On the Front Line of Rising Sea Levels, A Conversation with President Mohammed Nasheed, the Maldives

by Jon Bowermaster on

Forty-two-year-old President Mohammed Nasheed is the first democratically elected president in the island nation of the Maldives, home to 375,000 people in the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka. A former human rights activist and journalist, he was jailed and tortured by his predecessor. Today he is one of the most outspoken politicians in the world on the impact of climate change and its impact on all coastal areas, especially the Maldives. I interviewed him for our new book OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.

Jon Bowermaster: How immediate is the problem of climate change and rising seas in the Maldives today? What evidence are you seeing?

President Nasheed: Climate change is not a distant or abstract phenomenon in the Maldives. The affects of climate change are being felt today. One third of inhabited islands in the Maldives are suffering from coastal erosion, which is exacerbated by climate change. Fishermen are complaining that weather patterns have become unpredictable and warmer and more acidic seas threaten our coral reefs. If the world fails to curb carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures continue to soar, these problems will worsen over the coming decades.

JB: Have sea levels risen already?

PN: The Environment Ministry calculates that sea levels in the Maldives are rising by 0.7 mm per year, which is around the global average. The big fear, however, is that this rise in sea level accelerates as climate change starts to rise even more towards the end of this century. This is a concern not just to the Maldives, but all low-lying areas around the world.

A one-meter rise in sea levels, which some climate scientists warn will happen if nothing is done to reduce carbon pollution, would be devastating for the Maldives. Such a rise would also inundate other low-lying countries such as Bangladesh and the Netherlands and seriously threaten many of the world’s coastal cities. We must not allow this to happen. JB: Soon after your election you announced plans to look for higher ground to move your people to. Where are you looking and how is the search going?

PN: Nobody in the Maldives wants to leave home. The government is doing everything we possibly can to remain here. We are improving sea defenses, such as sea walls, revetments and embankments. We are working to improve the coral reefs and coastal vegetation, which are our islands’ natural defense mechanisms. And we are exploring new building designs, such as building houses on stilts so they withstand storm surges and floods.

The bottom line, however, is dry land and if the world allows the climate crisis to turn into a catastrophe, then future generations of Maldivians will have no choice but to seek new homes on higher ground. I believe it is right to have this conversation today so we can start to plan for the problems tomorrow may bring.

Last year, I suggested we should start saving a portion of our tourism revenues in a Sovereign Wealth Fund, to help future generations cope with climate change. Ultimately, this fund could be used to help people leave. Again, I stress that this is not a problem unique to the Maldives. We are merely the first people who are talking out loud about these issues. If we ignore the warning signs and continue blindly down a ‘business as usual’ polluting path, then it will not just be Maldivians looking for a new home but also the good people of London, New York and Hong Kong.

JB: In your travels around the Maldives do you find that most people understand the seriousness of climate change and its potential impact on them?

PN: People living in Male’ and other urban areas are quite knowledgeable about the environment, particularly young people. In more remote parts of the country, people see that erosion is increasingly. They know that the fish catch is more irregular and they understand that coral reefs are stressed. Maldivians know there are environment problems which affect their daily lives and that these problems are linked to global climate change.

JB: You’ve also proposed that the Maldives will become the first carbon neutral country in the planet. How is that going and have you set a timeline?

PN: We have a plan to make the Maldives carbon neutral in ten years. At the heart of this plan lies a commitment to renewable energy. 155 1.5MW wind turbines, coupled with half a square kilometer of solar panels and a back-up biomass plant would produce enough green energy to power the country. Aviation is trickier. Until airlines can switch to biofuels, there is little the Maldives can do other than offset the pollution caused by international tourist flights, by investing in carbon reduction schemes elsewhere.

Our carbon neutral plan is on track. This year, the government has started working with a number of international energy companies to build wind farms, which we hope will provide the bulk of our electricity. We are also working with the Government of Japan on a $10 million solar project, to install photovoltaic panels on schools and government buildings in and around the capital.

JB: You recently convened an underwater meeting of your entire cabinet. Whose idea was that? Some in the press called it a ‘stunt’ – which is not always a bad thing, when you’re trying to draw attention to important issues.

