The highest point in the country

Atoll nations consist of tiny parcels of land surrounded by millions of square miles of ocean, but that’s not what really scares me. What is scary is that atolls are quite flat by nature. The highest point in this country is a bridge (pictured below) which connects two parts of the Majuro island. I’ve jumped off higher places into water. It’s only about 20ft high, if that - and it’s a significant rise over the rest of the land. That’s to say that if the ocean were to rise by only a few feet, most of the land in the Marshall Islands would be under water.

Now why would that happen?

Well, if what Al Gore says is true (and you must watch his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth), then this scenario is quite plausible. Large pieces of ice are melting at both poles.

Surely people have the power to reverse this trend of global warming, but people change their ways at the pace of snails. And too many corporations stand to pay a lot of money to update their factories to cleaner technologies. So the American, Canadian, Russian and Chinese governments resist implementing the Kyoto agreement, which frankly, is only a small first step in the endeavour to reverse warming.

Call me pessimist, but my bet is that the Marshallese people will be looking for new homes in the next 20 – 50 years.

It made me wonder whether the national government here has some kind of evacuation plan in the works.

It doesn’t.

20 years is an unfathomable time to a politician.

Luckily, only 50,000 people live in the Marshalls. And we won’t have to evacuate everyone right away. (So if you pictured hundreds of boats and helicopters in a convoy, you’ve watched too many movies.)

Here’s my prediction:

Over the next decades, the water will slowly rise. Land, which is already at a premium, will further increase in value (and so housing costs will rise). This will drive some people to leave the country to find places where they can drop less of their earnings into rent. So the population of people that can afford air fares will decrease.

But since the poorer people still aren’t using birth control, the proportion of people that can’t afford a plane ticket is increasing.

In addition, the Marshallese are woefully under-educated, so even those that do leave usually work at the bottom of the totem pole. In the U.S., the largest contingent of Marshallese people work at a Tyson Turkey processing plant. Others pump gas. Many are simply unemployed.

But for those that can’t afford to leave on their own, I propose 2 potential solutions:

Plan A: Recycle Offshore Drilling Platforms

Ironically enough, the very source of our global warming woes can be put to work: our dependency on fossil fuels. In a public relations project of epic proportions, the various oil giants can donate old offshore drilling platforms to the atolls. By 2020, history will be made by the first countries ever to live on completely artificial territory.

Plan B: Import Trash from America

Survival or economic good sense? The Marshall Islands can become the world’s most significant importer of trash. Most of Boston is a trash-heap-cum-city, so why not Majuro? A few hundred feet of garbage can be laid on top of the coral foundation. We can certainly count on Americans to produce enough trash to out-pace global warming! Not only trash importers would benefit from this economic boom. Tourism would get a boost as beautiful grass-coloured hills could form the back-drops for exotic golf courses and sight-seeing tours; nose-plugs included. Coke Tower (made of recycled cans and bottles) will be the tallest building in the Pacific region.

I will submit my draft proposals to the Ministry of Interior with hopes of getting a fat consulting fee to implement Plan A or B.


But seriously, my evacuation plan would focus on education. Getting people off a sinking ship is a logistical problem, yes, but even if we do get people off the islands, the next generation of Marshallese may end up a poor under-class living in the United States. We gotta get these kids some skills.