Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  So a small industry has lately arisen to deal with it. Research is being undertaken with great expenditure of time and treasure. Ships large and small—the JUNK Project, a sailing raft made of garbage, being a small one; and two much larger ships, called the New Horizon and the Kaisei—are involved in laudable projects in the gyre. Sea skimmers take off to try to collect rubbish, often with little result. Websites exist (5gyres.com is one) that describe the ocean’s woes. As a result, the public has become increasingly aware that plastics (in particular those that are nonbiodegradable, nonphotodegradable, and indissoluble) are highly dangerous, do great damage, and leave harmful legacies. This was born of a NOAA prediction and one sailor’s observation in the Pacific Ocean, and it may yet result in a significant change in the habits of the whole world’s population.

  Because of the world ocean’s sheer size, and the difficulty of policing what were once the high seas but are now known as ABNJs (Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction), big and powerful bodies, ideally ocean-aware and supranational bodies, are vitally necessary to confront environmental challenges of great magnitude, and to try to give protection to the evidently fragile, ever-changing seas. The lack of such entities in the past has had dire consequences. In 1992, for example, when savage overfishing caused the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, there was simply no interested, responsible, or influential organization around to help prevent it. Then again, the tuna, sharks, turtles, and whales that nowadays are so greedily sought in the southern Pacific have long swum similarly unprotected—with all their populations now facing crises and with the diminishment of certain species, the possible extinction of others, a looming likelihood.

  For too long, impotence was pervasive. The nongovernmental bodies (Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund most notable among scores of others) always had the voice, and they had a good measure of influence, but what they never did have was power. And in the past, few national institutions had the political will to wield such power as they had over the open ocean waters. Happily, and late in the day, this now appears to be changing.

  As the realization grows of the very real threats to ocean life (warming, acidification, overfishing, pollution, mining), there does seem just now to be a fresh abundance of good intentions—maybe genuine, maybe merely the fashion of the moment, maybe an ambition among world leaders for personal legacy building, or maybe attempts to assuage the guilt for past environmental sins. Whatever the motivation, though, a number of what are known as marine-protected areas are currently popping up all over the place, and the Pacific in particular has recently seen the huge expansion of existing protected zones and the establishment of new ones.

  The American government is currently attempting to exert its influence on the central Pacific’s environment by declaring vast square mileages of it protected, and maintaining them as strictly policed sanctuaries for the creatures that live on, in, and beneath them. During President George W. Bush’s administration, and using the curious and wide powers of the 1906 Antiquities Act—which President Theodore Roosevelt first signed into law, allowing him and his successors to give protection to national treasures—the U.S. government created four large protected areas in the Pacific. The first, with a name of appropriate size, was the 138,000-square-mile Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The other three, named just two weeks before Bush left office, protect from mining, drilling, or commercial fishing the almost 200,000 square miles of waters that wash around a dozen lonely and unpeopled mid-ocean islands, which include Rose Atoll in American Samoa, seven tiny morsels of land in the Line Islands group (declared the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument), and three more in the Marianas. All the fish, crabs, sharks, mud-nesting birds, volcanoes, and hydrothermal vents that lie within Bush’s Spain-size tracts of sea will be protected, for now at least.

  In 2014, President Barack Obama went even further, using the same century-old act to place under American protection seven hundred thousand further square miles, all to be added to President Bush’s Remote Islands Monument. And all the specific bans declared by Mr. Bush would operate in these new areas, too, with the addition of a prohibition on tuna fishing, which provoked predictable howls of rage from fishermen.

  Other countries have since weighed in. The British are considering placing under protection the waters around Pitcairn Island and its three uninhabited neighbors—though a Royal Navy ship would need to be nearby to enforce the zone, and the British have little money to pay for it.

  Kiribati, the former British colony, has already placed strict limits on commercial fishing in an area within its own immense jurisdiction. It is the only nation that occupies all four hemispheres, its islands and atolls being scattered north and south of the equator, and east and west of the International Date Line, so it has ample room from which to select a suitable area—1.35 million square miles, with just 100,000 inhabitants.

  But Kiribati has another problem that makes overfishing pale in comparison, since it may well not exist in a few decades. The island appears to be drowning. Steadily rising sea levels are doing it, so the island could be the first true sovereign victim of climate change. The rising waters are already causing regular and frequent floodings, and considering that its atolls have an average height above the sea of only seven feet, it could well founder by the century’s end.

  Happily, the Kiribatians have an ark. They have lately bought six thousand acres on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu, and the current Fijian president says they will be most welcome to come south and bring their entire population there. For now, the Kiribati government is building sandbag seawalls, and hopes the ocean will perhaps calm itself and drop back to what the landlubbers regard as its proper level.7

  Poised between those unsung and solitary figures who have wrought some measure of beneficial change (the Australian coral scientist, the Japanese albatross protector, the generations of nameless Hawaiian cloak makers) and the might and power of governments who hope to do so, too, is a scattering of others who occupy a different category altogether: a corps d’élite of the extremely rich, usually men, who entertain the wish to leave their own substantial mark on the planet. One man who has publicly declared his wish to make such an impression on the Pacific Ocean is Larry Ellison, the billionaire sea-loving founder of the Oracle Corporation. His ambition for immortality stems from his purchase in 2012 of nearly all of the somewhat played-out but delightfully shabby little Hawaiian island of Lana’i, which once was the Dole Food Company’s largest pineapple grove, and the largest such plantation in the world.

