Maldives: Paradise threatened?

Endangered because of climate change, it works to be friendlier to the environment.

By Amanda Jones
LA Times

January 10, 2010

Here's what happens when you travel to the Maldives with someone who followed an Indian guru for 20 years: You find yourself convinced that the dazzling liquid topaz ocean surrounding you is energizing your chakras and healing your inner turmoil. You may not have been aware of any inner turmoil, but apparently most of us suffer it, and isolated tropical islands such as the Maldives are just the sort of place to wrestle it to the ground.

Sally Tagg, a dear friend from New Zealand, was my travel companion and the former guru follower. Former because eventually reality set in, but she still lives her life mindfully. We were in the Maldives not, in fact, to pursue personal satori (enlightenment) but to learn firsthand how enlightened the Maldives is when it comes to being eco.

A string of coral islands lying 3 degrees above the equator in the Indian Ocean and 477 miles west of Sri Lanka, the Maldives has 1,190 islands. Only 200 of the islands are inhabited, home to about 390,000 Maldivians. But here's the doomsday foreshadowing: The largest of these 1,190 islands is 2 miles long, and most are smaller than a football field. The highest point in all the islands is less than 8 feet. A basketball hoop is 2 feet taller than the whole country.

The Maldives has never been known for much except its idyllic tropical beauty, which appears on screen-savers and posters worldwide. In 2008, however, the watery nation hit the news with a splash. If experts are right and global warming escalates, sea levels will rise and the Maldives will disappear. (We should note that some experts dispute this claim.) U.N. pundits say that oceans could rise as much as 2 feet in the next 90 years. Imagine what that might do to an island the size of a football field.

(More here.)