The Age of Islands Read online

  THE AGE

  OF

  ISLANDS

  By the same author

  Off the Map

  Beyond the Map

  New Views: The World Mapped Like Never Before

  What is Geography?

  How to Argue

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Alastair Bonnett, 2020

  The moral right of Alastair Bonnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Except where noted, all photographs and illustrations are by the author.

  While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publisher would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-809-0

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-810-6

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-811-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-812-0

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part One: Rising

  Why We Build Islands

  Flevopolder, The Netherlands

  The World, Dubai

  Chek Lap Kok, Airport Island, Hong Kong

  Fiery Cross Reef, South China Sea

  Phoenix Island, China

  Ocean Reef, Panama

  Natural, Overlooked and Accidental: Other New Islands

  Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, Tonga

  The Accidental Islands of Pebble Lake, Hungary

  Trash Islands

  Part Two: Disappearing

  Disappearing Islands

  The San Blas Islands of Guna Yala, Panama

  Tongatapu and Fafa, Tonga

  The Isles of Scilly, UK

  Part Three: Future

  Future Islands

  Seasteading

  Dogger Bank Power Link Island, North Sea

  East Lantau Metropolis, Hong Kong

  Not an Ending

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  THIS IS THE age of islands. New islands are being built in numbers and on a scale never seen before. Islands are also disappearing: inundated by rising seas and dissolving into archipelagos. What is happening to islands is one of the great dramas of our time and it is happening everywhere: islands are sprouting or being submerged from the South Pacific to the North Atlantic. It is a strange rhythm, mesmerizing and frightening, natural and unnatural. It is imprinting itself on our hopes and anxieties: the rise and fall of islands is an intimate and felt thing as well as a planetary spectacle. I want to navigate this new territory and try to grasp what it tells us about our relationship – our vexed love affair – with islands.

  This is the story of that adventure. It won’t be plain sailing. I know that for certain now because I’m writing this in Nuku‘alofa, the slow-moving, weather-battered capital of the Kingdom of Tonga, and I’m feeling just as tired as any of the sad-eyed dogs that hunker on the hot and empty road outside. This morning the wind blew unexpectedly hard, and 15 kilometres from shore the hull of the unexpectedly small motor launch on which – many weeks before and many thousands of kilometres away – I’d booked a passage to a newly emerged and as-yet-unnamed volcanic island began to fall in sickeningly slow blows, hammering every valley between every green wave. ‘We must turn back,’ hollered the captain, the faded tattoos of whales and dolphins writhing with the spray along his bare arms and chest.

  So, yet again, I’m holed up, WhatsApping friends and family: ‘Didn’t make it to my island.’ I’ve come 17,700 kilometres for nothing. A cyclone is hitting this patch of the Pacific tomorrow and I guess I will never reach that impossible fleck on the horizon.

  ‘My island’. What a strange conceit. Islands get under your skin like that: splinters of longing, or escaped territories, they lodge themselves deep. As the gathering storm spits down its first heavy drops, I treat myself to another splash of whisky and trawl my memory, not for the first time, for what set this long and often lonely journey in motion. I remember my seventeen-year-old daughter standing in the kitchen, toast-in-hand, wise, steady and unimpressed. ‘You’re fundamentally dumb,’ she warned me with icy authority, adding: ‘All you’re doing is globalizing your male menopause.’ But then she smiled gloriously: ‘I want to come!’ Others were less generous, narrowing their eyes in the presence of some unfortunate but undefined species of post-colonial self-indulgence.

  Yet chasing these scattered and unmapped points of change feels urgent to me. I keep waking suddenly in the small hours, obsessed with some wayward, unanchored detail, only calmed when I have scribbled out a map or illegible note. I guess I need to cool down and tell this story slowly, to work out why the rise and fall of islands matters.

  There is no place better to start than the South China Sea. To the north and west the coastlines of China and Vietnam bulge into its warm waters; to the south and east lie Malaysia and the Philippines. This is one of the world’s great trade routes – said to be worth $5.3 trillion a year – and it is one of the cockpits of contemporary geopolitics. The Spratly Islands, the once-pristine and untouched reefs and tiny islands that sprinkle this sea, have been horribly mutilated: squared off and concreted over; a dozen or so have been crammed with military firepower and turned into audacious forward placements in a new cold war. China is bolting together the majority of these Frankenstein islands and it is winning control of the entire sea.

  Satellite and aerial images show how the reefs are latched on to by long black snake-like pipes that curve through the water. They wend back to boats that are grinding up the sea floor – sand, coral, crustaceans, everything – into building material. This marine paste is squirted onto the island. Later come the concrete mixers, the airstrips, naval harbours and the missile silos. One of the latest victims is Johnson South Reef. It has been snared by an inseminating predator. In its early stages it is bulked up. Later it will be squared off – a hostile alien in a beautiful blue sea.

