nations and oil companies on behalf of those whose islands and cul-
tures are being drowned. We talk in the Centra conference room where
her group has been meeting, but after 4 days of interviewing govern-
ment bureaucrats, activists, and academics (at the University of the
South Pacific), I am ready for a different kind of in-depth reporting—
from the Garden Island Resort on Taveuni.
I fly there via Vanua Levu over small islands and wild aqua-blue
reef lines, with breaking waves stretching toward the horizon.
“Imagine we had no reef. One big wave and we’d be gone,” Ritesh Lal,
my 21-year-old Taveuni taxi driver tells me on the way from the airstrip,
when I mention that I am writing a story on reefs and climate. We are
driving on the island’s main dirt road that runs along the water’s edge.
“If you make the change from these fossil fuels maybe these oil guys
won’t be making enough money and that’s it,” Ritesh suggests with a
grin, and then more seriously says, “I get behind these trucks and
buses and they have all this black smoke because they don’t maintain
their engines. Or people clean their engines and let the water run down
the drains. And you know all those drains end in the sea.”
Lal tells me he got his environmental education in school. “And
that’s where I went to school,” he says as we speed past the Methodist
High School across from an eroding seawall. A few minutes later we
pull into the hotel, a converted Travel Lodge now equipped for scuba
diving in the Somosomo Strait.
During my first dive I notice that the reef looks like a snowstorm
has passed over it. About a third of the corals have bleached white.
Some of the staghorn and other branching corals are wedding cake
white. The worst-hit area is Beqa Lagoon south of Viti Levu, one of the
most popular dive sites in Fiji, which has suffered more than 80 per-
cent potentially lethal bleaching as the a result of a huge pool of warm
water first spotted by U.S. satellite.
“Did you see that bleaching?” I ask one of the other divers, a travel
agent from Minnesota, after climbing back onto our boat. She looks at
me curiously. “When the water heats up the coral polyps either lose or
expel the algae that give them their color. Unfortunately the algae also
provide 70 percent of their food, so they begin to slowly starve to
death,” I explain to her.
138 David Helvarg