Place of the Week: Nauru

The possibly misguided continuation of the Place of the Week series takes us this time to an erstwhile paradise in the South Pacific: the Micronesian microstate of Nauru.



Status: Independent Republic
Area: 21 sq. km.
Population: 13,770
Unemployment rate: 90%
Rank, in GDP, among the world's nations in the early 1980s: 2
Rank today, according to the CIA World Factbook: 141

The tragic story of the island nation of Nauru begins in the digestive tracts of countless generations of sea birds. Those were the production facilities of what would become one of the world's most valuable commodities: bird shit. Or at least, it would become very valuable after being deposited in copious quantities over millions of years and reacting with the uplifted coral that formed the structure of the island to become phosphate, from whence comes phospohorus, which has many industrial and agricultural uses, including as a key component of fertilizer.

Turns out that the combination of Nauru's geology and its ecology allowed the island's phosphate deposits to become some of the largest and highest-quality deposits in the world. Mining began in the early 20th Century, when Nauru was a colony of Germany. The island would go through periods as a possession of Australia, Japan, and the UN before becoming the world's smallest independent nation in 1968 - and all the while, the mining continued.

It was an absolute bonanza. The small population of the island gained enormous wealth from its phosphate exports. By the early 1980s, the country had the second-highest per capita income in the world, after the United Arab Emirates. And, like the UAE today, the country was not ashamed to spend the wealth it derived from its natural resources. People chartered planes to go on international shopping trips around the Pacific Rim. The country imported fancy sports cars, even though the entire nation can be circumnavigated by bicycle in an hour and a half and the highest speed limit on the island is 25 mph. The nouveau riche Nauruans were living the good life and profiting from a natural bounty that seemed to be a limitless gift from God.

Unfortunately, the island's good fortune did not extend to its investments of that wealth, to the extent that investments were even made:

"We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

The world's most dubious investors - from the nefarious to the clueless - saw in Nauru a likely target for their financial schemes. One advisor to the Republic of Nauru convinced the government to invest in Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a West End production that would go down as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of the London stage. The country also made various real estate investments around the world that would be gradually vaporized by corruption and mismanagement. And when the nation finally took a break from its decades-long party to look around itself, it made a discovery: the phosphate - the source of all the good times - was nearly gone, and so was the money.


The country has tried other means to keep its financially foundering fortunes afloat. It went the route of other island nations by trying to make it as a tax haven and money laundering center, though pressure from the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering quickly scotched that plan. And in 2001, a Norwegian boat carrying a cargo of human refugees, including some from Afghanistan, was diverted from Australia to Nauru; in exchange for keeping the refugees in a detention center on the island, Australia threw Nauru a lifeline of financial aid. Australia decided to close the facility in 2008, and its unclear how the island will deal with the consequent shock to its now refugee detention-based economy.

Meanwhile, mining has left the once pristine nation comprehensively denuded. A thin limn of foliage clings to the edge of the island, but almost the entire interior - 90% of the island - has been rendered a wasteland. The country, having squan- dered its resources and its wealth, is now left without even a healthy natural environment from which to rebuild.

Nauru's tale is the story of a population whistling past the graveyard as it gradually depletes the finite resource on which its economy and its society depends, preferring to live extravagantly without considering what might happen when that resource inevitably disappears.

Feel free to draw your own lessons.

UPDATE: NPR's This American Life had a really good episode a little while back about Nauru. Here's the link.

Place of the Week: Pitcairn Islands

For the second installment of what I'm still not sure whether it may or may not become a regular feature of this blog focusing on some odd or unusual corner of the globe, I give you: The Pitcairn Islands.



Status: Overseas territory of the UK
Area: 47 sq. km.
Population: 48ish
Languages: Pitkern, English
Religion: Seventh Day Adventism
Number of Telephones: 17, on one party line
Size of the labor force, as drolly put in an entry in the CIA World Factbook: 15 able-bodied men

Why did no one ever tell me about the Pitcairns? The story of the Pitcairns is crazy! It's the sort of story that it seems like you ought to just inherit as part of your received knowledge of the world, like the fact that the Egyptians built the Pyramids, or that French Canadians are never to be trusted. But for me, this was not the case! I had no idea about the Pitcairns until just a couple of years ago.

So what's their deal? Their deal is this: the modern Pitcairners are the descendants of an 18th Century mutiny at sea - the mutiny on the Bounty. Now, here's another thing about my ignorance: I had no idea, again until recently, that the mutiny on the Bounty was anything other than a work of fiction. I had always thought it was, you know, The Mutiny on the Bounty. But no, it really happened.


The story, roughly, is this. In 1787, a ship was sent out from England to go fetch some breadfruits from Tahiti. (Yeah, I know - but apparently that's the sort of thing people did in 1787.) After a rather longer-than-anticipated amount of time at sea - about ten months - the crew landed at the South Pacific island and, for reasons that are utterly inexplicable, found the tropical paradise quite to their liking. In particular, they appreciated the local women. (After nearly a year at sea? Again, inexplicable.) Apparently it took them about a fortnight to go native. As the Bounty's Capt. William Bligh observed, "it is therefore now not to be Wondered at ... that a Set of Sailors led by Officers and void of connections ... should be governed by such powerful inducement ... to fix themselves in the midst of plenty in the finest Island in the World where they need not labour, and where the alurements of disipation are more than equal to anything that can be conceived." In other words: they liked it there, because it was freakin Tahiti.

But so after five months they left to take their breadfruits back to England; however, apparently the prospect of returning to Spithead, the port from which they'd originally set out, didn't appeal to a large contingent of the newly tattooed and Tahitian-betrothed crew, for this is when they mutinied. After some travails involving assorted cannibals and Royal Navy courts martialers, the mutineers and a number of the Tahitian wives and buddies ended up on Pitcairn Island.

As incredible as that story is, what gets me is that they're still there. Their descendants at least - almost everyone who lives on Pitcairn today descends from those original crew. (Granted, this was after a bit of a genetic bottleneck; after some growing pangs involving racial violence, murder, the deaths of all the Tahitian men and a number of the English, and a number of accidental deaths (which increased after the local re-invention of alcohol), the male population had been whittled down to a sole survivor, along with nine women and many children, by 1800.) They didn't come into contact with anyone from the outside world again until 1808, and infrequently thereafter, from what I gather. Later in the 19th Century some missionaries showed up and turned them all into Seventh Day Adventists. But basically, the Pitcairners have just been doing their thing, maintaining their tiny civilization (and perhaps, unfortunately, cultivating a culture of sexual abuse), for the last couple hundred years. It's remarkable.

The locals speak Pitkern, an English creole tongue, which combines elements of Tahitian and 18th Century maritime English. The economy is based on subsistence farming and selling handicrafts to passing ships (which, given the distances to the nearest continents, must be about as remunerative as opening up a magazine stand in the middle of the Rub al Khali). Like 50 or so people live there today.

Seriously. It's important to know that this place exists in the world. Why did no one ever tell me about this?


Life on Pitcairn.