That Sinking Feeling

Tuvalu

In those long ago days when I was trying hard to become a nice person and studying to become a Methodist Minister, I spent a few years in the Methodist Training College in Brisbane.

One of the positive aspects of living there was meeting people from all over the world who came to study. We had Fijians, Gilbert and Ellice Islanders, Chinese and Papua New Guineans. Even in those closeted days I felt a bond with people from these far flung lands and maintained a level of friendship with some of them for years after I left the college.

The Ellice Islands subsequently became independent as Tuvalu, along with its seven tiny islands and roughly ten thousand souls. One of its first prime ministers, Tomasi PuaPua, attended that same college.

I was sent there on a short mission to look at water storage. At the time, I was based in Kiribati, to the north and getting to Tuvalu’s Funafuti Internatioanl airport was by bi weekly plane (small turbo prop) from Fiji. To get to and from Fiji and Kiribati you had to take Air Nauru’s remaining jet once a week to Kiribati. Planes could take off from Tuvalu when they removed the goal posts from the soccer pitch.

At least in larger Kiribati all they needed to do was herd the cattle off the strip and make sure that the drunken fork lift driver didn’t drive into the side of the plane again when unloading the baggage.

I tried to convince my colleagues in the Kiribati Government that the Tuvalu model of water collection was an excellent idea. I spent days arguing for them to re-establish the practice of colonial times when each house by law had to collect rainwater from its roof (assuming it was tin) and that all public buildings had to feed their water into tanks for storage in the same way. They did it in Tuvalu and in fact by law most houses had to be built over a water catchment area that equated to the floor area of the house.

After all, by the time I got there groundwater was saline and polluted in both countries. Kiribati opted for a Chinese desalination plant which occasionally worked. Rainwater simply wasted away. I could never understand it. Water-wise, the British had it right when they ran the islands. Every building, by law, had to have rain water collection systems. For whatever reason, that provision lapsed on independence. People told me that it was because after the dry season, sand and dust was washed into the tanks when the rainy season started.

‘Then do what we did in Australia,’ I advised. ‘When the rain season starts, disconnect the down pipes till after the first shower and the dirty water can run away on to the garden or somewhere else useful. The next time it rains, the roof will be clean’.

The looks that greeted that suggestion could best be interpreted as: ‘That sounds like work!’   

We met with government officials to discuss two things: global warming and water.

To be honest with you, to this day I remain confused. I see evidence of global warming. I see the polar ice caps expanding…. And contracting. What is really happening? Al Gore’s slick presentation notwithstanding. I do not dismiss the arguments of those who claim that there is outright lying about environmental issues in order to try and stampede world leaders to save the planet. Despite the decade since my visit to the two tiny nations, Kyoto protocols and so forth, world leaders still seem to have bigger fish to fry.

The Tuvalu government wanted to approach the New Zealand government asking it to accept its ten thousand or so citizens as environmental refugees. Even in those days, the shock phrase ‘global warming’ was the big bogeyman.

What was odd was that one of the delegates, citing a scientist from the Cato Institute (if I am not mistaken) whose name I forget, claimed that the sea level around Tuvalu had been falling for the last half-century. He cited a report in an issue of Science which he distributed to the experts present. It (and he) was treated with some disdain by those with hair longer than two inches. He became apoplectic.  He showed us all a pretty map with all sorts of colours that supported his unpopular views. In fact, he claimed that the decline was so steep that even using the UN’s median estimates of global warming for the new century, Tuvalu would not get back to its 1950 sea level until 2050!

The response was stunned silence. I was also stunned. I lived in Kiribati. I saw the coconut line disappearing. I had visited Cook Glacier. Each visit I could see how far it had retreated. What was the truth?

It was not a simple matter of jumping on the ‘let’s get scared’ bandwagon. Newspapers round the world had already announced in large headlines that Tuvalu would be amongst the first to drown. Our devil’s advocate asked how difficult was it to check the facts before jumping on the bandwagon? He asked us to consider an alternative cause for at least some of the problem.

‘Why are your people leaving?’ he asked the government. Even without global warming, both Tuvalu and Kiribati are almost uninhabitable as they are. They can cite factory emissions in the west as being at the root cause of the destruction of their environment, but we must be careful here and I began to consider that blind bandwagon boisterousness was unwise. 

What's the real reason Tuvalu’s (or for that matter, Kiribati’s) people might have to leave?

Consider this. There are no rivers. Their sources of potable water are exhausted. Their beaches are eroding. One issue is whether that erosion has been exacerbated by the willy-nilly removal of sand for construction and building.

Also consider that most of the vegetation of these poorly vegetated islands has been burned for fuel by the environmentally irresponsible islanders. The soil is poor. The islands have no mineral deposits. Exports? Fishing licenses perhaps. For Tuvalu, a large percentage of its GDP comes from licensing revenue from the sale of its ‘.tv’ Internet domain.

Tuvalu is a self-made ecological disaster. The people of this tiny nation want to leave at least in part because they have destroyed their own country. And the same can be said of Kiribati. And Nauru. And the Cook Islands and so on and so on.

Sadly and against the tide of common wisdom, Tuvalu’s story is one of environmental and political deceit, abetted by a media more interested in sensationalism than fact.

The meeting ended in chaos. We left with bad vibes following us and sat quietly on the plane as we slowly chugged back to Fiji. I said it before and I say it again:  we had been challenged to question conventional wisdom. We rejected that challenge. Were we right to do so?

To this day I am in two minds. I can see devastation and disaster and loss and I have to ask what is the real cause. What about the French scientist’s data? Was Tuvalu ‘larger’ now than in the 1950s? Some of the elders, when we asked them, frowned and refused to comment.

Had they forgotten?

Or did they secretly like the idea of living in New Zealand?