Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine December 2002

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Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.)

SOMETHING DOESN'T quite compute. My head is full of the dire warnings of the government, environmentalists, and the press. But my eyes are open, too, and I can see that Funafuti is no green haven, and that a substantial chunk of its real estate has been cleared of trees and paved, and that garbage seems to be its most prolific national product, and that the environment has been degraded in ways that are unrelated to the legacy of Henry Ford.

Dozens of casual conversations with Tuvaluans who aren't associated with the government yield little concern about rising seas. Many, like Teagai Apelu, an 85-year-old curmudgeon who is regarded as the leading guardian of Tuvalu's oral storytelling traditions, are outright scornful of the notion. "There's no change in sea level," he tells me. "It's rumors. It's lies. It's always been the same. When it's high tide, salt gets in the gardens. When storms come, the sand gets washed away in one place and shows up somewhere else. It's foolish to say Tuvalu will disappear!"

Government officials caution me not to heed the backward views of the people. "Tuvaluans will hide their real feelings when talking to a stranger," Paani Laupepa tells me. "They don't want to admit defeat." Further, he says, 98 percent of his countrymen are devout Christians who take God's word for it when he promises Noah that the big flood will not repeat itself. Yet after mass at the Tuvalu Christian Church one Sunday, Pastor Molikao Kaua, a diminutive 76-year-old whose blue eyes are so cloudy they seem to be made of smoked glass, tells me that he has made one thing clear to his congregants. "If there is a flood," he says, "it comes from man, not from God."

If. Not far from the wharf in Fongafale, a small fiberglass hut suspended over some pilings houses a state-of-the-art sea-level gauge installed by an Australian institute called the National Tidal Facility. Since 1991, the gauge has detected a rise in the waters around Tuvalu of less than a millimeter per year, which is more than a hair but a lot less than a flood. The Australians attribute the unusual high tides that have been observed by some Tuvaluans to a natural tidal cycle in the region that repeats every 18.6 years and is yet to peak. They also point out that the most dramatic recent changes in sea level have actually been decreases, like the astounding one-foot drop that occurred after the enormous pool of warmed-up seawater caused by 1998's El Ni-o migrated from the western Pacific to the eastern Pacific.

When I mention the Australian measurements to Laupepa, he abruptly shoots them down. "I'm very cynical about Australian science," he tells me, noting that the Australian government, which funds the National Tidal Facility's research, is the world's largest exporter of the second-most-abundant greenhouse-gas emitter-coal. "The Australian mentality stinks," Laupepa goes on to say. "Their scientists misrepresent information in a way designed to suit the needs of the piper."

Australia's director of the National Tidal Facility, Wolfgang Scherer, who developed the sea-level gauges while working in the U.S. for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is adamant that his government has no influence over his Tuvalu project, and believes that objections to his findings are raised by those with "a political agenda."

Scherer stresses that while the sea around Tuvalu is rising about a millimeter a year, Tuvalu's troubles are not entirely the doings of nature. They're also man-made. He cites, above all, "those flaming borrow pits that the Americans put there during World War II when they built the airstrip." In 1943, 6,000 troops of the U.S. Seventh Air Force arrived and transformed Funafuti into a combat air base to fight the Japanese. The Americans paved one-third of the arable land with a runway that remains the capital's dominant physical feature, excavating coral from 11 borrow pits across the island to use as construction material.

"Those borrow pits left a mess of the island, and have never been repaired," Scherer says. "And there's never been any attempt to give the Tuvaluans anything back for that." The pits, he tells me, collect runoff and rainwater; this alters the flow of Tuvalu's fragile freshwater lens, makes the island's potable water supply salty, and allows seawater to push its way up through the ground. Scherer also suspects that the destruction of the freshwater lens has enhanced the dissolution of Tuvalu's limestone underpinnings. It's likely, he says, that Tuvalu is being hollowed out. He compares the situation to that of Bermuda, with its famous limestone caverns, some of which have collapsed. "There's substantial fear that something like that may be going on in Funafuti, as a direct result, in some cases, of the borrow pits."

Still, Scherer says he understands where the Tuvaluans are coming from. "In geological perspective," he explains, "Tuvalu is one of those volcanic islands that has come to the end of its life. It's largely a natural process. But for an island person living in that environment, a meter and a half above sea level, it's not a very comfortable experience."

When I contact Ursula Kaly, an ecosystems specialist who was Tuvalu's environment adviser for four years, beginning in 1997, what she tells me further complicates the Tuvaluan script for global-warming-wrought annihilation. The gravest danger to Funafuti, Kaly says, comes from tropical storms, and she hints that the island's vulnerability to storms has been enhanced by things other than global warming. Tree cover, which defends against high winds and soil erosion, has been reduced to make way for construction; reefs, which help absorb energy from incoming waves, have been damaged by the dumping of waste. "It's just the diffuse impact of everyday stuff," she tells me, "building houses and roads and gardens, and trying to make a living on this tiny bit of land."

The most foolhardy assault on Tuvalu's environmental well-being was sponsored by foreign-aid donors, including the European Union, who encouraged the islanders to remove a bank of coral rocks from Fongafale's ocean-side shore. The rocks had been dragged to the beach and deposited there by Hurricane Bebe, a fierce 1972 storm that leveled almost every building on the island. "Experts came in," Kaly recounts, "and said, 'You'd better dig up that Bebe Bank, or it will be wasted.' " A rock crusher was brought in and the bank was quarried for construction materials, including a seawall built on the lagoon side of the island. The seawall crumbled quickly. And without the Bebe Bank to absorb the energy of ocean waves, the island now faces a nasty sucker punch from the next cyclone to make its way ashore.

But hold on: If global warming isn't the primary agent of erosion, contamination of fresh water, and abuse to the reef in Tuvalu, and if, indeed, the sea's waters aren't yet swelling, why is the government mounting a determined campaign to broadcast its death rattle to the world?

One scientist I talked to who has worked extensively in Tuvalu, but who refuses to be named, put it to me simply: If Tuvalu doesn't stick to the global-warming-is-sinking-us message, it risks losing access to whatever compensation or assistance might be coming its way. "Even if they're not 100 percent sure," the scientist said, "they're going to have to talk as if they are in order to get heard. . . . I've been to a lot of international meetings. If you let into one of those big UN meetings even one little quiver of doubt, you get cut out. So you see, the system has created them.

"I'd be worried about being on Funafuti now if another Bebe came through," the scientist continued. "I think the stage is set for a real disaster now. Resilience has been taken out of the system-because trees are gone, because the coral reef hasn't grown back yet, because people pick up rocks, throw rubbish, build houses. There is a sense of overall ecosystem downgrading. Worrying about climate change is like a terminal cancer patient worrying about catching AIDS."

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