PN: It was a cabinet decision to conduct the underwater meeting. We estimate that over one billion people watched, heard or read about the underwater cabinet meeting. While it was a bit of fun, it underscored a serious message. I hope the meeting raised people’s awareness about the dangers climate change poses to the Maldives and the rest of the world. I hope that some of those people go on to ask their own politicians what they are doing to help solve the climate crisis. It is only when people start holding leaders to account, when politicians start losing elections over environmental issues, that they will treat climate change with the seriousness it deserves.

JB: How many feet above sea level is your bedroom? Office?

PN: The President’s office is about six feet above sea level.

Where blue meets blue

by Jon Bowermaster on

The upcoming Earth Day (April 22) will be the 40th; I’ve been lobbying, quietly, that this time-round the day be labeled Ocean Day instead. In part because this is without statistical question more of an ocean planet than a continental one, and because I think right now around the world there is a tsunami wave of interest in all things “ocean,” particularly the threats to its health and its fisheries.

(To that end, my new book is called simply OCEANS, Threats to the Sea and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide. Companion book to the new Jacques Perrin/DisneyNature film of the same name (OCEANS), both are officially out on Earth Day/Ocean Day. )

Who isn’t made blissful sitting at water’s edge staring at the horizon, hypnotized by that delicate, nearly imperceptible-yet-somehow-distinct line where blue meets blue? Who among us doesn’t count those solitary, sun-washed moments – whether afloat on a boat or feet dug deep into the sand — as among the favorites of a lifetime?

Cliché? Perhaps. But if the views off land’s edges are not the most soothing, the most renewing on the planet, why do so many of us flock there to live, to work, to rejuvenate? Which raises the issue of why is it that this planet is called Earth, when seventy five percent of it is Ocean? That this is not known as Planet Ocean speaks only to the ego of man, since it has nothing to do with reality. It also raises the question of exactly how many oceans there are. Go get your atlas. Inside you’ll find five mildly distinct bodies with labels (Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern). I, like most whose writing graces these pages, believe there are no real distinctions, that this big body of water encircling the planet is just one ocean.

Put me on the edge, on or in the ocean at sunrise, sunset, under a blazing midday sun or even a small storm and I am content. For the past twenty years I’ve managed just that countless times. A wide variety of explorations have given me a unique perspective on both the health of the ocean and the lives of people who depend on it, a meandering route leading me from remote Bering Sea and Pacific islands, down the coasts of Vietnam and all of South America, around the various seas that surround Europe, parallel long sandy beaches in Gabon and India and rocky ones in Croatia, Tasmania and Kamchatka. At each stop I have spent time with the people whose days are most defined and shaped by the ocean.For all the differences each place offers – from browsing forest elephants and surfing hippos along the beaches of Gabon to eighty-mile-an-hour winds raking the Aleutian Islands, from horrifically-polluted bays off the South China Sea to centuries-old ritual celebrations still practiced on remote South Pacific atolls — similarities link them all. The same is true for ocean people. Though their cultures may differ – dress, food, religions and more – the people who live along coastlines have far more in common than they have differences. Instinctively, the very first thing each does in the morning is scan the horizon line, the seascape, checking the morning sky for what it might portend. Increasingly too, each is impacted by a handful of environmental risks now impacting the ocean, its coastlines and both its marine and human populations.

As the human population grows, headed fast towards nine billion, the planet’s coastlines grow ever more crowded. Fourteen of the planet’s seventeen largest cities are built on the edge of the ocean. Nearly half the world’s population – more than three billion – lives within an hour’s drive of a coast. The rich go for the views and refreshing salt air; the poor for jobs and big dreams; holiday-goers for a brief respite. But we humans are a rapacious species, seemingly incapable of taking good care of any place; over the past five centuries or so we’ve done a very good job of taking from the ocean without pause to consider its fragility and the damage we’ve done to it by our indifference.

