SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Our Imperiled Oceans: Victory at Sea
from Smithsonian Magazine
At first sight, the people of Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the central Pacific, would not appear to be model conservationists.
Trash is abundant all along Tarawa, the capital island, a skinny atoll shaped like a backward L and crammed with 40,000 people. (It was the site of one of the costliest landings in World War II, in which 1,000 U.S. marines were killed.)
The rustic charm of the traditional thatched houses, which have raised platform floors and no walls, is offset by the smell of human waste wafting from the beaches. The groundwater is contaminated. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy low. And yet this past January impoverished Kiribati established the world's largest protected area, a marine reserve the size of California.
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