These events were even more sobering for me because of the ten days I had just spent in Tuvalu. A tiny country of nine coral islands about 650 miles north of Fiji, 8 degrees south of the equator, Tuvalu gained its independence from Britain in 1978 (though it’s still part of the Commonwealth). Its population of twelve thousand ekes a living from some of the most unforgiving land on earth, supplemented by royalties from a fortuitous Internet domain name: .tv. Tuvalu was settled by Polynesian seafarers around 3,000 years ago, and its people historically practiced pit taro cultivation, in which holes are dug into the coral stone of the atoll and filled in with organic material (pig feces, trash, palm fronds, and other detritus); the resulting “soil” is used to grow the starchy tuber that until recently provided the majority of the Polynesians’ calories. Of course, the reefs are rich in marine life and have always yielded a bountiful fish catch. I had the chance to experience this myself during my visit, when I spent an afternoon spearfishing with a Tuvaluan near his family’s motu, a small, sandy island across the lagoon from the capital, Funafuti. Practically everything else in the Tuvaluans’ lives, though, is meager and hard-won, particularly fresh water. Tuvalu is truly a country that lives on the edge.
FIGURE 27: FUNAFUTI ATOLL, TUVALU.
The reason I had come to Tuvalu was to see how close to the edge it really is. It is one of the lowest countries on earth—no point is higher than fifteen feet, and most of the islands are only a few feet above sea level. As a result, much of it is forecast to disappear beneath the waters of the Pacific by the end of the century, inundated by rising sea levels as the earth’s climate warms. Long before this, storm surges and high tides will have gradually, inexorably killed the ancient taro pits with salt water and rendered the freshwater supplies undrinkable. Eventually agriculture will be impossible, and everything in the Tuvalu diet apart from fish will have to be imported. At that point, the Tuvaluans’ way of life, so inextricably linked to the sea, will have been destroyed by it.
Tuvalu is not alone in this challenge. Every reader of this book is likely aware that the earth’s climate is changing. Whether you’ve seen Al Gore’s influential 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth or are a long-standing student of carbon credits and alternative energy supplies, climate change is one of the most pressing and best-publicized dilemmas facing the world in the twenty-first century. How radical these changes are remains to be seen, and estimates of the extent of global warming range up to ten degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. As the climate shifts, much of the polar ice that has been in place for millions of years will melt, raising sea levels by anywhere from three to six feet—enough to doom Tuvalu. Global sea levels rose by around eight inches in the twentieth century, and much of this was in the latter half, as global warming accelerated.
Tuvalu, unlike other low-lying regions threatened by inundation, has taken the matter to heart in a radical way. In 2002, sensing the impending loss of their homeland in less than a century, Tuvalu’s leaders drew up plans to file a lawsuit against the United States and Australia in the International Court of Justice for their failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They have also started plans for a mass evacuation of every citizen to New Zealand and its South Pacific dependency Niue. That’s right—an evacuation of every person currently living on the islands. The details are still being worked out, but such a plan is unprecedented in world history.
“Climate refugee” is a term that will become much more widely known in the twenty-first century, as our planet goes through a period of radical climatic change unlike any since the end of the last ice age. And as with that period, and its resulting era of innovation, this new climatic shift promises to result in drastic upheavals to our way of life that are perhaps unimaginable today—including the evacuation of entire countries.
KYOTO’S BLEEDING EDGE
The flight into Tuvalu had been much less eventful, though a storm about halfway there had caused me to wonder about the advisability of making the trip. Tuvalu gets only a few dozen tourists each year, and most of the people on the flight with me were either aid workers or Tuvaluans returning from shopping or business trips to Suva, Fiji’s capital city. As we descended ever closer to the waters of the Pacific, I peered anxiously out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of land. Apparently my furrowed brow was noticeable, because a Tuvaluan sitting across the aisle told me not to worry; we weren’t going to land on water, he said, before laughing with his girlfriend. If this was the direction Tuvalu was headed in, it was reassuring to hear that it hadn’t happened yet.
Stepping onto the tarmac, I was hit with a blast of steamy tropical air that reminded me just how close to the equator I was. Suva had been cold and rainy when we left, but here on Funafuti—the largest and most densely populated of Tuvalu’s eight inhabited atolls—it was sunny and very warm. I immediately broke into a sweat, straining under the weight of my backpack in the intense sun. Global warming indeed, I thought, and headed over to the passport control in a wooden building at the edge of the runway.
Around 150 people were gathered outside, waiting for relatives or meeting the few foreigners who were arriving for development projects. More were on the runway itself, off to the side, having been cleared off just before our arrival by a car with a siren. Steve, an Australian legal-aid worker based on Funafuti, told me that the runway was the de facto center of social life on the island; sports, socializing, exercise, and simply watching the arrival of the twice-weekly flights from Suva—it all happened here or nearby.
