World Island Info

A report on a “notorious conman” who has proclaimed his own kingdom on Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, taking advantage of that country’s weak government.

Police fear a self-proclaimed king in rebel-held territory is plotting to overthrow the island’s government with a private army trained by former Fijian soldiers.

Smithsonian reports on a classic cargo cult, on Tanna, Vanuatu:

“John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”  The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult.”…. The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields.

The battle to save the Galapagos from goats, dogs, pigs, cats, donkeys, plants, insects, and humans.  Only 5% of the islands’ species have gone extinct since the Galapagos were discovered, but many are now threatened—and conservationists say they are losing the fight on inhabited islands in the group.

Rats have reappeared on Ulva Island, a biologically important island cleared of the invasive species in 1996.

Rats and other pests have decimated New Zealand’s endemic creatures, and offshore refuges such as Ulva are crucial to their survival.

Mother Jones reports on the possible fate of low-lying islands in the face of sea-level rise:

Today, roughly 1 million people live on coral islands worldwide, and many more millions live on low-lying real estate vulnerable to the rising waves. At risk are not just people, but unique human cultures, born and bred in watery isolation. Faced with inundation, some of these people are beginning to envision the wholesale abandonment of their nations.