Nauru
"The country that ate itself," Nauru has been eighty percent destroyed by strip mining
Category Anomalous Islands, Disaster Areas
Known as the country that ate itself, Nauru is, along with the islands of Banaba (Ocean Island) in Kiribati and Makatea in French Polynesia, one of three big "phosphate rocks" of the Pacific.
Almost the entire surface of the island was once covered with a thick layer of guano, sedimentary bird droppings that accumulated over several millenniums. The high content of phosphorus in Nauru guano made it an ideal raw material for fertilizer and explosives. Exploitation of the island's guano reserves started at the turn of the last century.
The business become so lucrative that by the time Nauru achieved independence in the 1960s the country had the highest per capita income in the world. Unfortunately, after a century of exploitation the phosphate reserves have been almost entirely depleted. Decades of strip mining have devastated over 80 percent of the land area, leaving a barren wasteland of jagged limestone pinnacles up to 15 meters (49 ft.) high. With the end of phosphate mining the country's economy collapsed and the devastation left by strip mining mostly eliminated the chance of establishing a tourist industry.
Today, with a population of about 10,000, the island of Nauru, a minuscule 5 kilometers in diameter, has only a 150-meter-wide strip of fertile land left along one of it shores. The entire population relies on a single desalination plant for all its freshwater supply.
For a time, Nauru tried to survive as a tax haven for shady financial operations. However, faced with international pressure, the local government put a stop such practices. The island's latest money making plan involved hosting an Australian center for asylum seekers. In 2007 the new government of Australia decided to abandon the facility.
Today the future of Nauru remains uncertain.
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- Address Nauru
Nauru Airline has flights to Nauru from Brisbane (Australia) and Honiara (Solomon Islands).
Comments
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Those are fair points anonymous 1 and 2. We definitely try and stay away from moral sermons, for exactly that reason, not because we disagree, but because people are intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions. We will try to keep a better eye on this in the future.
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Anonymous
October 6, 2009
I agree with the above comment. I have begun to see more and more of these types of entries, and I don't think they belong here. Not everything has to be a sermon. We can draw our own conclusions if we so choose. -
Anonymous
October 6, 2009
"And the island nation itself is a symbol of what happens to an economy and a people once natural resources run out" - this quote is kind of political and probably doesn't belong here. Look at Hong Kong as an example of an island and a people who did just fine with very little natural resources to speak of.
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