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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.)


	A thin strip of Funafuti Atoll snakes its way across the Pacific. (Photograph by Matthieu Paley)

WHAT DOES A COUNTRY DO when it knows it is of no concern to the rest of the world, has no natural resources to sell, occupies a location so exposed to the elements that it seems geography has played a bitter joke, and emerges from colonial dependency into the warming-up postmodern world?

It does what it can to survive for all the dwindling days that the earth has allotted it.

For the last decade, environmentalists have been eager to christen Tuvalu the proverbial canary in global warming's coal mine. Jeremy Leggett, who was scientific director of Greenpeace's Climate Campaign in the 1990s, told me that Tuvalu "is a microcosm of the horrors that await us if blindness and idiocy like that of the present American government continue. Tuvaluans are the first victims."

Of course, were it not for the reports of its impending demise, few people outside Tuvalu would know that it existed at all. Put together, the nine islands cover less ground than Manhattan, and their highest point is 16 feet above the sea. The nearest movie theater is in Fiji, roughly 600 miles to the south. Under British rule until 1978, Tuvalu didn't even rate its own colony; instead, the British yoked Polynesian Tuvalu to its Micronesian neighbor Kiribati, calling the package the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. (Tuvalu was Ellice.) Despite its current value to environmentalists, none I spoke with had visited the country or could even pronounce its name properly (accent on the second syllable: Tu-VAH-lu).

Tuvalu, though, has slipped comfortably into its role as environmental cause célèbre. A succession of prime ministers have captivated the press at international gatherings like the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and, more recently, this summer's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Tuvalu anted up to join the United Nations in 2000, hoping, according to Ambassador Enele Sopoaga, "to draw attention to the adverse effects of climate change and sea-level rise on the survival and livelihood of Tuvalu's people." In March, at a summit of Commonwealth nations held in Coolum, Australia, Prime Minister Koloa Talake predicted that his homeland would be gone within 50 years, and appealed to the leaders of Australia and New Zealand to guarantee Tuvalu's population a dry migratory destination.

"Flooding is very common. When it is high tide, the flow has gone right into the middle of the island, destroying food crops," Talake told a news conference in Coolum. "Islets that used to be my playing ground when I was ten or eleven years old have disappeared, vanished. Where are they? . . . These things were there and now they have gone; somebody has taken them, and global warming is the culprit."

Talake got a cool response from his biggest South Pacific neighbor. The Australian government-which asserts that "the likely impact of climate-change-induced sea-level rises in the Pacific is not immediate"-flatly rebuffed Tuvalu's calls for immigration. New Zealand, on the other hand, amended an existing temporary-employment program to allow 75 Tuvaluans a year to apply for residence.

At the same summit, Talake raised the prospect of filing suit in the International Court of Justice against the United States and Australia for their prominent role in pumping up the atmospheric greenhouse with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Groups like the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which continues to investigate the strategy of mounting anti-tobacco-style litigation against big global warmers, are aware that Tuvalu could make an agreeably desolate plaintiff. "If I lived in Tuvalu," Jon Coifman, the spokesman at NRDC's Climate Center in Washington, D.C., told me, "I'd be concerned with basic justice and with reparations for the fact that my country is about to go underwater."

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