In the Republic of Nauru on the fifteenth of July 2018, worshippers sat in makeshift pews and praised God. “Zion is a place of singing,” they called out in unison. “Zion is a place of joy.” The church was rectangular and dark inside with electric fans blowing from the doorways. Someone played keyboard as the minister spoke into a microphone. “I saw some new faces in this place—friends of ours,” he had said in opening. “I hope they will enjoy this company, this island, because it’s called Pleasant Island, or blessed island”—he smiled—“so everything in this place has to be pleasant.” As the minister spoke, members of the congregation clapped and called out Hallelujahs. “We welcome our Iranian families, our Sri Lankan brothers,” he said. “We bless you and praise you, father God.” Outside the temperature was high, the parking lot full. It was Sunday morning, and the island—Nauru island—was at church.
The church, like nearly everything in Nauru, sat within sight of the Pacific Ocean. Located near the equator and far from any other land, Nauru is the smallest island-state in the world. It is rocky and occupies an area of eight square miles. Its jurisdiction includes the 119,000 square miles that surround it—a block of sea of which Nauru is the only occupant. Unlike most Pacific islands, Nauru is raised, not low-lying; the depth of the seafloor increases sharply all around (CIA 2020). “Do not swim at the beaches,” a woman there once warned me. “The current goes down and out.” Nauru means “I go to the beach.”
Nauru is a republic now, as it has been for fifty years. Before its independence in 1968, it was controlled by Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain and before them by Germany, which forfeited the island after World War I. In 1906 Nauru’s European rulers started a phosphate mining regime that would, by the end of the century, result in the removal of one hundred million tons of material from the island. That material—phosphate—was an essential ingredient in agricultural fertilizers; Nauru provided enough phosphate to revolutionize global food production, increasing yield on farmed lands, particularly in Great Britain and Australia, and allowing new areas to enter into agricultural production. The result was a reimagined global food system—and a ravaged island. More than eighty percent of Nauru’s land has been strip-mined and left bare (International Court of Justice 1990, 92).
Few countries embody environmental disaster like the Republic of Nauru does. The country is physically defined by what is not there: the ground that was moved, the trees that are gone, the rain that no longer falls. Nauru is also characterized by the social effects of environmental disaster. During the 1990s, when the island’s phosphate reserves began to run dry, the country’s economy cratered. The government tried multiple measures to make income by other means—by selling citizenships and bank licenses, enabling money laundering, and investing in dubious, expensive overseas schemes (Hilzenrath 1999). As Nauru earned the ire of the international community, markers of well-being declined at home. The health of its citizens worsened, poverty rose, and schools crumbled. With most of the island’s surface area gone and its weather patterns disrupted by the newfound lack of vegetation, the practice of agriculture became difficult to the point of impossibility. Nauruans came to rely on Australia, a country two thousand miles away, for sustenance. Obesity soared as a result of the influx of canned and processed foods, and Nauruans developed the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes in the world (Khambalia et al., 2011).
In 2001, with the economy in freefall and poverty on the rise, Nauru took part in what Australia’s leaders called the Pacific Solution—a refugee detention scheme that sought to deter displaced people from the Middle East, North Africa, and South East Asia from claiming asylum in Australia. In exchange for multimillion-dollar payments from Australia, Nauru’s government agreed to detain asylum seekers who had been intercepted on their way to Australia. Nauru was out of sight and out of mind—an ideal place for Australia, which wanted the camps out of the public consciousness. Australia’s Pacific Solution cost AUD $1 billion—about $630 million USD—per year, and much of that was spent in Nauru on housing for guards, land for the camps, flights chartered through Nauru Airlines, and direct payments to the government. The influx of money provided a much-needed lift to Nauru’s economy. However, the policy was criticized internationally because the refugees who arrived in Nauru suffered abuse and were denied legal refugee protections. In 2008, Australia ended the policy (Spinks and McCluskey).
With the refugees gone and the phosphate reserves nearly depleted, Nauru’s economic struggles returned. The detention centers had accounted for one-fifth of Nauru’s GDP, and the loss of the money had a cascading effect. Unemployment rose to 90%, and the country’s social infrastructure crumbled again (Thompson 2011). Then, in 2012, Australia restarted its offshore processing program, building new camps in Nauru and bringing fresh funding to the island. Like before, people who arrived in boats and tried to claim asylum in Australia were put on planes and flown from Christmas Island—the Australian territory where their boats had landed—to Nauru, four thousand miles to the east, and Manus Island, a part of Papua New Guinea. On Nauru and Manus, thousands of asylum seekers were placed in camps overseen by the Australian government and told to wait.
