Submission + - Our Sinking World
Maddie Kahn writes: If you want to preserve a fish you've caught on Kulinus, a tiny island in the Tigak region of Papua New Guinea, your best bet is to smoke it. Ice, available from the store an hour and a half away if you’re lucky enough to own a boat with a motor, is a foreign concept here. But when Brooke Jarvis meet Ramis Thomas, an elder in the village, ice is on his mind. The night before, most of the island was swamped by high tides, with residents staying up most of the night to keep their belongings from floating away. Thomas says that Kulenus now has perhaps a quarter of the land area he remembers from childhood, and though his concept of natural ice is from a vaguely remembered movie scene (you’re thinking of Titanic, another man offers), he’s heard that melting ice far away is the reason his island is disappearing. He wants to know how much ice has yet to melt—if it’s all already gone, perhaps his people can stay here, holding onto the edge of a tenuous situation. I tell him there’s a lot more. “Then we will have to move,” he says. “I’m sorry about our island, but life is important.”
