It's a miniscule example...but reflects human behaviure on a scale small enough to understand it, so I hope you get the point....
SADDEST FATE FOR AN ISLAND NATION
The demise of Nauru
Most people have never heard of Nauru. The world’s smallest independent republic, Nauru is an eight-square-mile island that lies halfway between Hawai and New Zealand and has a population of around 12.000. One hundred years ago, Nauru was a sparkling emerald of dense tropical forests surrounded by blue water,much like the thousands of other islands scattered across Polynesia. Today 90 percent of Nauru resembles a moonscape, with only a thin strip of greenery around its perimeter. What happened? It was the Nauruans’ good and then very bad luck to be living on one of the only Islands in the south Pacific to be made almost entirely of high-grade phosphate, an important fertilizer ingredient – the result of migratory seabirds having used the atoll as a rest stop for eons.
When a German-British consortium found out about the phosphate in the early twentieth century, it moved in with steam shovels and started scooping away the island’s interior, compensating native landowners a half penny for each ton of phosphate they hauled away. By the time Nauru won its independence in 1968,and estimated two-thirds of its surface had been mined. With independence came a much better return on the phosphate – the islan’s only real exportable asset – so the mining continued unabated. Now that the money was good, why turn back? As the Economist repoted, “For a brief, heady oment in the 1970s, Nauruans were, astonishingly, among the richest people on earth.” They enjoyed tax-free lives filled with wonderful perks, and work was strictly optional.
Then two bad things happened: First, the Nauruans lost their fortune to con artists, who swindled them with bogus money-market schemes and, most notably, a crazy investment in a theatrical musical about the life of Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo: A Portrait of Love) that lost millions of dollars. Second, Nauru essentially ran out of Nauru. The island had literally been hauled away, shipload by shipload. What little phosphate remains is too expensive to extract, so most foreigh mining companies have picked up their equipment and left. Today Nauru is on the verge of bankruptcy and limps along by selling passports, providing unreported banking services (to such clients as the Russian Mafia, which has laundered an estimated $70 billion there), and presenting itself as a miserable holding and detention camp for Australian-bound refugees.
In the fall of 2004, Nauru fount itself unable to continue financing its massive debt and was forced to relinquish the property portfolio it had acquired in the boom days and put it up as collateral, including several hotels in Sydney and Melbourne and a range of shopping centers. Nauru’s health minister announced that the government was “basically broke” while the island’s financial minister opined that the assylum seekersbeing held in Nauru’s Australian subsidized detention camp were more fortunate than the islan’s own residents. “The facilities they provide in those centers are better than we can provide for our own people”.
To make matters worse, Nauruans rank amongst the most obese people on the planet, thanks to their need to import preserved food (even fresh water has to be shipped in). Over 50 percent of the population has diabetes, and life expectancy is 20 years less than that of people living in nearby developed countries.
As if all of that weren’t enough, Nauru itself may one day cease to exist. Evidence suggests that ocean levels are rising and eventually the Nauruans may have to evacuate. Then, Nauru will be nothing but a bad memory.
From the book “The WORLD’S WORST, A GUIDE TO THE MOST DISGUSTING HIDEOUS Inept, and Dangerous People, Places,and THINGS ON EARTH” by Mark Frauenfelder. 0-8118-4606-7
Chronicle books LLC,
http://www.chroniclebooks.comNice book BTW