The camps were overcrowded and hot. Many guards were abusive. According to documents obtained by The Guardian and other sources, rapes and suicide attempts were common, including among children (Farrell et al. 2016). In response to these disclosures, people protested the poor conditions. In 2016, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea declared the Manus camp unconstitutional, and the camp was dismantled. Some residents were placed in the local community; many were sent to Nauru, which became the centerpiece of Australia’s offshore detention system. Over the ensuing years, Nauru became an international pariah, a state synonymous with profiteering policies of cruelty and neglect. In an effort to limit oversight, Nauru’s government blocked access to Facebook, fired judges, imprisoned political opposition leaders, and banned journalists from entering the country. Rule of law crumbled. Nauru became a place that was difficult to describe without a detached language of tragedy and sadness—particularly since most outside observers, prevented from entering the country, were forced to write about Nauru from afar (Davidson 2018).
Before traveling to Nauru in 2018, I spoke with a forestry researcher who had visited several years earlier to study plant growth in the country’s phosphate mines. He was interested in rehabilitation: What kinds of trees might one consider growing in Nauru’s barren landscape? How could the growth of those trees be encouraged? Like other people who have asked those questions, his findings inspired little optimism: the limestone pinnacles left by mining are unsuitable for most growth, and Nauru’s remote location renders rehabilitation unfeasible. Disillusioned, this researcher described Nauru as a kind of epilogue—an island located outside the usual parameters of time. “It’s a place where the world ended, and what exists afterward is this blind spot where things don’t make sense,” he told me. “The world ended, and everybody stayed alive.”
Often when we imagine our planet in peril, we adhere to narratives that place massive, apocalyptic change at the conclusion of events. In Nauru, however, the apocalypse has already taken place. Environmental destruction led to the collapse of Nauru’s economy, the degradation of its government and the weakening of its social systems; violations of human rights followed close behind. The story of Nauru is the story of a chain of consequences that began with the colonial-era destruction of land around the world—a story that continued when European leaders set their sights on Nauru’s mineral wealth as a way of undoing the depletion of the soil. It is a story that ended and continues still.
The day the church members sang of Zion was four days before July nineteenth, the five-year anniversary of a 2013 Australian decree that no asylum seeker arriving by boat would ever be allowed to settle in—or even visit—Australia. On the day in 2013 when the government made that announcement, people in the camps in Nauru had held a protest that was met violently by the camp’s administration. In the ensuing clashes, the camps were partially burned, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage and prompting hundreds of arrests of asylum seekers. Since that protest, the camps had been rebuilt, and access to the rest of the island eased, but the law remained the same, and the people trapped in Nauru in 2013 remained there in 2018. As time stretched on with no sign of a conclusion, hopelessness grew in the camps. Self-harm became epidemic, with adults and children alike attempting suicide. In a 2018 report, a psychologist who worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Nauru described the “heartbreaking reality” of life on the island. "Every day I worried which of my patients might attempt to take their own lives, because after five years of waiting people had lost all sense of hope," she said (M.S.F. 2018).
As the nineteenth neared, tensions rose on the island. “They say to me, why you care for nineteen July, two thousand eighteen?” one man, an Iraqi, told me. “Australians don't give a shit for this day…this is my life for this day.” Five years was a timestamp for him and many others—a moment they felt could not be eclipsed. After five years of waiting, the prospect of this being forever felt more plausible than ever. People felt helpless. There were plans for protests, and there was a rumor—unconfirmed—of a party hosted by guards to commemorate the occasion. “We come in two thousand thirteen. Thirteen is coming, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” the Iraqi man said, cataloguing the years of resettlement delays he and others had faced. “Now they say, so easy, they will come in two thousand nineteen. Like really, really, I want answer for that. What can I do?”
When the nineteenth came, some people protested. They stood on a dirt road holding signs. “I do not want to lose my family,” read one sign. “19th July, 2013 to 19th July, 2018,” read another. One said simply: “After 5 Years.”
Nearly two years have passed since July 2018, and the situation in Nauru remains difficult. People are stuck on the island, Australian law forbids their resettlement in Australia, the international community condemns atrocities in the camps, and people there are suffering. The Nauru refugee regime has become emblematic of global indifference toward refugees.
