Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature (review)

Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature by Carl N. McDaniel and John M. Gowdy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 239 pages, cloth $45, paper $17.95.

One of the most remarkable things about the late twentieth century is the extent to which mainstream society denied, then forgot about, the environmental crisis that had emerged in the middle decades. It would have seemed unimaginable to many people on Earth Day 1970, that in 1999 major media would denigrate Italy's low birthrate as a "bambino shortage" or celebrate the births of sextuplets. But such news items are common now, even though there are a billion more people on Earth than in 1970, increasing numbers of them desperate.

How to reawaken the public to the enormity of this? The mass media, despite sporadic flirtations with such eco-chic concerns as California's Headwaters Forest, are a main part of the problem, intoxicated as they are with high technology and the gross national product. Environmentalist media, which had grown somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, shrank significantly in the 1990s. Thus, the task seems to devolve on the genre that first brought the environmental crisis to public notice nearly half a century ago: scientific popularization. Books such as Silent Spring and The Population Bomb achieved phenomenal success at that time, so maybe it can happen again. The obstacles to such success have always been formidable, however. Neither the scientific nor the literary establishment looks on the genre with much respect, so funding tends to be meager. Furthermore, the market for such books is generally sluggish and always unpredictable.

Paradise for Sale exemplifies scientific popularization's promise and pitfalls. Authors Carl McDaniel and John Gowdy use one of the modern world's most popular legends--the destruction of a Pacific island paradise by civilization's contaminating influence--as a striking metaphor for global crisis. Their Exhibit A is Nauru, an islet twenty kilometers in circumference and situated halfway between Australia and Hawai'i. Nauru is composed of a coral-rock plateau overgrown with jungle and a littoral dotted with coconut palms. The island supported a stable population of about one thousand Micronesian inhabitants for two millennia before sailors discovered it in the nineteenth century. It was not really a paradise, of course. Ocean currents prevented the islanders from developing marine fisheries to any great extent, and periodic drought limited food and water supplies. Yet these very limitations evidently restrained humans from destroying Nauru's ecosystem. Regular resource shortages shaped a culture that limited population growth and regulated the harvest of coconut palms, pandanus trees, fisheries, and other food sources.

Western influence undoubtedly destroyed Nauru's equilibrium. Guns and liquor intensified societal conflicts in the mid-1800s, provoking feuds and anarchy. German annexation in 1886 brought peace, but the missionaries tried to reform Nauruan culture, and introduced diseases burgeoned. The main blow to the island's stability came after an Australian firm discovered a huge phosphate deposit on the plateau in 1899. In the next century, phosphate mining transformed most of the island into an industrial wasteland while the population multiplied. First exploited by the Germans and Australians and then enslaved by the Japanese during World War II, the Nauruans gradually lost their culture and with it the ability to subsist on local resources. After national independence in 1968, a lavish income from phosphate mining encouraged a way of life dependent on trade with the outside and characterized by high rates of obesity, diabetes, automobile-accident mortality, and other symptoms of economic glut. Today, the phosphate deposits are nearly exhausted and population stands at around ten thousand (seven thousand Nauruans and three thousand foreigners). Some capital continues to flow in from the mining, but if that is not invested well, the tiny, isolated nation faces an ominous future.

In effect, the global economy has bullied and cajoled the Nauruans to trade their island's ecological integrity for roads, cars, televisions, and other consumer...