Robbing Ourselves Blind: How We've Managed to Ignore Ecological Collapse.

• Author: Runyan, Curtis
• Position: Review

Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature Carl N. McDaniel and John M. Gowdy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

In 1976, National Geographic magazine declared that Nauru, a country barely six times the size of New York's Central Park, was the world's richest island. Today, this remote volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific is a wasteland. For the past century, the high-quality phosphate deposits that once covered it have been stripmined and shipped, largely to Australia, for fertilizer. Four-fifths of the island, nearly all of "Topside," as the interior is called, is now a dry desert of limestone pinnacles. These ancient coral spires, which for thousands of years provided refuge for migratory birds and their deposits of phosphorus-rich guano, stand as a ghostly reminder of the lush tropical forests that once grew above them.

Prior to the 20th century, the fish from local reefs and the fruits and sap of native coconut and pandanus trees sustained a vibrant culture for more than 100 generations. The annual rainfall on the island periodically fluctuated sharply, from levels twice as heavy as the average annual deluges received by Brazilian rainforests to the levels found in the red rock deserts of the southwest United States. Because the island was wholly dependent on rain for its freshwater, Nauru was subject to frequent droughts. These resource constraints forced the Nauruans to develop strict social customs that kept their population below 1,000 to avoid shortages and famine. Today the narrow coastal strip around Nauru is home to more than 10,000 people, and virtually everything--water included--is imported.

In their book Paradise for Sale, Carl McDaniel and John Gowdy undertake a remarkable exhumation of the biological, psychological, and economic factors that landed the Nauruans in the straights they are in today. And what they find is not a simple tale of an ancient island culture forcibly colonized and left poorly equipped to deal with an encroaching global economy, but a worldwide phenomenon of human disconnect and disassociation from nature's warning signals of ecological excess. Like archeologists unearthing the answer to an ancient puzzle, McDaniel and Gowdy sift through the remnants of fallen cultures around the world to try to answer a simple, but essential question: What is driving us to live beyond the Earth's limits despite the compounding ecological and social warning signs?

Mathis. Wackernagel, author of Our...