There was no b.s. in actor Edward Norton’s introduction of himself at the recent SLOWLIFE Symposium in the Maldives: “Films are now my sideline,” he said. “Waste is my business.”
Photo by Six Senses
He admitted of course that what he referred to as his “day job” had provided him with the “storytelling skills” that aid him in his variety of non-acting pursuits, from CEO of Baswood Inc., a green wastewater treatment alternative he and his partners are currently selling and building around the U.S. and abroad to U.N. Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. He’s also a board member on a handful of non-profits, including the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, which gives him direct insight into sustainable tourism and eco-system preservation.
The move from fulltime acting to mixing it up in a diversity of projects focused on social good does not strike Norton as unusual. In a long interview with author Mark Lynas (Six Degrees, God Species) while in the Maldives, he sees it as more obligation than option.
“I think the defining challenge of the era right now is that we have recognized that we are living our lives and operating our civilization in a way that will not sustain life as we know it on the planet,” said Norton. “I don’t think an artist any less or more than anybody else should stay out of that conversation. I think artists, if they are serious about what art can do, are trying to engage in the times they are living in.”
Norton’s wide-ranging level of professional curiosity can easily be traced to his father, Edward Norton Jr., an environmental lawyer who has worked extensively in Asia, was a federal prosecutor in the Carter Administration and has close links with the Nature Conservancy, the Wilderness Society and the National Trust for Historic Conservation.
During the three-day symposium Norton’s emphasis in private conversation with various Maldivian government officials and local U.N. workers focused on how Baswood might bring its recycling expertise to island states, like the Maldives, where coasts and reefs are at great risk due to the tendency of dumping waste and wastewater just offshore.
For a full interview with Mark Lynas, adviser to the President of the Maldives on climate change, click here.
Excerpts on Norton’s take on the power of storytelling, the real impacts of tourism and the greenwashing of travel journalism are below:
The conventional image of tourism is that it’s quite environmentally destructive. We’ve worked out for the Maldives that the carbon cost of all the flights of people coming in is pretty much equivalent to the domestic emissions of the country, so that does beg the question of whether tourism can ever be a net benefit environmentally.
When people talk about the ‘extractive industries’ they mean forestry, fishing, mining, the industries that clearly extract from the environment . We don’t tend to think of tourism as one of the extractive industries, but the more I learn about it the more I think that tourism should be judged on the same types of metrics that many of those other extractive industries are judged. Because tourism is an industry that uses the environment as its draw to give an experience but yet may at the end of the day be depleting the very resources upon which it is based in an unsustainable way.
Right now we are in a beautiful resort called Soneva Fushi, surrounded by these bright blue ocean waters and fringing coral reef, and I’m sure its appeal to visitors is that it’s some sense located in nature, yet it’s hardly a wild environment.
Look, the thing about tourism is that it is based on the allure of having an experience in a beautiful environment, and perhaps even on interacting with nature in a certain way. Those used to be experiences, which were accessed only by a very privileged few. In the last 25 years the number of people who are travelling further and further abroad to more remote places to have these types of experiences has just gone up exponentially. So places that just a decade or two ago were truly remote indigenous communities are suddenly having to grapple with having to balance that sudden economic benefit of new waves of tourism and yet figure out how they do that without destroying the very thing that’s bringing the people to them.
You’ve done work with the Maasai in Kenya, and in other parts of the world. Have you got any lessons that you’ve taken away about how to manage tourism sustainably?
One is sustainability of operations – how are you actually operating your business, and are you operating it in a way that will maintain the natural resource capital that your business is based on. Number two is community benefit. How do we assess community benefit, to what degree is a tourism business representing a micro-economy where actual benefit is penetrating meaningfully into the local community, as opposed to a vortex where all the benefit is coming in through the business and then going out of the country.
People talk about carbon footprint but I think the thing that gets less often assessed is water. In many of the most remote places, whether they are beach resorts or safari lodges, the way that these places use water is a fundamentally problematic issue. Guests are looking for luxury, so tourism operators are afraid to ask the guests to change their narrative of what luxury is they are visiting. But I think that it needs to happen more. I think if you ask most people if they want to ruin a place during their visit of it they would say no. I think most people don’t want to feel that they came to a place and trashed it.
