The Attacking Ocean by Brian Fagan Read Free Book Online

communities elsewhere. However, the migration issue is far larger than a few trainingprograms, and is compounded by the refusal of many islanders to believe that there is a sea level problem. Many of them, devout Christians, believe that God will raise the islands a little higher, then higher, so that they, and their descendants, will live in peace.
    KIRIBATI AND TUVALU are but two of many Pacific islands that face uncertain futures in the face of the ocean. Such islands have formed an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small island nations, the Alliance of Small Island States. 8 This active lobbying group argues that serious attention should be paid to mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and urges support for its members’ attempts to mitigate the effects of rising sea levels and other facets of global warming. Fourteen Pacific island states are members, as are the Comoros Islands, Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.
    The Maldives, a nation of about 1,190 islands covering an area of ninety thousand square kilometers, are a tourist paradise of dazzlingly clear turquoise waters, shimmering white beaches, and pristine coral reefs. The islands lie no more than 2.4 meters above sea level. Some are coral atolls, others islands covered with lush tropical vegetation and reef-ringed lagoons. Three hundred thousand people live here, on some of the lowest inhabited land on earth.
    For many centuries, the Maldives were a crossroads astride ancient Indian Ocean trade routes that linked them with India and Sri Lanka. Maldive cowrie shells became a major form of barter currency throughout much of Asia and as far afield as the East African coast for many centuries. 9 Little is known of the earliest inhabitants, who probably arrived from India or Sri Lanka and appear to have lived in transitory settlements. Buddhism spread to the Maldives during the third century B.C.E., probably during the reign of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great, when the religion diffused far beyond the boundaries of his empire centered on the Ganges River. Fourteen centuries later, Buddhism gave way to Islam, which arrived from India’s Malabar Coast, a hub of the Indian Ocean trade. Islamic interest in the islands revolved aroundthe cowrie shell trade. Portuguese merchants established a small trading post supervised from Goa on the Indian mainland in 1558, but they were soon driven out. Both the Dutch, who had replaced the Portuguese as the dominant power on Sri Lanka, and the British, who expelled them in 1796, established hegemony over the Maldives, but did nothing to involve themselves in local affairs. Eventually the islands became a British Protectorate from 1887 until 1953, when the Maldives achieved independence and became a republic rather than a sultanate. Since then, the islands’ history has occasionally been turbulent, its economy boosted by a burgeoning tourist industry that capitalizes on the great natural beauty of the islands. But that beauty is under siege from climbing sea levels.
    At the Kyoto climate change conference in 1997, former Maldives president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said, “What you will do or not do here will greatly influence the fate of my people. It can also change the course of world history.” 10 One cannot imagine the inundation of the Maldives Islands changing world history, but no one can deny that the nation’s 2.4-meter-high domains are extremely vulnerable, not only to rising sea levels, but also to exceptionally high tides. 11 In 1987, such a tide flooded Malé, the capital. Nineteen years later, and at huge expense, then-president Gayoom increased the height of Hulhumalé Island as a place of refuge by using a giant dredge to suck up sand from the ocean floor into a shallow lagoon. He built a hospital, apartments, and government buildings. Several thousand people live there: Gayoom wanted fifty thousand to make it home. Rare events, like the great