The runway on Funafuti had been built by the Americans during the Second World War. Tuvalu served as a base for bombing missions to Japanese-occupied Kiribati ahead of the Battle of Tarawa, and the runway was more than long enough to land the hulking B-17 Flying Fortresses—and long enough, certainly, to land a jet, if Tuvalu were ever to make it onto the tourist map.
Tuvalu certainly deserves to be on that map, I thought as I walked the hundred yards to the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel. Swaying palm trees, sun, a beautiful (but unfortunately increasingly polluted) turquoise lagoon, and friendly people would certainly be draws—a place where life seems decades removed from the twenty-first century, even if the hotel recently got satellite television and Tuvaluans make much of their foreign exchange from the Internet domain. I was looking forward to my week here.
After checking in I went down to the bar to watch the sunset and discovered that it was the main center of expat life in Tuvalu. Over a glass of Fiji lager I chatted with a German named Wulf and his Fijian girlfriend about what had brought them here. He was working on a geospatial mapping project, creating a high-resolution map of the islands so the government could define exactly where its territory began and ended. But they had been in Tuvalu for too long, they told me, and were ready to head back to the “big smoke” of Suva, where she could party in the style she preferred. I also met an Australian nurse who had come as part of the team that I would later fly out with. Its doctors were performing much-needed pro bono cataract surgery for two weeks on a population that spent its life in the intense tropical sun. She told me that both the hospital and a nearby desalination plant had been donated by the Japanese government in exchange for whaling rights in Tuvalu’s waters. Though I’m no fan of whaling, I had to hand it to the Tuvaluans for their ingenuity in attracting foreign aid. However, she explained, although the hospital was brand-new, there were not enough trained staff members or supplies, so the Tuvaluans still had a shockingly poor standard of health care. That was why she and her team were there.
Gilliane and Chris showed up after I had been at the bar for an hour or so. They were filmmakers who had come to Tuvalu a couple of years before to make a documentary on its environmental situation (it’s entitled Trouble in Paradise and is a very good overview of the situation facing Tuvalu). We all ordered dinner from the restaurant, and they told me about the project they were starting on the island: an environmentally sustainable power plant using pig waste. The problem was, they explained, that the Tuvaluans
had been seduced by the same things as those of us in the West—cars and generators among them—and they were now net contributors to the global carbon problem. This made it difficult for Tuvaluans to argue that other countries were thrusting environmental devastation upon them, but as a small island nation they had the opportunity to choose a more environmentally friendly route into the twenty-first century. I was fascinated by the pig-waste project, and Gilliane and Chris promised to take me to the nearby island where they were building their first facility.
After chatting for a couple of hours, with a stunningly beautiful sunset as a backdrop, and eating dinner, I headed back to my room, tired but excited about my next week on the island. The remoteness of the location was tempered somewhat by the international mix of people I had just met—German, French, American, Australian, and Fijian, all brought to Tuvalu to help it or tell its story. This diversity hammered home to me just how interconnected the world had become, and made me feel that Tuvalu did have some hope of survival after all.
Over the subsequent few days I met several other aid workers (there were no tourists at all when I was there), government officials, and many local Tuvaluans. Semese Alefaio was managing the Tuvalu Association of NGOs but had previously worked for the Funafuti Conservation Area—created by Tuvalu in 1996 “for the benefit of the community and future generations.” He wanted to create a nongovernmental organization devoted to revitalizing the ways of his ancestors, like rainwater collection with palm fronds, or the harvesting of coconut gel for a baby’s first solid food at six to eight months. Jeff, a Tuvaluan who had been living in Singapore, had come home to run in the parliamentary elections. He had lost and was now planning to return to Singapore, but had been prepared to stay if he had won. I was beginning to get the impression that there were a fair number of people who hadn’t given up on Tuvalu.
On my last morning there, I met with Enate Evi, director of the Tuvalu Environment Department. He told me about the massive shifts in the Tuvaluan economy over the previous decade, a change from a subsistence lifestyle to a cash economy and imported food. Food imports brought with them a huge increase in waste from the packaging, which was currently rotting at one end of the island, and he discussed his plans to recycle aluminum cans and other items. We talked about the tidal surges and how they were making the taro pits too salty for cultivation, as well as the droughts that were becoming more frequent, especially on the northern islands. These factors were leading to more immigration from the outlying islands to Funafuti. Faced with few job prospects and a growing population, some young people on Funafuti—those who knew a trade and were willing to completely remake their lives—were emigrating, but there was no official large-scale effort to resettle the Tuvaluan population in another country. Evi told me of his desire to return to renewable energy sources (solar had once been much more widespread, but now a generator was easier and cheaper) and spoke highly of the work Chris and Gilliane were doing. He said that the much-discussed lawsuit against the United States and Australia had been dropped as too expensive and ultimately untenable, and he now saw the only way forward as being one of partnership with the larger countries, especially those in the European Union and, perhaps, the United States.