I also think the ‘tourism media’, the travel writers, and actually the travel agents too, have to do a better job. There’s a lot of ‘greenwashing’ in the industry… resorts claiming to be ‘eco’ and ‘green’ and promising ‘community benefit’ that are really doing very little. And the writers just buy the marketing and assist the lie. They need to investigate deeper.
This also depends perhaps on the cultural background of the tourist. I think this year for the first time the majority of the visitors to the Maldives have been from China. So no longer is this primarily a Western market.
Yes, that’s fascinating, because then you’ve got people coming out of a completely different narrative in terms of familiarity with even those concepts. Tourism operators have to be courageous in the sense that they’ve got to be a part of introducing people to that value system, not because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s in their best interests economically in the long term.
The thing I can’t get my head around, and I hope you’ll forgive me for this, is to talk with someone who’s had such a high-profile, successful Hollywood movie career about the economics of waste management, and the peculiarities of certain septic systems. Isn’t that a weird combination?
I think the defining challenge of the era right now is that we have recognized that we are living our lives and operating our civilization in a way that will not sustain life as we know it on the planet. And if we are living in the moment when that kind of clarity has been reached, then I look at that as a generational sort of mission. I don’t think an artist any less or more than anybody else should stay out of that conversation. I think artists, if they are serious about what art can do, are trying to engage in the times they are living in.
But do you find it difficult to be taken seriously? People might think it’s some celebrity fad.
I think people should never throw generalizations about those types of things. I mean, look, I think that these particular issues are ones that everybody should get involved in. I don’t think anybody should look down their nose at an actor or a musician any more than a lawyer, or a doctor or an economist. People are starting to engage with these issues from all sorts of different angles. For instance, what can someone who works in a storytelling medium bring to the equation? I’ve sat with lots of climate scientists, or biodiversity specialists who are just absolutely incapable of articulating a narrative of why that matters to the average person.
So when I got asked by the UN to be an ambassador for the biodiversity program I don’t engage with something like that flattering myself that my qualifications come in the category of biology or science, but I do think that I am in some ways more capable than some of the scientists in the field of explaining that story to other people – of taking examples, case studies, things that I’ve learned about and helping rearticulate them in a way that a new generation of people can begin to see what’s the connectivity between a very abstract idea like biodiversity and me and my life. And that is storytelling.
That’s actually how humans actually receive information successfully, isn’t it, storytelling?
Absolutely, and that’s part of the story we’re living in now, we need a new narrative. We need a narrative where we relocate ourselves literally within the biosphere. We have looked at ourselves for a long time as exceptional, as disconnected from the natural systems on the planet that support us, and we need a new narrative in which people on a broad global level become conscious and aware of their interconnectedness with those systems. So helping to get that story out there, helping people reframe their sense of themselves in the world in a way they understand that they are reliant – and their children are reliant – on the health of these systems, so they care about it, is important.
Given her decades of success in the movie business, environmental activist and actress Daryl Hannah could be lounging on any beach in the world today, drinking rum punches, working on her tan or perfecting her mermaid’s kick.
Photo by Six Senses
That she recently spent a week in the Maldives, much of it indoors participating in a pair of eco-symposiums focused on climate change and the future of island nations — just days after being arrested in Washington D.C. as part of the protest against the planned $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline — says a lot about her priorities.
It’s easy to cast a dubious eye at celebrities who align themselves with environmental causes since often it’s clear managers or agents have encouraged them hoping to better a client’s position based on image rather than sincerity. With every actor under 40 (and many older) attempting to gain environmental cred these days it doesn’t take too much effort to scratch the surface and find out who of them really bleeds green.
Having participated with Hannah in a bunch of roundtable talks and spoken on a panel together with her on ocean biodiversity during the recent, third annual SLOWLIFE Symposium, I can vouch for her dedication, commitment and truly green blood. On a quiet beach we talked about how she came to this level of commitment and how, having grown up in America’s heartland, she became so impassioned about the ocean.