In a world characterized by problems of epic scale, Nauru’s prominence is noteworthy. Globally, more than seventy million people are currently classified as forcibly displaced, including twenty-six million refugees (U.N.H.C.R. 2020); fewer than three hundred refugees live in Nauru. Yet those three hundred people have been held in Nauru for more than five years and have been told they may stay for as long as twenty. They exhibit symptoms of stress that some doctors have called the most extreme in the world—symptoms that include suicide attempts and an epidemic of self-harm among children. (All refugee and asylum seeker children were evacuated from the island in 2019.) The worsening mental health situation of the three hundred people held in Nauru has become central to Australian politics, where elections have been won and lost on small details of refugee policy. Today the word Nauru is closely associated with Australia’s harsh border protection regime, which prevents people seeking asylum from entering the country. This synonymy is intentional, as the Australian government implements a deterrence strategy that holds up the fates of refugees in Nauru as a symbol to the world (Spinks and McCluskey).
The surprising global importance of the small number of refugees in Nauru parallels the recent history of Nauru itself. Nauru’s land was degraded by mining, a high-impact, low-volume form of environmental destruction (compared with logging, for example, which affects larger swaths of land, but in a less destructive way). Nauru’s 8.2 square miles of land is not a large amount of space on a global scale; the output of Nauru’s mines, however, deeply affected the world. If you lived in Europe, Japan, Australia, or New Zealand during the twentieth century, you certainly consumed bits of Nauru’s land. If you live in any of those places today, you benefit from productive agriculture and the collective wealth that has accrued as a result. You may also witness the downstream effects of agricultural fertilizer use—the algal blooms that consume leftover phosphorous and nitrogen, blocking sunlight and using up the oxygen, killing plant and animal life and creating massive dead zones that sometimes extend for hundreds of square miles (Carpenter 2008).
Nauru is but one example of the perils of mineral wealth. The geographer Maria Fadiman (2009), writing recently about oil exploration in the Amazon Rainforest, described a local culture that has been overwhelmed by extractavist corporations. The Huoarani, the indigenous population of the Ecuadorian Amazon, have experienced extensive land loss accompanied by the loss of local customs and ways of life. The oil company operating in the area brought Fadiman and several others to what they termed a “traditional” village in the area, which Fadiman found to be a humiliating spectacle for the people living there, many of whom were employees of the company and were forced to pretend to be living a “traditional” life for the sake of the visitors. "This depiction of the Huoarani who work for the company, encouraged to look like people who do not…is a contradictory detail of how cultures are shifting and how these shifts are being both portrayed and hidden,” Fadiman writes. In Ecuador, as in Nauru, resource extraction led to complex questions about local identity and the relevance of small, relatively powerless places to issues of global importance.
Likewise, Nauru fits a trend of small islands struggling to deal with global forces including migration, corporate power, and climate change. The geographers John Connell (2012), writing about Tonga, and Rex Rowley (2020), describing Kiribati, both describe contemporary forces acting on these two Pacific island states. Tonga, Connell writes, “has more ethnic Tongans overseas than at home.” He writes: “International migration dominates the lives of people in most small island states, whether in the Caribbean, the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans” (75). Islands can serve as sources of migration, places of detention or, in Nauru’s case, both. Writing about Kiribati, the Pacific island state that is Nauru’s closest neighbor, Rowley describes the effects of colonialism and climate change on the country. “Even in what might be one of the most isolated island nations in the world today, globalization and globalism are front and center,” he writes.
Oceania has long been the site of violent outside intervention. Islands throughout the Pacific were the subjects of nuclear testing, mining for phosphate and other minerals, widespread slave-trading, and all manner of imperialist and colonial destruction. “The latter part of the twentieth century has made it clear that ours is the only region in the world where certain kinds of experimentation and exploitation can be undertaken by powerful nations with minimum political repercussions to themselves,” writes Epeli Hau’ofa, an Oceanian writer and scholar (46). Nauru—an island at the confluence of multiple kinds of experimentation and exploitation—represents just one vector of destruction.
