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Our tribe must make all islands survivors

By Duane Silverstein

Millions of viewers are tuning in to "Survivor-Marquesas" to see which of 16 castaways will be the last to be voted off the beautiful French Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva. Yet a far more consequential contest of survival is taking place on Nuku Hiva and all of the world's 100,000-plus islands. Will these islands themselves be voted off the planet?

Although islands evoke images of pristine tropical paradises, they are actually among the world's most threatened ecosystems. In the last 400 years, 50 percent of extinction of animal species and 90 percent of extinction of bird species have occurred on islands. Seventy-two percent of plant and animal extinction recorded in the United States have occurred in Hawai'i, a state that makes up less than 0.2 percent of the nation's land area.

Much has been written about global warming and climate change. Nowhere in the world will its consequences be felt more strongly than on islands, some of which will cease to exist if the seas continue to rise as the polar ice caps keep melting. And islands are far more than the inconsequential specks of land with one palm tree pictured in a New Yorker cartoon. The 125 largest islands alone have a combined land mass equal to Europe's.

If one counts the exclusive economic zones that cover ocean resources several miles offshore, islands have claim to one-sixth of the world's surface harboring one-half of our planet's marine biodiversity. One out of every 10 people on Earth is an islander, most of us will be surprised to learn, so this struggle for survival has enormous consequences.

Four hundred years ago, poet John Donne wrote that "no man is an island." But in a modern age of jet travel, international fishing fleets, satellite communications and far-reaching ecological trends such as global warming and acid rain, he might correctly write: "No island is an island."

The very isolation that until relatively recently protected island environments from encroachment now makes their ecosystems extremely vulnerable to damage from such outside threats as introduced species.

Compounding this problem on land, the coral reefs and mangrove forests that surround most tropical islands are rapidly disappearing because of human interventions such as cyanide and dynamite fishing, sewage discharge, pesticide runoff, and dumping of waste from cruise ships.

Most of the world's islands have small populations and, internationally, little political clout. Nongovernmental organizations such as Seacology are doing what we can to save these invaluable island environments and cultures. It will take a concerted effort by all nations to develop policies that will protect islands, the great repositories of the world's biodiversity.

Without such a new initiative, our tribe will have spoken. By our inaction, we will have voted precious island ecosystems and cultures — and, because of rising sea levels, some islands themselves — off our planet.

Duane Silverstein is executive director of Seacology, a nonprofit organization whose sole focus is preserving the environments and cultures of islands around the globe.