Overall, I came away from Tuvalu with a profound sense of a people in flux, trying to cope with their increasingly dire situation by thinking transgenerationally, considering more long-term goals, renewable resources, and transnational collaboration. This is a vision of the future that many in the developed world share and is, I believe, the only way forward in dealing with the enormous pressures of global climate change. As I write this I am looking at a glass Coca-Cola bottle that Semese and I found on the motu during our day of exploration. It was left behind by American soldiers stationed in Tuvalu during the Second World War, more than sixty years before. It still looks brand-new, and seems a fitting example of the sort of transgenerational power I’ve written about in this book. I doubt the young soldier who drank the Coke and tossed the bottle into the bushes had any idea that it would find its way—possibly long after his death—to a suburban bookshelf in Washington, D.C., a souvenir from a small island nation that is struggling to cope with the challenges of the twenty-first century.
CAP IN HAND
The situation in Tuvalu demonstrates some of the innovative ways that people with very little material wealth or technology are dealing with climate change. As I’ve traveled around the world for my work, I’ve had a chance to see other options being explored. The key point, ultimately, is that people are reacting to the challenges that we face as a species. Our lifestyles, built on expansion and on using all of the resources available to us, are in the process of shifting to take into account the long-term conservation of those resources.
While I was writing this book, the price of a barrel of oil hit an all-time high of nearly $150, the most expensive it has ever been. The cost of buying gasoline became prohibitive for some of the rural poor in the United States, and many were forced to stop driving their own vehicles, move closer to their jobs, take public transportation, or carpool. Some of the lofty price of petroleum can perhaps be explained by speculation on the commodities markets or the decline in value of the dollar, but much of it is due to the increasing demand from China, India, and other developing countries as they have become richer. Although oil prices are extremely volatile, dropping to around $30 a barrel only a few months after hitting that all-time high, the fact remains that petroleum is a scarce commodity that seems destined to become more expensive in the future.
China is now the world’s largest market for automobile sales, having surpassed the United States in December 2009. Moreover, Chinese sales are accelerating, while those in the States and Europe are declining, a trend that pre-dates the recession of 2008–09. Some economists expect India to be the world’s third largest car market by 2030. Increasing wealth brings with it increasing desire for mobility, and the car remains the transport of choice. Even as we in the “rich world” may wring our hands about our carbon footprints and gas mileage, consumers in China still have the pedal to the metal on the automotive front. This is in part because of gasoline subsidies, which kept prices in China at about half of what they were in the United States through mid-2008. These subsidies have now been reduced significantly, but the Chinese continue to buy more cars every month.
The effects of this transportation shift are already visible—quite clearly, as anyone who has visited Beijing or Shanghai recently can tell you. City thoroughfares, once a sea of bicycles, are now traffic gridlocks, with millions of cars spewing exhaust into a horribly polluted sky. Even on sunny days it is sometimes difficult to make out the scores of building cranes on the horizon because of the smog, and the air quality is consistently so poor that some elite athletes seriously considered skipping the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In its race to embrace the fruits of the twenty-first century, China has also thrust itself into the heart of a debate about the downside of modernization.
FIGURE 28: AUTO SALES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1980–2009.
The Kyoto Protocol doesn’t address Chinese emissions standards. In fact, it fails to address emissions standards for any of the larger developing countries, including India and Brazil. They are exempt from the standards of the so-called Annex I countries, which are bound by the treaty to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide—to an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels. This is to be achieved through a “cap and trade” system, where Annex I countries are given a cap for their emissions levels and are able to trade “carbon credits” in order to help them achieve it. The trade in carbon credits recognizes that some countries—and even some industries within a country—will generate more greenhouse gases than others, and will be allowed to purchase the unused credits from the cleaner country or industry. In other words, the system tries to use both government-level quotas and the free market to achieve a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
While almost all of the world’s c
ountries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol (it actually came into effect when Russia ratified it in 2004), the largest carbon emitter at the time of the protocol’s 1997 drafting, the United States—which then accounted for around 40 percent of global carbon emissions—never signed. The reasons given by the administration of President George Bush were twofold. First, officials argued that the economic costs were too high as proposed and there needed to be more flexibility in implementation. This, perhaps, can be dismissed as protectionism and a shortsighted failure to recognize the long-term costs of global climate change. Second, and perhaps more important, the administration pointed out that it hoped to have emissions standards set for developing countries as well. Noting that China is building an average of one large coal-fired power plant every week, detractors of the protocol say that the stakes are too important to leave developing nations out of the reduction targets. In fact, in 2006 China overtook the United States as the world’s largest carbon emitter. The Chinese counter that they not only should benefit from the same sort of petroleum-assisted development that took place in the world’s richer countries in the twentieth century, but also that, as a nation of 1.3 billion people to the United States’ 300 million, their emissions per capita are still much lower.
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