Doomed Island (Issue 35.1)

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Nauru is a teeny speck of an island in the middle of the Southpacific. Once a bountiful habitat for 1,000 residents, in the past 150 years Nauru has been reduced to a lunar landscape of rubble. Novelist David Kendall tells the whipsaw tale of greed and shortsightedness, how phosphates made these islanders among the richest people in the world and how its subsquent depletion — by their own hands — has left them bankrupt and hopeless.