  Ellison plans to turn the island into a sustainable version of Paradise. His point man on the island, Kurt Matsumoto, has declared that Lana’i will be reengineered into “the first economically viable, 100 percent green community.” If Ellison succeeds, then the ocean surrounding Lana’i (to say nothing of the three thousand people who live there) will have ample reason for gratitude. But in his first few years of ownership, Ellison has inspired less than perfect confidence that he will leave the kind of legacy for which he is hoping.

  Ellison’s wealth is quite staggering, with Forbes magazine placing it at $56 billion in 2014. If the figure is correct, then this seventy-year-old college-dropout son of an unmarried teenager from the Lower East Side of Manhattan has more money than the individual GDPs of 120 of the world’s sovereign states. He is worth more, for instance, than the 3.4 million people of Uruguay make together in a single year, four times as much as the 15 million people of Cambodia.

  It was computers, both the hardware from which they are made and the software that makes them tick, that brought Ellison his fortune. Until he stepped down as CEO in 2014, he ran the Oracle Corporation, the company he founded with a twelve-hundred-dollar loan in 1977. Like so many computer companies—from Microsoft up in Seattle to Apple down in Cupertino and Google in Mountain View—his Oracle in Santa Clara can rightly be said to be a Pacific Ocean company: though he is by birth a New Yorker and by se
lf-interrupted education a Midwesterner, he moved to Pacific California when he was twenty-two and has effectively never left.

  Once there was much ostentation. He sails enormous boats; he flies (he has two ex-military jets); he owns gargantuan oceanside estates. And yet more recently, and displaying something of the kind of marriage of East and West that the Pacific encourages, he prefers people to know that he is becoming ever more considerate of his circumstances and his surroundings. He is wanting to become known as a friend of the ocean, as a man of great generosity, a man who gives away, or plans to give away, much of his fortune. When in 2004 he donated $105 million, the sum represented just 1 percent of his wealth. Now he says he expects to give away 95 percent of it before he passes on.

  He lives principally in a Japanese house with a Japanese garden, eats Japanese food, and is said to marinate himself in Japanese culture and espouse some Buddhist beliefs and practices. He bought almost all the island of Lana’i for a relatively modest and, for him, easily affordable $300 million. In total, the island—its name is the Hawaiian word for “hump,” since its weary volcano was the only thing visible across the five miles of sea from the vastly more interesting island of Maui—occupies 90,000 acres, 141 square miles. Ellison would have taken all of it, except that a few islanders had long ago acquired title to their homes and some lands had been traditionally Hawaiian-owned. So he had to settle for just 87,000 of the acreage—all the pineapple groves; all the beaches; all the mountains, the docks, the churches, and two very large luxury hotels (that happen to lose a great deal of money each year). He also bought Island Air, the tiny airline that flies to Lana’i from Honolulu, with ambitions to bring an inrush of wealthy visitors.

  At first sight, Lana’i currently does not radiate much interest or attraction—and it never did. Before the Europeans came, its legends involved man-eating monsters, ghouls, and a mountain god given to provoking nightmares; its shores were littered with shipwrecks; its landscape spotted with the graves of unfavored members of the Hawaiian aristocracy who had been sent there in exile. The first European to settle was a Mormon missionary who turned out to be a confidence trickster; and after he had been excommunicated by the Salt Lake City elders and his island put on the block, James Dole bought it, for a song, to grow pineapples.

  It still sports much of the agricultural detritus of his now abandoned monoculture. For seventy years, its sixteen thousand cultivated acres were given over entirely to pineapples. (Most of the rest is steep forest upland, hiding pronghorn antelope, mouflon sheep, feral cats, and deer, and with thousands of the Norfolk Island pines that the Royal Navy in its sailing days favored felling for mainmasts; or else it is ringed with steep coastal canyons, spectacular but unusable.)

  Lana’i City, laid down in a perfect grid in the cool and shaded upland center of the teardrop-shaped island, was very much a company town, with small tin-roof houses that were home to the Filipino plantation workers, and larger establishments for the Japanese and haole overseers who kept them slaving away in the fields. H. Broomfield Brown was the best remembered and least liked of Jim Dole’s overseers. He spent his days astride his horse up on the Munroe Trail, scanning the fields below with his telescope: if any one of the broad-hatted, goggle-wearing Filipinos seemed to him to be slacking, he’d gallop down the network of laterite paths and give the hapless fellow a tongue-lashing, maybe cut his Dole Company pay; and if a persistent layabout, the man would be tossed out of his Dole Company house, transported to the Dole Company dock, and sent packing back to the mainland and likely deportation home to Manila.

