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Newtok, Shishmaref, and other Alaskan villages can move to nearby higher ground—if someone will pay for the relocation. But what happens when your home is completely surrounded by water and lies only a few meters above sea level, as is the case in the island nations of the Pacific and Indian Oceans?
    LIVING ON A Polynesian atoll, you can never tune out the sound of ocean breakers. You are at most some four or five meters above sea level. When severe storms descend, you are almost certain to get wet. To live sustainably on such isolated and tiny spots of land in the past required not only water but also a set of adaptations. As a result, every inhabited low Polynesian atoll is a humanly modified environment, complete with seawalls and pits for growing taro, a staple root crop in the South Pacific, the soils often formed of the refuse from human occupation. A few plants have always provided food and essential raw materials—coconuts, with their fluid, meat, and leaves for weaving, pandanus for both food and leaves. Both do well in the salty environments of tropical beaches. Breadfruit and taro can be grown, both requiring water, and the latter grown in artificial pits mulched with leaves and other organic detritus. Inevitably, survival depended on social contacts and trade with other islands, maintained by long-distance voyaging in outrigger and double-hulled canoes.
    Both Tuvalu and Kiribati, described below, are Polynesian outliers, settled not from the west like other Micronesian islands, but from the south, from the heart of Polynesia. Intensive studies of radiocarbon dates from Polynesian islands place the first voyages eastward from Fiji and Samoa at around the eleventh century C.E. Both Tuvalu and Kiribati may have received their first inhabitants at about that time: We don’t know. 5
    Once settled on a small island, however remote, you were never stuck in one place. There was a great deal of movement in Tuvalu and Kiribati’s world, for no island in this part of Polynesia was completely isolated from others over the horizon. That was the strength of Polynesian society and its greatest weapon against an attacking sea—the ability to move elsewhere on short notice. Today, frontiers set over the past century by colonial powers create artificial barriers at a time of fast-rising populations. The ancient, more flexible world is no more. Many Pacific islands face an uncertain future as independent nations in an intensely competitive, global world.
    Tuvalu comprises four reef islands and five atolls located in the heart of the Pacific midway between Australia and Hawaii. 6 At twenty-six square kilometers, Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest nation on earth. Only Monaco, the Republic of Nauru, and Vatican City occupy less area. There are 10,500 inhabitants on eight of the nine islands. The highest point lies only 4.6 meters above sea level.
    Some canoe loads of people had settled on Tuvalu by at least a thousand years ago, probably from Fiji or Samoa. Sporadic European contact began when the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira sailed through the archipelago in 1568 while on a search for the mythical Terra Australis, the great southern continent, but he was unable to land. Foreign visitors were rare until the nineteenth century, except for the occasional whaler, but landing was always difficult. Nevertheless, slave traders, “blackbirders,” removed nearly four hundred men from the islands to work in the notorious guano mines on the Chincha Islands off the Peruvian coast between 1862 and 1865. By 1865, Christian missionaries and foreign traders were active on the islands, which became part of the British colony of Gilbert and Ellice Islands from 1916 to 1974. Tuvalubecame an independent nation within the British Commonwealth in 1978, but it is a nation at serious environmental risk, lying as it does only a few meters above an inexorably rising Pacific.

    Figure 12.3 The Pacific Islands.
    The Tuvalu government is