  The tragedy of the Spratlys has been spread across headlines in East Asia for some years. In the coming decades much bigger and more peaceful Chinese islands will grab the world’s attention. Spectacular new leisure and entertainment islands are emerging just minutes from the shore of a number of coastal cities. Like the artfully shaped new islands sculptured in the Gulf States, these are sites of turbo-charged consumerism. However, since they are made by gouging out the seabed and planting rows of offshore and improbably shaped, air-conditioned hotels, these apparently carefree shopping and holiday destinations can be just as environmentally damaging as their military cousins.

  Our power to reshape the planet is stark on new islands. Each of them shouts: ‘Look what we can do!’ But the age of islands has another face. New islands are rising up as old ones are going under. Today the spectre of disappearance stalks low-lying nations. Thousands of the world’s islands are only centimetres higher than the surrounding sea and most are shrinking year by year, month by month. The roll-call of the vanished is already a long one. The rate at which dredgers and engineers can fabricate new islands is increasing but so is the speed at which natural islands are being swallowed up.

  En route to the capital of the Solomon Islands for yet another conference on climate change, the then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon peered out of his aeroplane window and saw what may, at first glance, have appeared to be a couple of undersea reefs and, in the background, some small islands. In fact, it was the remnants of one large island that had been almost completely swallowed up, with only the highest ridges left. About a dozen islands in this part of the Solomons have gone the same way. Islands today feel fugitive and uncertain: an atmosphere of doubt surrounds them. Their stories hold a mirror up to our alarming era.

  Islands are changing fast but they have a primal allure. I love islands. They offer the possibility of newness, of hope. Staring at the white, lifeless heap that is Johnson South Reef or the vestiges of the Solomons, that might sound very odd. But the idea of utopia clings to even the bleakest island. The first image of ‘utopia’ was an island. It is telling how insistent Thomas More was in the book usually simply titled Utopia – his travel fantasy that gave us the word – that Utopia had to be an island. More tells us that the founder of this uniquely perfect realm, King Utopus, ‘made it into an island’. Originally it was part of the mainland but Utopus ‘ordered a deep channel to be dug’ in order to ‘bring the sea quite round’. Only in this way could a flawless and completely new place be born. Utopia is a space apart, a jewel in the sea, a distant sight towards which one longs to steer.

  More describes the island as ‘not unlike a crescent: between its horns, the sea comes in eleven
miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about 500 miles’. It’s easy to imagine sailing into that generous harbour. One of the alluring things about islands is that we can picture them whole in our mind’s eye. Hence we can imagine them perfect – complete and completed.

  Anyone who travels to new islands has to deal with hope. Not timid, doe-eyed hope but outrageous, gleeful, turbulent, confident hope. It’s there in the fast-mutating island polders of the Netherlands and the off-kilter leisure islands of the Gulf States and China. Despite the fact that most new islands are environmental disasters, it’s still, perversely, impossible to detach them from hope. So it seems inevitable that I devote the last section of this book to future islands – places that are likely to be unveiled over the next few decades or so.

  Another memory is rising to the surface. My first ‘new’ island. I went there a couple of years ago. I recall it like the face of an old friend. I need that memory now for the rain and wind are pounding the roof. Best not to listen as the palm trees clatter and twist, their limbs snapping and skittering skywards. Many people on Tonga are spending tonight in flimsy canvas tents donated by aid agencies in the aftermath of the last cyclone, often camped in their own wet gardens. Casting back for comforting memories, I retreat to a happier place.

  A light heave on the oars. The water is calm, silky. This is how all island journeys should be. With that last pull, the pretty green rowing boat I’ve rented for the day grates a few inches onto an underwater rim of hefty round stones. I splash out and begin busily surveying, pushing a yellow steel tape measure through a tangled knot of shrunken alders and over the grizzled corpse of a putrefying sheep. (How did it get here?) My unnamed island is 19.5 metres long and 10 metres wide. High above it heavy black power cables sag across the width of the loch: dark arcs drawn on a summer sky. It is a windless day.

  The island is one of many on Loch Awe, a freshwater lake 40 kilometres long in the west of Scotland. I had no inkling that it marked the start of something. My yellow tape measure, wielded with faux-professional aplomb, is nothing more than a protective talisman, fending off the pointlessness of a wayward mini-break. Squatting down on this islet’s western shore beside a mini-vortex of plastic rubbish – coagulated food packaging and fishing lines – I baffle myself with questions: ‘Why have I come here? Why do islands lure me?’ Staring down at all that plastic, other questions soon come: ‘What is happening to islands? Why, today, are we building so many of them and misshaping many more?’

