A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
Outside of the glimmer of a possibility that Donald Rumsfeld may, however belatedly, finally face trial, it’s a pretty slow news weekend. So, as I was meandering through the pages of the Huffington Post, I made short work of the home and politics pages and began looking for something else to read.
So I turned to the Green Page. There is an article there about an extremely ambitious project of the tiny country of The Maldive Islands. It’s one of the smallest countries on Earth, set on a group of coral islands off the coast of Sri Lanka. About two hundred of its islands are inhabited. The total population is under half a million people and about a 3rd of them live on the capital island of Male.
It’s also the lowest country on Earth, most of it being less than a meter above sea level. If the ocean levels rise as much as many scientist predict, the entire country will be erased from the face of the Earth, swallowed by Poseidon, gone.
So, where will the people go? The project in the article, a cooperation between the Maldivian government and a Dutch architect, is for a series of floating islands, big enough to have ponds, golf courses, swimming pools, homes, docks, beaches, small towns. The pictures look beautiful but, of course, an artists rendition of a planned construction always does.
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of floating islands since the 1st time I read about them, maybe a couple of years ago, and every time I check back in on the subject the projects seem to be a little more definite, and a little bit more ambitious. This project is extremely ambitious. If each of the islands is designed for a population of 5,000 – which is possible, large cruise ships hold about that – they still need to build about 80 of them to hold the 400,000 people who now call the Maldives home.
They could maintain their two largest industries, which are fishing and tourism.
Although it is a new concept, and undoubtedly will run into snags which nobody has foreseen, if it is successful it will become a model for new and improved versions off the coasts of all the world.
It won’t solve the problem of global warming. But it may be a way of adapting to it.
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