Nauru claims to be the world’s smallest island nation (apparently, the Nauruans don’t recognize Sealand as a sovereign nation). The island is, in fact, only 2.5 miles across. It’s located in the South Pacific between Papua New Guinea and the Marshall Islands. 13,000 people live there, but curiously, they all live in a narrow ring within 500 feet of the shore.
Once one of the richest nations in the world, Nauru is now one of the poorest with a per capita GDP of US$5,000/year. 90% of the population is unemployed, and Air Nauru’s only plane was repossessed in December 2005.
I discovered Nauru in 2003 listening to This American Life. Jack Hitt visits Nauru and records what he learns. It’s quite a story. From the show:
I checked into the private hotel. There is only one. I caught the cab. There is only one of those, too. And I went to the shack where, at that time, most of the world’s money laundering occurred…
And later in the show:
I called the cab for an island tour. The driver this day, whose name sounded like Brian, took me on a slow tour around the outer edge of the island. Then he asked me if I wanted to see the interior, known as topside. When I said I did, the mood in the cab noticeably darkened, but he turned off one of the few side roads and we headed in. Right away the trees disappeared. I immediately saw that the palms and padanas that you see on the shore are a kind of scrim, a curtain hiding from sight one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. Almost all of Nauru is missing. Picked clean…
Nauru started as a corral atoll, but hundreds of thousands of years of bird droppings built up turning Nauru into a valuable lump of phosphate. During this century the topside was strip mined away, leaving a desolate moonscape in the middle of the island. Now the phosphate is running out, and the interior of the island is essentially destroyed.
:: This American Life | The Middle of Nowhere (The Nauru segment starts at 3 minutes)