  This cloud of question marks might seem out of place in such an anonymous and peaceful place. But my island holds a secret: it was built by people. So were nearly all the other islands I can see from its shore. The two dozen or so that are still visible in Loch Awe were all constructed somewhere from 2,600 to 600 years ago. Surrounded by high hills, back then people used the rivers and lochs as their transport routes. They were water-based in almost everything they did and island-building allowed them to live on their economic and political ‘main street’. Logs were driven into the shallows and large stones placed on top. Communal round houses were then built on the islands alongside small pens for pigs and goats. These ancient artificial islands are called crannogs. Only handfuls have been excavated. Scotland has about 350 existing examples; Ireland has many times that number and there are similar ancient lake islands in dozens of other countries. They are intriguing places: perplexing yet immediately understandable. Humans have an insatiable curiosity about islands and a deep-rooted desire to shape and create them.

  After that trip out on Loch Awe I drove back home to Newcastle, the city in England’s far north where I have lived for thirty years, and tried to put my feelings into some kind of order.

  I began doodling all sorts of island shapes, just like I did as a boy: fat and fiddly ones; ones with lovely sinuous inlets; ones with villages and ones with mountains; ones with caves and treasure. I also started drawing up a list of the world’s newest and most rapidly changing islands – both the natural and unnatural. These came from conversations at work, back in Newcastle University’s Geography Department (where I first got word that the main part of Svalbard, in the high Arctic, was revealing itself as two islands as the ice sheets melt away), and news items (latest pictures on the bulked-out and militarized Spratlys in the South China Sea and a menacing-looking new volcano rising from the sea north of Tonga). I also relied on readers of my previous books on ‘off the map’ places. Had I heard of the new artificial islands in Korea? Did I know about the ‘Trash Isles’, or islands that are poisoned, exploding, becoming uninhabitable, crowded with giant crabs?

  So many islands. I’m not sure it helped to find a copy of the Island Studies Reader and learn that there are 680 billion islands on our planet. It turns out that figure includes 8,800,000 islets and 672,000,000 rocks. I wonder who counted them. It sounds like guesswork. I was becoming overwhelmed: unsettled by islands’ fractal endlessness and the fast pace of change.

  Trying to clear my head, I stopped spending my evenings on Google Earth (which is often years out of date when it comes to new and disappearing islands) or checking my email (ping: ‘I saw this on the BBC News App and thought you should see it: “The island that switches countries every six months”’). I wanted ideas that would anchor me. I kept coming back to an idea that proved seaworthy and still guides me, namely the Janus-faced nature of modern islands: they are both frightening and beguiling; they offer security but also vulnerability. Here are some of my more cogent scribblings from when I was just back from Loch Awe.

  Islands = crisis: the drama of so many issues – climate change, species loss and extinction, overpopulation, nationalism and pollution – is played out with a special intensity on islands. The disappearance of an island occasions genuine grief, a real sense of loss, in a way that ordinary flooding does not. When an island goes it is like a complete thing, a whole nation, has been eradicated. Islands are often small places but they pack a big punch. Conquering or creating new ones is a big deal. Countries are greedy for them – in part because they can claim 200 nautical miles of territory from the shore of every single one. They offer a radical leaping outwards of national power. If you are looking for places that are intensely occupied by military firepower or have been bombed to nothing, then islands are the places to go.

  Islands = freedom and fear. They seem tailor-made for experiments and a fresh start. Perhaps that’s part of the tingle when the boat nudges the shore, the possibility that this is a new world where things, finally, can be made right. The twenty-first century is throwing money and ideas at islands. The rich like them because they offer security and status. But in an era of rapidly accelerating sea-level rise and worsening storms, islands are fragile. They are the first places to be abandoned. The dream becomes a nightmare and the island a prison. Islands are often used as dumping grounds for the unwanted. They lure us but they can easily and quickly become places of dread.

  The windows have started to shudder and the wall plugs just sparked. ‘No way you’re flying out this week,’ my Tongan captain forewarned me. As the cyclone gathers, I’m shrinking and hunching, trying to get small. My notes about islands suddenly feel like very thin gruel. They may contain some truth but they don’t feel vulnerable enough. Our relationship to islands goes well beyond political and ecological headlines or clever paradoxes. I try another memory; I reach back, much further.

  I’m standing with my brother and sister in an old wood – it is called Wintry Wood – at the northern end of Epping, the town on the eastern outskirts of London, where I was born and grew up. I’ve got my bright red wellington boots on; sometime later one of them will be sucked down and lost in a nearby patch of bog. Before us – Paul and Helen and me, the youngest – there is a dark, quiet pond hazy with flies and in that pond is an island. The pond and the island must be very old but they do not look natural: dug out for reasons long forgotten and of no interest to us. The island has our full attention: it is our destination. It is maybe 100 square metres in size and dense with beech and silver birch trees. Thin, finger-like branches reach down and paddle the water, beckoning children. Generations have taken up the invitation. We edge sideways down one particular muddy bank where an uneven causeway of sticks has been strewn – branches and twigs thrown into the water by those who came before us. It’s likely at least one of us will get a welly full of stinking, leaf-matted water and have to beat a wet retreat. But not this time, not in this memory. I can’t help smiling: we’ve all made it, holding hands across the tricky bits.