts of the islands. The tidal surges left streets covered in rocks, coral and debris.… Groundwater and farming land has been contaminated with seawater.…
There’s also this, from the U.S. government:
If the President of the Federated States of Micronesia determines that the emergency or disaster requires a greater response from the United States Government, the President of the Federated States of Micronesia may request that the President of the United States make a presidential disaster declaration.
That means money, folks. But why should we pay now? After all, we didn’t pay at the pump; it wasn’t on our electric bill—.
The first official sea-level-related relocations to higher land occurred in December 2005 in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu—we’re not talking about a few hundred people. Well over half a million people live in island countries whose average elevation above the sea is only six feet. (When people have trouble finding higher ground, many other creatures will simply perish. Seabirds that nest on low islands and atolls—millions of birds, of dozens of species, populating entire oceans—will lose their nesting grounds. They will not be able to move to high islands. All the high islands are taken by a peculiar new two-legged animal.)
On continents, the numbers of people are much more serious. The slow tsunami of rising sea will inexorably sweep millions to higher ground. Fifteen of the world’s twenty biggest cities lie exposed to the sea, including Tokyo, Mumbai, and New York. Something approaching 100 million people live on land less than one meter—about three feet—above sea level. The sea level may rise three feet in this century.
The World Bank reminds us that as the sea
level rises three feet, in Bangladesh alone 30 million people will have to squeeze inland, while half of Bangladesh’s rice fields will be spoiled by saltwater. Already among the world’s first climate refugees are 500,000 former inhabitants of Bhola Island in Bangladesh, left homeless after half of the island became permanently inundated in 2005.
* * *
Toward dusk, fruit bats the size of crows are commuting to the coast across a broad arc of sky. Leonard Basilius says there are two kinds, adding, “But you can hardly tell the difference unless you have them on your table.”
I ask how well he likes eating fruit bats.
“I don’t eat. But my wife and kids, they love it.”
“We love it,” his thirteen-year-old daughter affirms.
At Leonard’s home, flowers scent the night air. The quiet neighborhood bears no sound of music, just murmuring voices, singing frogs, and an occasional dog’s bark. Through the silhouettes of mangroves and coconut palms, the moon rises full and lovely.
But that moon pulls a pucker of sea around the world, and as the tide rises we watch Leonard’s backyard disappear. Soon, he and his neighbors are sloshing around in shin-deep saltwater that rises up the wheels of parked cars and laps at front doors.
Leonard and his family—he and his brother and their wives and kids share a house—are making dinner outdoors, wading around in water that soon reaches almost to their knees. As they sit, their table stands in seawater. Benches become islands, dogs stand on cinder blocks, and fish are actually swimming around everyone’s feet.
“I get very frustrated,” Leonard admits. “After it started, for a few years it was once or twice a year. It happens every full and new moon now. But there is nothing we can do.”
Inches higher, and it will be flooding the house interiors. “In a few years, we will have to move. Or maybe the government will assist us in raising the house. But the politicians see this problem only when they are campaigning for office, not after they get in.” He pauses and looks at his family and their home. I glance at his flooded neighborhood. “Well,” he says, “we’ll have to find a way.”