Photo by Six Senses
“I grew up not only in the heart of the city of Chicago but on the 42nd story of an apartment building, so I was really disassociated with the natural world in a strange way. There was a park nearby which I thrived off of, but I felt kind of strange and alien as a kid. It wasn’t until my dad sent me off to a camp in the wilderness that I formed a bond with the natural world and understood that’s where things made sense for me.
“It was also around that time that I started diving, at 13, with pony bottles, and it was just magic. It was like being a bird in the ocean, giving you a feeling like flying. Whenever I’m in the water my heart rate slows, I get really calm … it is a constant sense of wonder every time.”
I’m specifically curious how she came to a life committed to environmentalism, whether it was imbued in her Illinois youth or dawned later on a sunny California day.
Photo by Six Senses
“I used to think that the most important thing I could do was to live as ethically as possible, which I still think is a really important step for people to take. But once I began to really understand the crises that we are in the midst of — extinctions, over population, ocean acidification, and more — I started to realize that it was absolutely imperative that we all do everything in our power to change.
“It wasn’t really a decision. I just feel compelled. I’m like one of those mamas trying to lift a car off her baby, I have no choice, I just have to (be involved).
Have her acting jobs, like “Splash,” informed her sufficiently? “I don’t have to be a scientist or an oceanographer to see that the coral reefs are bleached and that there are no fish left, I can see those things with my own eyes. I’ve seen things change in such a short amount of time
“And not just in the oceans. We are in real trouble if we don’t start living more ethically and mindfully and employing all of the solutions we have available to us.
I remind her of a common theme among committed preservationists, which is that people generally protect best what they love most. If we expect people to truly take better care of their little patch of land or sea or sky, they must have great affection for it first.
“That’s absolutely it, we protect what we love. But I think the ocean has a particular challenge. Less than one percent of people have spent any time under it, so they look at it from the beach, from the shore, and it looks just fine. But it’s not fine. Once people understand the interdependence of all life on this earth, that we are all interconnected — that when we fix the problem with our energy consumption and dependence on fossil fuels — we would also fix some of the serious issues facing the oceans.”
Back home in the U.S., one of Hannah’s major disappointments is recent change in laws allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections and lobbyists.
“I never put my faith in government or politicians,” she says. “It’s people who are going to change things. If we each took responsibility for our own lives we wouldn’t be in the mess we are. But there’s no way we have a voice unless we insist upon it.
“As long as people get out there and start sharing information with each other then people can make their own decisions. Most people wouldn’t make a decision to commit suicide or poison their own children … or kill their loved ones. They are going to make wiser, more informed decisions if they know that choices are available.”
She returns to the core belief that individuals can, and must, lead. “We have to hold people accountable, hold corporations accountable and hold politicians accountable. But we have to hold ourselves accountable first.”
Daryl Hannah and Richard Branson in the Maldives, photo by Six Senses
There are few places on the planet as remote as the Maldives. Landfall is a thousand miles away from much of the long string of 1,200 islands, most of which are little more than thin, uninhabited strips of sand. Diving into the heart of a Maldivian lagoon it is easy to imagine you are alone in one of Planet Ocean’s most distant paradises.
Yet when I did just that a few days ago, in the heart of the Baa Atoll — 463 square miles of aquamarine Indian Ocean recently named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — something didn’t feel, or look, quite like paradise.
The ocean, though jaw-droppingly beautiful, was a bathtub warm 86 degrees F. Diving to its shallow floor it was quickly clear that the realm below sea level here has been badly impacted in recent years by a combination of man and Mother Nature and resulting fast-warming temperatures.
The coral reefs of the Maldives were first badly damaged in 1998, when shifting ocean patterns associated with El Niño raised sea level temps above 90 degrees. The result then was that 70 to 90 percent of the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls were badly “bleached,” the warm temperatures killing off the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color. While since then many of the reefs have been recovering, according to a report by the Maldives-based Marine Research Center, another warming last year (2010) estimated that “10-15 percent of shallow reef coral is now completely white, while 50-70 percent has begun to pale.”