How many of those billions who glimpse a sea with frequency, I wonder, stop to ask, How is this big, beautiful ocean of ours doing? While it has long seemed limitless, its resources infinite, there are myriad signs that we’ve now abused the ocean to the point of no return. The list of harms is long and includes threats from climate change (rising sea levels and acidification), various pollutions and over fishing. Eat fish? If so, you have to be concerned about the ocean; experts predict that by 2050 all of the fish species we currently survive on will be gone. Like tuna sashimi? Get it now since all of the world’s bluefin is anticipated to be gone by 2012. Forever. Fresh water supplies are endangered globally, with new reports suggesting that even in the wealthiest of nations (the U.S.) twenty million people drink polluted water every day.

There is some room for hope and optimism, with marine reserves and both national and international laws in the works that may help make a difference. Let’s hope they are enacted and enforced quickly enough that they can have an effect rather than just preceding an inevitable demise; around the globe, for example, far too often marine reserves have been set up only after the last fish was taken.

At each of my coastal stops during the past twenty years I have paused for long minutes, sometimes an hour and occasionally more, often far off the coast in the middle of the vast ocean, to ponder the horizon line, to watch the sun fall into the sea, or rise again. In each of those scenes I have found an incredible renewing energy. And it is the memories of those horizon lines – and the people I’ve met along the ocean’s edges — that keeps me going back for more.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Live from Antarctica: part 4

by Jon Bowermaster on

WHITE THUNDER, NEKO HARBOUR, ANTARCTICA, DAY 4

Sitting atop a bared brown rock on top of a thousand-foot hill looking out over a relatively ice-free harbor – Neko, one of the most beautiful along the Peninsula, though even as I write that I am reminded of how often I say this place or that is “the most beautiful along the Peninsula” – I’m struck by two things: How quiet it is and simultaneously how much ambient sound there is in the air if you just sit … quietly … and listen.

I have long said that one of my favorite things about Antarctica is that it is truly a place that you can get remote. Take a hundred foot walk from the shoreline virtually anywhere along the Peninsula and you can be assured no one has ever walked there before. Climb a short hill, as I’ve just done, and the predominant sound is the beating of your heart. It is a perfectly still, calm day, sunny, 38 degrees F at nine in the morning. By noon it will be in the mid-forties, now-typical for the Peninsula this time of year.

Across the narrow bay, black rocky mountain peaks jut out of deep snow. The opposing hills would be incredible ski runs if you could hike up them without disappearing down one of the dozens of crevasses marked by grey shadows on the snow. A pair of glacial tongues roll down towards the sea each a mile-wide, built up over a many tens of thousands of years. The two hundred foot tall glacier walls drop straight into the cold black sea, which is dotted by small icebergs and bergy bits calved off them.

I have been to this harbor a dozen times before and each time it looks different. Often the currents in front of the sand-and-rock beach are fast, filled with moving ice, threatening landings. Big calvings off the glacies have been known to create eight-foot waves, washing everything – Zodiacs, penguins, humans – off the beach. The sea is blue black, highlighted by icebergs and the rings of aqua blue that rim them, reflections of the ice below the surface. The sky scudded by high clouds. Thirty miles to the north, towards the Lemaire Channel and Anvers Island, the peak of Mt. Francais – the highest peak along the Peninsula – pokes through the clouds, a rare sight. To the south stretches dozens of miles of snowcapped peaks heading for the Didier Channel … followed by many more dozens of miles of snowcapped peaks.

Each season I carry back from Antarctica too many mental images to possibly download. They’re all up there in my head, jumbled, roaming, floating. Thankfully they are permanently lodged and pop up at the oddest times – driving along Manhattan’s West Side highway, climbing in the Catskills, just falling asleep – which I always like.
But often it’s not the visual memories from here that stick with me most powerfully, which strike me at the oddest times. It’s the aural ones, the sounds of Antarctica.

The plop-plop-plopping of porpoising penguins. The blow of humpbacks, often heard before you see them breaching. The squawk of new mother and father penguins as they attempt to imprint their voices on brand-new chicks. The wind under the wings of a soaring pintado petrel as it sweeps just overhead.