Hau’ofa, who died in 2009, exemplified Pacific interconnectedness. A Tongan born in Papua New Guinea who studied at academic institutions around the world and spent much of his life in Fiji, Hau’ofa produced distinguished works of humor, scholarship and cultural criticism about the multiple places he called home. He pushed social scientists to describe Oceanian—Pacific Islander—peoples with empathy and a greater understanding of indigenous perceptions of time. Hau’ofa writes that western historians see chronology as a focal point for arranging facts—but Pacific cultures view time as a circle rather than a straight line. Hau’ofa describes history as a spiral: a layering of environmental cycles that pull time from one year to the next by way of weather patterns, rainy seasons, and changes in the coral reef. The community’s perception of its place in time is always dependent on the status of the land around it.
As outside interests degraded islands and sea, the Oceanian perception of time that Hau’ofa describes was largely lost. Time, land, and memory used to be interchangeable components that were connected by the actions of people and stories passed down over time. “Sea routes were mapped on chants,” Hau’ofa writes. “Distances were measured in how long it generally took to traverse them…We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes (and seascapes).” But imperialism and colonialism degraded and divided the whole of Oceania, breaking it up into constituent parts. Hau’ofa characterizes Oceania as a “sea of islands”—a large, interconnected space that belies the perceptions of western countries that see Nauru and its neighbors as small and remote. By turning these islands into politically distinct territories, Hau’ofa writes, imperialists “erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today” (34).
Nauru is a case study of the changes brought by European rule. Before colonization, Nauruans had lived on the island for two thousand years. With Europeans in control, it took just one hundred years for that land to disappear. With it went culture, traditions, and stories. Christianity arrived via missionaries in 1887, wiping away traditions that included Nauru’s historically matrilineal culture. European beachcombers and merchant ships introduced guns, leading to a bloody civil war that ended in 1888. The mining regime that began twenty years later altered the island even more: the physical destruction of the land caused declines in self-sufficiency and health, while the sudden infusion of money caused a rise in lavish consumerism. People forgot how to fish. Luxury cars became a common sight. The government, flooded with money, fell under the sway of corrupt influences. Politicians used cash to buy votes. On an island that was quickly disappearing, the future seemed an unnecessary concern (Connell 2006).
Yet even as Nauru’s condition declined, the world’s perception of it as a failed place remained lopsided. A writer describing Nauru can document horrific abuse, tell stories of conspicuous consumption, and lay out a network of brazen corruption that indicts the governments of Nauru and Australia alike. A writer can, in the same breath, describe the oddities and everyday occurrences that make Nauru no different from anywhere else in the world. In Nauru there are weddings and school graduations and holidays and funerals. There is a 5k race, sponsored by Coca-Cola, that takes place every June. There are washing machines and compact cars and televisions. (There were also, in the basement of the building where I stayed, more than one hundred working slot machines.) People who live in Nauru are kind and cruel, frustrated and contradictory, just as people are anywhere else in the world. The sadness and symbolic value of the place exist alongside a normality that ensures Nauru’s relevance.
Hau’ofa tracked these existential contradictions. In his worldview, the decimation of land could not be separated from the subsequent loss of culture, governance, and human dignity. “It is the destruction of age-old rhythms of cyclical dramas that lock together familiar time, motion, and space,” he writes (75). “To remove a people from their ancestral, natural surroundings or vice versa—or to destroy their lands with mining, deforestation, bombing, large-scale industrial and urban developments, and the like—is to sever them not only from their traditional sources of livelihood but also, and much more importantly, from their ancestry, their history, their identity, and their ultimate claim for the legitimacy of their existence.”
In the church service on Sunday the fifteenth, the reading that had followed the hymn of Zion had been a verse from Lamentations. “Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed,” it had read. “His compassions never fail.” The minister, in his sermon, spoke of this compassion: “When the world looks at you and says to you, ‘You are trouble, you are ejected from the community, you are rubbish’—Jesus comes and picks you up.”
“Money cannot buy you,” the minister said at the end of his sermon. “If you tell me how much you’re worth, I will say to you, ‘You are committed to Jesus Christ.’ Because that’s how much you cost. Your life is not cheap. Our life is not cheap.”
“God created humanity out of nothing,” he said. “I thank you, I thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus. Thank you for your love. Thank you for your grace,” he said. “We thank God for this morning.” And we sang, and we filed out of the church.
Thank you to Rob Nixon and Tamsen Wolff, who advised this project; to Deborah Popper; and to my two peer reviewers at Focus. This material is based upon work supported by the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University through the Smith-Newton Scholars Program. Additional funding was provided by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Princeton University Department of English.