On this day I was diving with Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques and executive director of Plant A Fish, and Mark Lynas, author and climate change adviser to Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed. During our first dive along a shallow reef in the middle of Baa Atoll we repeatedly signaled “thumbs down” to each other, as it became clear that this reef was troubled. Blanched the color of cement, the coral tips were mostly broken off leaving just behind bare rock.
Maldives-based marine biologist Kate Wilson dove with us and explained recovery was slowed this past April when another bleaching event occurred, with high sea temperatures again sweeping the area.
Photo by Fabien Cousteau
Mark would later describe the scene as “eerie;” Fabien’s photographs illustrated a murky, fish-less seafloor.
Kate assures us there are nearby reefs less impacted by local fishing and closer to colder currents, which may help them recover faster.
I hesitate to paint an overly bleak picture of the Maldives because there are some very good things going on here too. Last year the island nation (home to 320,00) became just one of two countries to completely ban shark fishing in its 35,000 square mile exclusive economic zone (Palau is the other). Maldivians no longer eat shark, they were only being hunted here for shark fin soup for export to China. It’s estimated the value of a single shark to diving tourists versus fishermen was $3,300 to $32.
Photo by Fabien Cousteau
Tuna in the Maldives is limited to being caught by pole, one of the most sustainable forms of fishing. And the naming last year of Baa Atoll as an UNESCO Biosphere Reserve is significant, placing it along such sites as the Galapagos, Ayer’s Rock in Australia, the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil and Amboseli National Park in Kenya. The challenge now is to help educate the local populace about the reserve-status, help impacted fishermen find alternative employment and fund enforcement.
And the next day we would visit a reef in the center of the Baa atoll which showed signs of a strong recovery.
It is dramatically different.
Just below the brightly sunlit surface hundreds of shiny reef fish dart and feed. In the deep, dark blue swim the Maldivian big guys: Jackfish, tuna and red snapper. An occasional spotted eagle ray elegantly flaps past, as do a pair of green turtles.
During a mile-long swim we spy an incredibly beautiful and vast variety of wrasses, clown, surgeon and parrotfish. A dusky moray eel peeks out of its coral hideaway. And a square-headed porcupine fish attempts to hide itself deep inside a rock crevice. The shallow, sandy floor running to a sandbar is heavy with gray-beige coral, colorful clams and even a few handsome sea cucumbers.
On the way back to shore, we quiz Kate about the future of the reefs and the Biosphere.
Where will the funding come to protect the new park? “The government and a half-dozen resorts that operate within the atoll. Starting in January 2012 tourists are going to pay too, buying permits for things like sport fishing and swimming with the manta rays, which will all go into the management of the biosphere.”
Are some zones in the atoll already off-limits to fishing? “Nine core areas are strict no-take zones,” she says.
What about pelagic, open-ocean fishes like bluefin tuna, are they protected? “Since they are migratory species it is quite hard to manage them. Once they are out of Maldivian waters and into open ocean international fishing fleets target them. So even though the Maldives fisheries is one of the most protected, by sustainable fishing, stocks are still declining.”
Can the coral truly recover if water temperatures keep rising as they have been? “It’s a good test here to see just how fast corals can adapt. It’s not just about the temperature but also about acidification as well, so all of the corals are really at a critical point. No on really knows how quickly they’ll adapt, if at all. If we are not careful globally what you’re seeing could become the new norm.”
I’ve bumped into Richard Branson a couple times now, in vastly different settings. The first was in the high Arctic village of Clyde River, where he’d come to join his son Sam for a weeklong dogsled expedition. He introduced himself with what he admitted was a weakish pinky-tap, blaming his inability to lift his arm on having rolled an ATV at his African safari camp the week before.
Daryl Hannah and Richard Branson at the Slowlife Symposium, photo Six Senses
When we met again a few days ago on a beach in the Maldives, again he extended just a pinky. This time he blamed it on a nasty cold, which he was politely attempting not to spread.
He had flown in for a few days to participate in the SLOWLIFE Symposium as I had; ironically he’d arrived by British Air from London, rather than aboard his own Virgin, which doesn’t fly to Male, the capital of the Maldives. Given his longstanding competition and high-level squabbles with BA, he joked that he’d brought along his own “food taster.” I assume he wasn’t referring to his lovely wife Joan, who accompanied him.