But as I sit on this short hill above Neko Harbour, I’m waiting for my favorite Antarctic sound, which the Native Americans in Alaska called “White Thunder.” It’s the thunderous calving of the glaciers that occurs deep inside them. Loud, rumbling, often frightening. Whenever you hear that sound, you jerk your head around. But often there’s nothing to be seen. It’s the sound of glaciers evolving, breaking-up, but deep inside. The sound is not followed by falling ice, just … silence.

This day I wait and wait for that sound, but … nothing. Just after noon, after nearly four hours surveying the landscape from atop this rock, I walk down the hill with my friend Richard White. Just as we step down off the peak … out of sight of the end of the narrow harbor and its ending glacier for the first time in hours … when CRACK! Something’s broken off. This time though, it’s not White Thunder but more like Black Thunder. Real ice ripping off the glacier, falling into the black sea. Rippling waves and small pieces of ice emanating from the end of the harbor suggest it was a big piece of glacier that has fallen into the sea. Despite the beauty of the moment, it is that sound that will stay with me far longer.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Political conflict in the Galapagos

by Jon Bowermaster on

Street protests are not a common occurrence in Galapagos, but a recent decision by the Ecuadorian government to fight over fishing and illegal fishing by giving fishermen tourist permits – over other residents, who’ve been waiting patiently themselves, many for years – sent locals into the streets armed with pots for banging, loudly. Virtually everyone who’s moved to the Galapagos in recent years has come with hopes of participating in – getting rich off? – the booming tourism industry. With permits greatly reduced, the line of hopefuls is long. That the government is trying to buy off fishermen by letting them jump to the front of the line isn’t sitting well.

Near the front of the protest is a solitary gringo, a sixty-something man in a red polo shirt and khaki shorts, carrying a placard and a megaphone. Jack Nelson’s father came to the Galapagos in 1961, by a thirty-six-foot sailboat; he opened its first hotel. When the son came a few years later, hoping to avoid the U.S. draft and maybe adapt to island life, he never anticipated staying. He went on to become the Galapagos first tourist guide and is still here, watching the place he loves evolve. The hotel has been sold but he still co-owns a dive shop, so is actively interested in who’s getting new tourist permits … and who is not.

Bowermaster’s Galapagos — Chapter VII from gadling on Vimeo.

“The human population in the Galapagos is doubling every five years. What is really significant about that number is not just the environmental impact or living standards, but it’s political in that the political majority has been here just five years. There are people who don’t know anything about the place, don’t really understand what the issues are but since they have become the majority the government responds to their demands.”

Does he still love the place? “In some ways. It’s certainly still very beautiful but it’s becoming less enjoyable to live here because of the political problems and conflicts and things like increased noise pollution and contamination.

“One thing that’s killing the place is the introduced species that arrive with all the increase in tourism and business. Here’s a great example. A young lady arrived at Baltra with a rose that her boyfriend gave her Quayaquil, a rose with some tissue and foil around the base to keep it damp. At the airport the national park rangers jump her, take it away and burn it with their cigarette lighters because it’s an ‘introduced species.’ Simultaneously at the dock a few miles away a ship is unloading thousands of tons of uninspected cargo – bales, boxes, crates and bags of stuff, much of it carrying invasive species of one kind or another.

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“What do we need? Desperately, better public education about the local issues and economics, in a way people on the street can understand. Pretty presentations with university level vocabularies are meaningless. If people can’t understand where the money is coming from … or not… they don’t care about anything else.

“Education about simple things too, like the problem with the introduction of species. Everybody who comes to live here wants to bring a dog. And not just any dog, but a special breed. One wants a German Shepard, another a Great Dane, another a cocker spaniel. It shows that they don’t really understand the impact of that on this place. It’s not just dogs and cats; we have five new species of introduced gecko living here that are competing with and chasing out the endemic gecko. Which changes the balance for the birds, plants and soil and on and on, a cascade of changes.

“We definitely need stricter migration policies and realistic caps on the number of boats and number of beds and how many times they can turn over each week. Now, for example, a lot of the tourist boats are running what I call the nine-day week. They sell a five-day tour and a four-day tour, which means on a couple days each week they’re doubling up, turning over a lot more tourists than the caps should allow, which raises the pressures on everything. Another problem is that local population is promoting more and more mass market, lower quality tourists because they have no access to the first-class tourists. And mass-market tourism brings heavy environmental impacts for low profit and requires even more infrastructure.

