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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Tuvalu Toodle-oo (Cont.)

SO, TUVALU IS GOING DOWN. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not because of a single high-profile cosmic phenomenon, then because of a set of murkier, more depressing, mundane, typically human facts. Global warming may not, at the moment, be flooding Tuvalu, but globalization is. Either way, Tuvaluans are searching for deliverance.

Change has come with staggering speed. As recently as 1978, most Tuvaluans got by on fishing and farming. Although islanders can still be seen walking down the road every afternoon toting huge freshly caught tuna, 70 percent of the country's food is now imported, and tin cans and plastic bottles float in the borrow pits, line the roadsides, and clog the beaches. As a cash economy replaced a subsistence economy, residents of the eight outer islands, which are far less developed and far more pristine, flocked to Funafuti, seeking jobs in the new national government. With 4,500 people crammed in, Funafuti's population is now five times larger than it was in 1973.

The overcrowded conditions and limited economic prospects only help to feed First World doubts that global warming is the real source of Tuvalu's pleas. "We'd take Tuvalu's position on global warming a little more seriously if the first thing they'd done wasn't to ask Australia and New Zealand to let them in," an official in the U.S. Embassy in Fiji tells me. "Of course they want to move. There's nothing for them there."

When I met him, James Conway assured me, almost apologetically, that "if a court system were to say that there's evidence of sea-level rise and that industrial greenhouse gases were responsible for it, and if that court gave Tuvaluans a choice of half a billion dollars or the ability to continue to inhabit their islands for the next thousand years, they'd choose the islands in a minute."

They won't be given that choice. Nature and human folly and the internal combustion engine will, at some point, conspire to rid the world of a land that few people knew existed. There's unlikely to be a court case at all. The costs are too high and the odds too slim. And some environmentalists are already beginning to distance themselves from Tuvalu's grandstanding. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, issued a press release in November 2001 alerting his constituency that "Tuvalu is the first country where people are trying to evacuate because of rising seas." Nine months later, when I call him, he admits, "I guess what we were looking for is some canaries in the coal mine, and at first Tuvalu looked like it might be a canary. On closer examination, it's not clear that it is."

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