End Time in the Sunshine

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There are no words or pictures that can adequately capture what mining has wrought in Nauru. The small atoll has essentially been tonsured. The sickly collection of water-starved vegetation on the periphery-the dead palms, the pandanus trees with black crowns, the greenless golf course-is the good news. It masks the horror that lies just inside that ring of scrub: The entire interior has been clear-cut and the underbed of phosphate strip-mined so deep that the only things left are the coral bones of the atoll as it might have existed a million years ago. With all the topsoil and phosphate gone, what's left are sinuous canals marked by sun-bleached limestone towers and coral outcroppings. One would be hard-pressed to find a place that has been more wasted by the global economy. The winding, dug-out channels among these coral spires are lined with an appallingly silky dirt. Old trash blows around this blistering desert, the shredded plastic bags snagging on bits of coral, the weightier garbage eventually sinking into the ruts, where the rot manages to service the root systems of a few brave weeds. If there is a speck of nutrient to be found there, it is hunted by feral dogs that long ago fled the domesticated life on the shore for a brutal, dystopian existence in the coral channels.

One environmental theory that explains why Nauru's natural periodic droughts have grown so much worse in recent years is called the 'oven effect.' Under the equatorial sun, the exposed white hotplate of Nauru's interior creates a column of scorched air that rises fast enough to blow away rain clouds.

Brian pointed to a place-it seemed almost hypothetical-out in the powdery distance and said it was his. I later found out that every Nauruan owns a piece of the island. There are thousands of these tracts of land, some not much bigger than a double bed. I have seen a map that breaks up the entire island into micro_parcels. Despite the fact that most of the island has been exported to fertilize crops in the West, almost every Nauruan knows precisely where his or her designated splinter of homeland can be found.

Brian drove slowly with the windows down, then stopped at another place and we got out and scanned the skeletal landscape. He told me how, when he was a boy, all this had been dense tropical forest. He and his friends would hunt the black noddy bird and then bring their kill home to prepare it in the traditional Nauruan style. The population of the country's signature bird had since collapsed, as had those of the once-populous frigate bird and tern. So Nauruans no longer ate the noddy bird. We sat in a hissing silence for a while. There was no breeze, just fine talc, airborne and stagnant, like particulate suspended in the stillness of a laboratory vacuum. It seemed to crackle and pop in the heavy, birdless air. The emotional sensation of standing there was one of intense, primal fear, as if I could be murdered. Have you ever found yourself alone after hours in a cathedral or a stadium? There is an uneasy feeling of immense absence-of a congregation, of 50,000 fans. Here, on Topside, what was missing was the very life force of nature. It was stripped clean, literally to the bone; all that was left was a silence that scared me in a way I hadn't been scared since childhood.

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