End Time in the Sunshine

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At breakfast, for instance, I asked President Dowiyogo what other money-making ideas were kicking around Nauru. He said they were 'studying' a proposal to slice the limestone pinnacles into cross sections, polish them, and offer them for sale in the West as coffee tables. When I asked what other business opportunities his country was contemplating, he took a bite of toast.

Nauruan natives now exceeded 10,000, and with the hope for the future balanced on coffee tables, I gingerly asked the president what might happen to the people on Nauru in the next 10 years.

'That's not a problem,' he said, explaining that there were at least two more years of full mining, and engineers were studying how to extract 'residual phosphate' from the limestone pinnacles when they get knocked down. He explained that early estimates of the remaining potential added up to another eight years of income for the island.

'What do you see as the future in 20 years?' I replied.

'That may be a problem,' the president of Nauru said quietly. I had other questions, but I no longer had the guts to ask them. By now, the awkwardness had reduced the breakfast interview to little more than the sound of forks scratching plates.

Critics of Nauru in the U.S. government have long held that Nauru is an example of what happens when a country steps too far outside the banking and regulatory codes of the new global marketplace. Other observers have seen the island nation as a symbol of a larger problem. 'Nauru is the tip of the iceberg,' says Professor Carl N. McDaniel, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose book Paradise for Sale, written with John M. Gowdy, examines the nation's collapsing biosystems. 'Nauru is what happens when you treat natural resources as economic resources,' they write. 'You can't sell off your own habitat for long, but this is what we're all doing everywhere. Nauru is only the canary in the mine shaft.'

Could it be that Nauru will become the first nation-state of the modern age simply to go out of business? Once, Australia offered to give the Nauruans a new island off the Great Barrier Reef. The Nauruans declined, since it would have meant completely surrendering their sovereignty. But it does seem likely that some future leader will have to plan for such a contingency.

Should economics not finish off the country, it seems that nature will. Few scientists disagree about the inevitability of rising ocean levels. New environmental studies suggest that the ocean's waters will engulf the meager inhabitable outer ring of the island. Soon enough, we'll be out of the realm of metaphor. Nauru will return to the mercy of our guardian of the shorelines, regulator of temperatures, and heaving sculptor of mountains. Topside's bleached and bony labyrinth, scarcely visible in the high water, will be the sole proof that people once lived there before it was abandoned, bare and alone at sea, available once again only to the birds for millions upon millions of years.

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