During the course of three days spent in sessions where 80 or so participated in conversation and debate about subjects ranging from the consequences of not taking climate change seriously to the energy future of small island states, Branson sat in on every one, taking notes in a small red notebook, participating in round table debates.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty on his plate that might have kept him otherwise occupied: The bankruptcy of the American solar company Solyndra had cost him a bundle; his house on his Caribbean island paradise, Necker Island, had burned to the ground just a month ago (thanks to a lightning strike during Hurricane Irene); and in a few days time he would be outed by Wikileaks for participating in covert plots to oust Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, announce plans to have Virgin Atlantic Airways running on recycled industrial gases by 2014 and by the following weekend be testing a new submersible amongst great white sharks off the coast of Mexico.
When it was his turn to present in the Maldives he chose the challenge of running a transportation business — an airline — while simultaneously trying to limit contributions to climate change and still make money. A relatively recent convert to environmental activism — which began with a literal house-call from Al Gore, “who did his whole ‘Inconvenient Truth’ routine in my living room” — Branson has since pushed many of his various companies towards greener ethics and is the prime motivator behind both The Elders and the recently announced Ocean Elders, as well as the Carbon War Room.
The latter, he suggested, was focusing on 25 sectors for which clean technology is available, like shipping, which he said emits 1 billion tons of CO2 annually and spends “some $70 billion dollars a year needlessly.” Similarly, fifty percent of all carbon emissions worldwide, he said, come from inefficient buildings, which led to his gathering 30 mayors of the largest cities in the world together to plot how to be less polluting.
“We do need to keep broadening the debate,” he said. “As arguments continue to rage around the weather patterns and reality of climate change, we are missing the bigger picture that there is no scientific debate about that every single one of our natural eco-systems is in decline. Part of this shift must be a new perspective on how we value our natural assets and how we change our consumption patterns. If we don’t move on this, Mother Nature will force us to.”
The week before been in China, to help launch a campaign there against shark fin soup, and had met a man he believed to be one of the richest in China whose company could put up a 20-story, full functioning, environmentally sound building in 10 days. He loved the spirit behind the effort.
“At Virgin we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems,” he said. “With this in mind why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different.”
To that end, in 2007 he had announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, an idea he credited to his wife, which offered a $25 million prize to whomever — inventor, scientist or entrepreneur — could come up with the best way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The original deadline was 2010; to-date they’ve received 2,500 entries but have not yet chosen a “grand prize winner.” Instead, he said, the panel — which includes James Lovelock, Tim Flannery, Al Gore and James Hansen — had decided to choose a handful of promising entries and give them grants to help develop some experimental technologies.
Ever the optimist, he was the first to admit “we have a lot of work to do on many fronts and not much time to change the course we are on.
“We must look at the issues around protecting our natural resources as one of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities of our lifetimes. We have the technology to realize this opportunity – we now need the right government policies to put the capital in place to build a new economy that puts people and the planet ahead of just business as usual and creates a more equitable way of life in harmony with the planet.”
In typical Branson form, of course, he refused to end on a dour note, choosing optimism instead and closing by referencing Martin Luther King. “He did not get his message across by saying ‘I have a nightmare!’ ”
The office of Maldivian President Mohammed Nasheed, near the edge of the capitol island of Male’, sits less than six feet above sea level, one reason he, like many of his countrymen, is concerned about rising sea levels.
President Mohammed Nasheed, by Six Senses
During nearly three years in office Nasheed has shown a backbone far stronger than his small frame might suggest (he’s not much more than 5 feet tall), earning him both praise as “The Green President” and criticism from climate change skeptics.
On a humid, blue-sky day on the island of Kunfunadhoo, 150 miles south of the crowded capitol island, the 43-year-old president spoke to a small group gathered for the third annual SLOWLIFE Symposium. He gave an update on his global campaign to light fires under other political leaders around the globe.
The first democratically elected president in his home country, Nasheed is a former journalist and human rights activist who was jailed by his predecessor, Maumoon Gayoom, an autocratic leader who held the presidency for 30 years. He is expected to run against Nasheed in 2013.
