PACIFIC
ISLAND SELLS SOUL

Topics: Choices; Consequences; Cost; Foolishness; Mistakes; Past; Regret; Responsibility; Shame; Stewardship

References: Ecclesiastes 6:2; Luke 12:15; 1 Timothy 6:10; Hebrews 13:5

Around the year 1900, two scientists from the Pacific Islands Company studied a piece of rock picked up on Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island east of New Guinea and twelve hundred miles from any sizable landmass. Instead of a fossilized rock, it was rich phosphate so valuable that it plunged Nauru violently into the industrial era.

During the years that followed, the country was colonized by a succession of European and Asian nations, who turned the island into a strip mine. Nauru achieved independence in 1968, but the Nauruan government continued the mining practices that had, by then, brutalized the island.

By the early 1980s, Nauru boasted the world’s highest per capita income, but it didn’t last. Midway through the 1990s, Nauru’s wealth had been embezzled by corrupt financial managers, gambled away on risky investments, and squandered on extravagant luxuries. More than 70 percent of the island is a mined-out ruin, unable to offer the infrastructure or natural resources needed to support anyone. Nauru must now look for a new piece of land on which to relocate its population.

“When you’re on Nauru, there’s a palpable sense of shame at what was done,” said reporter Jack Hitt. “The Nauruans literally sold off their homeland for a pot of wealth that is now lost.”

—This American Life, “The Middle of Nowhere,” Public Radio International, episode 253 (December 5, 2003)