“I think we may be coming to a point where a whole lot of the laws, regulations and policies have to be reformed. When you’re in the tourism business the last thing you want is trouble. Like street protests, for example. Even perceived trouble in a tourist town can cause cancellations and wreck business for a long time. So to avoid ‘trouble’ sometimes we just go along with bad things we see happening around us. But it’s too late to ignore now.”

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Bowermaster’s Adventures — Sea Shepherd Conservation in the Galapagos

by Jon Bowermaster on

While Sea Shepherd‘s chief cheerleader and trouble-inspirer Paul Watson is holding forth from his ship, The Farley Mowat, continuing its chase of Japanese whale hunters off Antarctica and (recently) being arrested on a thirty-year-old warrant in Portugal (where he had gone to attend a meeting of the International Whaling Commission) … the Washington state-based environmental group’s second-most visible campaign is ongoing in the Galapagos.

From a very prominent, second-story office just across from the main fishing dock on Santa Cruz, Alex Cornellisen manages the Shepherd’s Galapagos operation. At the moment, it is a two-person band. His focus is on trying to keep a global audience alerted to issues of over fishing and illegal fishing. To that end the group has already donated a boat to the park rangers, to help them enforce the marine reserves rules and regulations. A veteran of Shepherd’s Antarctica campaigns, Cornellisen is happy to be in the slightly less-amped environment of Galapagos. That said, his predecessor was chased out of the country when the shark fin “mafia” put a hit out on him.

Bowermaster’s Galapagos — Chapter VI from gadling on Vimeo.

“In Ecuador you can get someone killed for $40,” says Cornellisen, standing on the balcony of his office, looking down at the main dock where small fishing boats are unloading legal catches. “So you have to take threats seriously here.” His primary concern about the Galapagos is that while there are plenty of rules against illegal fishing, enforcement is difficult.

“Last year we were responsible for several raids which resulted in the confiscation of about ninety thousand sea cucumbers, and about thirty thousand shark fins. But there is an enormous amount of illegal fishing that still continues. For example, the legal quota for sea cucumbers last year was about two million allowed to be taken out of the park. Only about 1.2 million were reported, yet there was an increase in illegally caught and confiscated sea cucumbers. What was not being reported just ended up being sold in the illegal markets.

“It’s not just a few Galapaganians doing the illegal fishing. There’s a big group from the north, from Costa Rica, that comes here to take shark fins. They catch them within the park’s marine reserve and then take them out of the supposedly protected waters where they are sold mostly to Asian countries, like Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

“All this shark finning has an impact on tourism, not just the fish population. If there are fewer sharks to observe, there will one day be fewer tourists coming to see them. Without sharks the whole ecosystem will crumble and then the question is will tourists continue to come to the Galapagos?

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“Enforcement in the Galapagos is not as efficient as Sea Sheperd would like to see. Plus, there’s a lot of corruption in the local Navy. Sometimes the Navy will alert illegal fishermen that the park officials are in the area. I’ve been coming to the Galapagos ever since I first joined Sea Sheperd in 2002 and every time I come, for a month or so, we catch poachers. So it is possible. They are absolutely out there and we know how to find them and pass the information on to the park. But the Navy often warns off the poachers so that by the time the park rangers arrive … they are gone.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any jurisdiction to apprehend the poachers, so all we can do is notify the park and start pulling in the long lines, which is mostly what they use to fish for sharks.

“I think it would certainly help if the park rangers were armed. If you go to a supermarket in Quito you see a security guard with a gun protecting bags of potatoes. Here we have this beautiful pristine ecosystem called the Galapagos Islands, and the park rangers have absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever, they are not even allowed to carry batons. I think that the park rangers should definitely be armed. I think if the word got out to the illegal fishermen that the park rangers were armed and capable of making arrests, I think it would be a lot harder for poachers to come in here and take sharks or any other species.”