  For those who didn’t slack, life was quite agreeable. “Have happy workers, grow better pineapples” was the Dole mantra for many years—and with free Dole schools and free Dole doctors, and men who mowed the lawns and weeded the gardens around your house so that Lana’i City looked as pretty a company town as possible, the island had a utopian quality to it. A million “pines,” as they were called, shipped out of Lana’i every day. But the fruit became increasingly expensive to grow: the workers were unionized; fresh irrigation water was scarce; and electricity, imported by underwater cable from Maui, was costly. By the 1980s, Ecuador and the Philippines were beginning to grow cheaper fruit, and the Dole pineapple empire started to struggle.

  The company’s entire business was eventually bought by an elderly Californian named David Murdock, who built himself on Lana’i a handsome home and a fine Victorian-style orchid house for his prodigious collection; threw up two enormous hotels, one in the cool of Lana’i City and the other down by the ocean; and when he arrived on-island, progressed through town in a horse-drawn carriage expecting displays of adoring fealty from his plantation workers, whom he called “my children.”

  But Murdock soon tired of the island, as most unsentimental businessmen tend to tire of an entity that doesn’t make them serious money. So it was Murdock who did the eventual deal with Larry Ellison: for the three hundred million dollars he paid, Oracle’s boss got just about everything available on the island, except for the orchids—he did get the empty orchid house, though, which has since been refilled—and a prescriptive right that is still retained by Murdock, who at the time was energy-obsessed, to build a wind farm on a headland up in the island’s remote northeast.

  Ellison has had more or less free rein to do as he will since the summer of 2012. He formally announced his intentions in 2013: his island, he said, would become “an experiment in sustainability.” According to his company, the plan was “clear in concept, vast in scope and complex in implementation.”

  Lana’i City would be tripled in size, to twelve thousand people. Electricity, currently generated in Maui, would now be made locally, by a solar power station. A soi-disant “solar soothsayer” named Byron Washom was hired from the University of California’s San Diego campus to design a series of microgrids for the island, with computers allowing the community rapidly to switch the source of power generation among three sustainable sources—solar, hydro, and wind—depending on need.8 Fresh water, admitted by all to be the key to success of any such venture, would be manufactured from the sea with a large desalination plant. The dried-out old pineapple groves would be turned into organic vegetable farms, with drip-feed irrigation, and would produce such volumes of vegetables that the island could earn immense sums from an export trade with Japan. Grapes would be grown, and there would be an island winery. The islanders would drive electric cars. There would be a branch university established on the island, clusters of more luxury homes, a film studio, a second runway at the little airport, a third resort hotel, a tennis academy.

  Though hardly anyone ever anticipated a sudden and swift turnaround for the island—some did, and for a while Ellison was being publicly touted as the island’s long-awaited savior, almost a messiah—some on the island now note that after three years, less has been accomplished than had been hoped. True, the two hotels are being renovated, and some grand new houses have been built. A public pool, closed by David Murdock, was reopened in 2014, to widespread approval. And the tiny island movie theater has been wholly renovated, now gets first-run films, and is mobbed by patrons.

  But the first drip-fed organic garden set up to supply food for one of the hotel restaurants was overrun with wild turkeys, apparently as keen on organic food as the hotel clients, and no other such agricultural experiments have yet been started. The islanders are fighting with Ellison’s local Lana’i management company, named Pulama Lanai, over plans for the desalination plant, which many fear will harm their own very limited aquifer—and that has delayed the start of construction. The most recent design statement for the airport now has only a single runway. There are no plans for wind generators.

  “Mr. Ellison appears to have gone to ground,” the editor of the local newspaper remarked. “He has other things on his plate. It looks as though he has gone off us.”

  More than a few islanders were publicly grumbling that they were being told little, and at the beginning of 2015 an apprehension w
as growing among some of the initially hopeful islanders that Lana’i was perhaps becoming little more than a costly plaything for this faraway mogul, a chattel, disposable and forgettable.

  Ellison, however, still has supporters aplenty—not least his employees and hired hands, who are fiercely loyal and, with strictly enforced nondisclosure deals, unwilling to talk about plans. There is also a retired French Canadian psychotherapist and former Hare Krishna zealot named Henry Jolicoeur, now living in Vancouver, who regularly broadcasts filmed paeans to Ellison and his efforts, and mounts spirited attacks on anyone with the temerity to criticize him. A newspaper story that once spoke of Ellison’s having a man in a speedboat follow his yacht and collect any basketballs that he lost while shooting hoops on deck especially piqued him. Why shouldn’t Mr. Ellison employ such a man? Jolicoeur demanded. He is rich. He can do as he likes. The reporter who wrote the story, he told viewers, was merely fourth-rate, and worse.

  The only other privately held island in the Hawaiian chain, Niihau (bought from the Hawaiian king in 1864, and owned ever since by the purchaser’s descendants, a family named Robinson) is extremely impoverished. Many of its population of some one hundred thirty native Hawaiians are on welfare. It has no radio or TV, no electricity mains or telephone, though its primary school is solar powered. The Robinsons’ local farming and beekeeping businesses have done poorly, and most islanders are compelled to live by subsistence farming. Niihau’s owners earn most of their income from allowing a small unmanned U.S. Navy radar station to be sited atop a cliff: it monitors the U.S. military’s own high seas missile tests, being conveniently downrange from the navy launch center on Kauai island nearby.