There is some concern that Nasheed’s globe-trotting presidency, the subject of a new documentary (“The Island President”) that recently won the best documentary award at the Toronto International Film Festival, may be distancing him from voters back home. Some think he may be more popular outside of his own country than inside, where the economy, jobs, crime and illegal drugs are growing problems.
I had the opportunity to ask him whether he thought most people in the Maldives understand the seriousness of climate change and its potential impact on them. “People living in Male’ and other urban areas are quite knowledgeable about the environment,” he said, “particularly young people. In more remote parts of the country, people see that erosion is increasingly. They know that the fish catch is more irregular and they understand that coral reefs are stressed. Maldivians know there are environment problems which affect their daily lives and that these problems are linked to global climate change.”
For now he shrugs off concerns, at least publicly, that his global campaign may be turning off voters at home, preferring to keep the focus on mankind’s continued burning of fossil fuels, which he believes, is killing the planet. “We don’t have much time,” he says, “just a window of opportunity of about seven years. If our leaders are not able to sort it out by then they should stop calling themselves leaders and get out.”
He gets a rise from the 80-person crowd when he asks, “Do you know what politicians get the most applause for?”
“Cutting ribbons at new power plants.”
“Politicians, including me, love to hear clapping. Now we just need to find an equivalent of ribbon cutting for green power plants and renewable energy sources.”
He went on to say he doesn’t regard climate change as an “earth science, but an economic, development, security and safety issue.
“Too often we hear leaders who say capping carbon emissions would result in poverty, of course this is not true at all.” He cites Iceland, an island state that became a developed country through its emphasis on renewable energy, as a great model.
“But it’s an upside down world today. The richest country on the planet, the United States, is the one most in debt. And the leader of the poor countries, China, is now the biggest investor in the world.”
Nasheed is not against a good publicity stunt to draw attention to his rhetoric, like holding the first-ever underwater cabinet meeting in 2009.
“We estimate that over one billion people watched, heard or read about the underwater cabinet meeting,” he said when I asked if the underwater session was more than just a stunt. “While it was a bit of fun, it underscored a serious message. I hope the meeting raised people’s awareness about the dangers climate change poses to the Maldives and the rest of the world. I hope that some of those people go on to ask their own politicians what they are doing to help solve the climate crisis. It is only when people start holding leaders to account, when politicians start losing elections over environmental issues, that they will treat climate change with the seriousness it deserves. “
Sonu Shivdasani, CEO of the Six Senses resorts, which hosted the symposium, asked the president if he was worried about getting re-elected. “All of your actions have been well received on the global stage,” said Shivdasani, “but what are you doing in the Maldives to get that message across, to get the Maldivians to vote for your green party ticket? Isn’t your legacy at risk if you don’t get re-elected?”
Predicting that he would get re-elected “handsomely,” the president insisted that going forward no matter who is president of the Maldives will have to keep the focus on the environment.
“We have always lived right next to the elements and the sea is everywhere around us, making it far easier for us Maldivians to understand that if the ocean is out of balance, things will go wrong. Since the tsunami (2004) I think Maldivians are much more concerned about the environment.”
My experience though is that protect what we love and sometimes it’s hard to know just how much Maldivians can truly love the aquamarine ocean that surrounds since so many of them never learn to swim. While a group of a dozen young “Ocean Rangers” dressed in matching blue shirts kneel in front of the stage to listen to the President, the reality is that many in the Maldives have never used a mask and fins to explore their own “backyard.”
But Nasheed is convinced young Maldivians in particular appreciate what’s at risk. “I am very clear with them that if they destroy the reefs, they are destroying their homes.”
Environmental activist/actor Edward Norton, photo Six Senses
The president’s outspokenness prompts actor and environmental activist Edward Norton to offer a few words of praise. “I can’t think of many leaders around the world talking with such clarity and vision. And while I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a long tenure here, you’re still a young man. When you’re finished in the Maldives could you come and consider being president of the United States, we could use some of that clarity and honesty.”
