islanders’ crops and salting their freshwater. The nine hundred resi-
dents had to have freshwater shipped in for the next 8 months.
“In a village in [the northern island of ] Laucala, they’re complaining
about drinking seawater,” explains Robert Matau, senior sub-editor at
the Fiji Post. “The whole [western] Yasawa island group has a huge [salt
water intrusion] problem.” Matau is a large bearded journalist, with a
traditional suluskirt, round face, and skeptical brown eyes. “Newsrooms
neglect the environmental story,” he complains. “What made global
warming real for me was when I returned to Kadavu [an island group
south of Viti Levu] to pay my respects to my great-grandfather in 1992
and found his grave half in the ocean. Then in 1997 a cyclone and tidal
wave washed away the road, jetty and much of the area’s shoreline. Now
in my mother’s village of Muani they’re moving houses inland and try-
ing to build a coral seawall. Two weeks ago the island’s main village of
Tavuki flooded. If you’re on an island with no [mountain] slope I believe
you seriously have to start thinking about moving.”
Even on high green volcanic islands such as Taveuni, Fiji’s third-
largest, where they grow copra, cava, and taro, most of the fourteen
thousand residents live along the shore. Leigh-Anne Buliruarua is
from the Taveuni farming village of Vuna. “In the last 30 to 40 years
they’ve made a rock seawall around my village. It’s all we can do, we
can’t afford a regular seawall,” she tells me.
“We have to assess the vulnerability of our coastal areas and then
we can see how we can adapt with sea walls or relocation of settlements
and people,” Environmental Director Nasome worries.
Still, Fiji is not in as bad a state as the low-lying Pacific island
nations of Kiribati, the Marshalls, and Tuvalu, which may literally be
subsumed by rising sea levels linked to fossil-fuel-driven climate
change. There are already diplomatic discussions under way about
where to resettle the Island’s environmental refugees. American attor-
neys have also journeyed to Tuvalu, eager to take on the island as a
client in a lawsuit about global warming.
Such suits are also under discussion in Fiji. “If something is a sur-
vival issue, then it is a human right,” Dr. Shaista Shameem, an attor-
ney and director of the newly formed Fiji Human Rights Commission,
tells me. She has been thinking about a possible suit against industrial
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