Monster reserve: Spectacularly vibrant anemone fish crowd around a thriving reef off Manra Island in the Phoenix Islands, Kiribati. To see so many of them in one place is extremely unusual anywhere else.
Credit: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images
TO REACH THE CUTTING EDGE of the marine conservation movement, you first have to fly to Tarawa, the site of the capital of Kiribati, a Micronesian country so poor that its national airline can't afford air links between its two most populous islands, let alone to a foreign country.
Air Kiribati confines its two small turboprops to the Gilbert Islands. There's only one way to reach Tarawa, and that's via Fiji on Air Pacific.
Tarawa is as skinny as any atoll, but instead of being shaped like the usual O, it's an L inverted sideways. For the most part, there's just a single road, and as you head west from the airport, you'll see a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to rubbish.
Car skeletons are often kept, alongside tethered pigs, in front of houses. At first glance, the I-Kiribati (pronounced 'E Kiribasi' as locals call themselves) don't look like the planet's most conservation-minded people.
Your car will turn off at the sign for the School for Disabled Children (like most signs here, it's hand-painted) then, past a volleyball court, you'll come to a two-storey, baby-blue, wooden building with a sign (hand-painted) that proclaims it the Ministry of Environment, Lands and Agricultural Development.
Inside, two roomy offices are separated by a glass partition and mercifully cooled by a potent air conditioner. Out of the second one emerges a handsome man in his 50s. His name is Tukabu Teroroko and he's smiling broadly, because he has one of sexiest jobs around: managing the birth of the world's largest marine area.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area will be the size of California, the first that protects tuna and other ocean-going fish and the first to get funding using market-based mechanisms.
It doesn't hurt that the Phoenix Islands just happen to contain some of the last of the world's pristine coral reefs, and that the region has the potential to become a tourist Mecca – an underwater Serengeti whose teeming fish populations will put Australia's Great Barrier Reef to shame (where commercial fishing is banned in only 30 per cent).
On the wall of Teroroko's office are nine stunning underwater photos of the Phoenix Islands' marine wildlife, taken by a National Geographic pro.
Over a series of conversations, Teroroko explains just why he's passionate about this project. "We're fulfilling God's will to have us look after his Creation," says Teroroko, a devout Catholic who has had audiences with two popes – John Paul II and Benedict XVI – and has the pictures to prove it perched high on his living room wall.
For science, he says, the reserve will serve as a sort of 'Noah's Ark' – insurance against the depletion of marine life that seems to be accelerating everywhere else.
It will also allow the study of the effects of global warming on one of the few places humans haven't otherwise interfered with because it's so remote. Finally, it will create tourism jobs for the I-Kiribati, some of the poorest people in the world (though also among the happiest, it seems).
climate
I hate to be pessimistic but it is a shame that just a few degrees rise in temperature could severely threaten marine ecosystems. By shame I mean frightening and saddening. Let us enjoy them while they exist in their current state.