“Most political leaders will do what their people tell them to do,” replied the president. “In the Maldives and the United States people must galvanize themselves to political action. People who can embrace the future now — today — will be the winners.”
If there is a ground zero for observing the impacts of a changing global climate the Maldives are definitely a front-runner.
Photo by Jon Bowermaster
It is a place many have heard of but few could easily pick out on a map. Comprised of twelve hundred islands and atolls, most pancake flat, the highest reaches no more than five feet above sea level … making the Maldives the lowest country on earth. Only two hundred of the islands are inhabited, by roughly 320,000 people. It is an always hot, exceedingly beautiful, Muslim country stretching about 600 miles from north to south in the heart of the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka.
I have been visiting the islands since 2005, when I first went to assess the damages wreaked by the massive tsunami that rolled from Indonesia to Somalia. The Maldives were largely spared; its coral reefs absorbed the brunt of the wave. In the years since, as rising sea levels and warming sea surface temperatures have gained more and more headlines, so has this tiny island nation.
Today erosion is a big problem on many of the islands and most of its coral is badly bleached.
In the past few days an invested crowd of thinkers and doers, including the Maldives’ President Mohammed Nasheed and several members of his cabinet, gathered on the small island of Kunfunadhoo, for the third annual S.L.O.W.L.I.F.E Symposium.
Daryl Hannah and Richard Branson, photo Six Senses
Organized by the owners of the resort company Six Senses, Eva and Sonu Shivdasani, the barefoot conference brought together environmentalists from the United Kingdom including Jonathan Porritt, Tim Smits and Jeremy Leggett, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Mark Lynas (author of “Six Degrees” and the new “God Species”), renewable energy and island nation leaders from as far away as Reunion and Bali, ocean mariners including Fabien Cousteau and some incredibly dedicated headline-makers (Richard Branson and the actors Edward Norton and Daryl Hannah).
The subject of three days of talks was, What can be done fast to slow climate change, before it’s too late.
Topics ranged from how small island nations can become energy independent, how to engage local communities in ambitious carbon reduction plans and the challenge of adapting transportation in a low-carbon economy.
It’s clear there are no easy answers. Soon after arriving by float plane President Nasheed delivered a harsh message. “Carbon dioxide emissions are going to kill us,” he said. “Here in the Maldives our goal of becoming carbon neutral is not to scare the world, but simply to make a step in the right direction.”
Sonu Shivdasani, SLOWLIFE Symposium, photo Six Senses
While Nasheed leads an effort to make the Maldives the first carbon neutral country on the planet, by 2020, there are some good things to brag about here on the Laccadive Sea. Last year the country banned all shark fishing and any tuna in the Maldives are caught only by pole. Recently the Baa Atoll was declared a UNESCO Biosphere.
While the Maldives, with few natural resources but a growing population and energy demands, is on the forefront of nations attempting to take themselves off the grid it’s clear the problems are not a lack of knowledge and information. But the Maldivian government officials reiterated what stands in their way is not lack of knowledge but of money. It’s one thing to have great ideas and access to information; paying for progress is something else, especially in a country with a fledgling democracy and a history of high debt and bad credit.
But it is trying. By 2020 the Maldives hopes to generate 60 percent of its electricity from solar, without raising the cost of power to its consumers. It has introduced a new import regime by the Transport Ministry to ensure that in the future electric cars will be a third of the price of conventional gasoline cars. And it has pledged to spend two percent of its national income on renewable energy deployment in the country. If that figure were matched worldwide, we would be collectively be spending $1.25 trillion a year rather than the $260 billion we spend today on renewable energy sources.
Worrying to all island nations of course is that CO2 in the world’s atmosphere is not declining but growing, as development and growth continue to mount globally. The goal of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million — what scientists regard as the safe limit for humans — may fast becoming an unreachable goal, since it has already risen to above 392 ppm.
One industry that prospers in the Maldives of course is tourism. Nearly 1 million visitors a year, including increasing numbers from China and India, fly into the capital city of Male each year and jump out to various island resorts by float plane or small boat. Taxes on resort development — and potentially new tariffs on visitors to support renewable energy projects — are the lifeblood of the Maldivian economy.
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