Copyright 2008 by Alan AtKisson

This essay was developed from a keynote address delivered to an international conference on island sustainability, in June 2008, on Åland, an autonomous island (with a population of 27,000 and its own parliament) that is Swedish-speaking but part of Finland.

In Swedish, the word for “island” is a single letter, itself a small island:  ö.

When one comes upon it in reading, this little “o” with two dots over it appears suddenly and alone in a surrounding sea of words — tiny, yet redolent with linguistic meaning and personal associations.  Ö seems to long for company, and to be happily self-contained, at one and the same time. Ö needs no other letters to be a word and to mean what it means.  And yet, unless it is surrounded by other words and given a context, ö appears to be just another letter of the alphabet, and is meaningless.

The actual islands of our world are similarly self-contained and yet dependent, beautifully isolated and yet in need of contact, a combination that contributes to that hazy quality of specialness that seems to hover over nearly all of them, especially to the visitor. Throughout history, island cultures have been famously experienced as more or less closed to outsiders, and yet very welcoming of guests and traders and tourists, on whom islanders depend for contact with the rest of the world.  Island ecologies, fenced off by water, are known for their propensity to exert unique evolutionary conditions on the species who live there, producing pygmy elephants and other radical variations in phenotype.  Smallness of scale, distance from “the rest of the world,” and firm-yet-crossable boundaries define the island experience, for nature and humans alike.

Island economies, on the other hand, are very different, especially in today’s globalized world.  For some sectors — banking, gambling, and e-commerce services come to mind — telecommunications essentially erases the water.  Indeed, for all commerce that does not require the physical transport of heavy goods across great distances, the boundary of an ocean or other water body might as well not exist.  And in this era of cheap energy and fast transport, even heavy goods can cross the boundary of water even to a distant island with not much more effort than they cross the imaginary borders between European countries or Chinese provinces.

Modernity has caused a wrenching transformation in island economies, which were once dependent on the trading and brokering acumen of their citizens, not to mention their ability to hunt, fish and farm. Island economies have always had the potential to “punch beyond their weight,” using their smaller scale, their highly developed social capital (supported by greater demands for mutual trust), and distance from greater powers to leveraged advantage.  The histories of islands like Gotland, which grew wealthy as a Hanseatic trading center in the 1200’s, and Nantucket, which concentrated Kuwait-like wealth onto its shores in the 1600s thanks to its mastery of the whaling business, are illustrative.

But modern technology has amplified these potentials to new, and increasingly risky, extremes.  Frequently enjoying some level of autonomy, or at least a psychological sense that they can “go their own way,” true island economies can more easily establish unusual policy frameworks and concentrated competence clusters, mirroring in a fascinating way their ecological systems’ propensity for exaggeration and uniqueness.  As banking centers, as tourism destinations, as home bases for shipping companies or insurance managers, island economies now often appear as unexpectedly weighty distortions in the overall gravitational field of the global economy.  Like some unusually small interstellar phenomenon that nonetheless glows brightly and exerts surprising force, islands can draw in and spit back out astonishingly large flows of money.  By then skimming off tiny percentages of those flows, their balance sheets can grow wildly.

But such high flow-volumes and pressures do not touch the island’s shores without risks.  The recent case of Iceland, whose glories in the financial markets were followed by the first and the worst of travails among nations in the aftermath of the financial collapses of late 2008, provides a crystalline case in point.

The Secret to an Island’s Success

Like their economies, island ecologies are often supercharged with a diversity that seems far in excess of what their size might cause one to predict.  Pygmy elefants, Darwin’s Galapagos finches, the bizarre and ancient organisms of the Socotra archipelago … islands breed uniqueness in nature, just as their human inhabitants prize the uniqueness of their cultures, dialects, and vantage points on the wider world.

All islands similar, however, in being excellent case studies in the concept of sustainability, and in the value of systems thinking.  They have clear boundaries, and clear physical limits.  What comes in must either fit into what already exists, or leave, or push something else out to make room. When the economy ruins the natural world, everybody can see it.  If the social organization is not working, economy and nature both suffer (think Easter Island). And human health and well-being is a fundamental asset, whether the island’s prosperity depends on tourists seeking peace and fun, or on the hunting prowess and ingenuity of a traditional people.

In systems terms, life on an island shortens the feedback loops between these elements, both for events limited to the island itself, and for events that “happen to” the island because of things happening elsewhere.  Chains of cause-and-effect run their course very quickly, and “side effects” become central.  It is no accident that the first peoples to cry out about the destruction of their homelands due to global warming are islanders in warm, expanding seas.  At the other extreme, it is also a sign of short (and therefore quick) feedback loops that some villages in Greenland — each village a kind of island culture all its own — have experienced “outbreaks” of suicide by young men who, very suddenly, cannot see a future for themselves that preserves their dignity as men.

While emerging problems are more quickly apparent on islands, solutions are likewise similarly speedy to implement – at least theoretically – for the same reasons that sustainability is a bit easier to understand, and to analyze, in an island context. Things can happen faster on islands. Cultures may be recalcitrant and reluctant to change; but once they adopt change, they can change overnight.  I have been amazed, for example, at the rapidity with which the island of Gotland, where I spend my summers, has emerged as a center for sustainable energy, sustainability education, ecologically produced food, and more.

The globalization patterns noted earlier are, of course, a complicating factor.  They can make the embrace of sustainability easier by making vast amounts of information available, quickly.  But they also blur the island’s otherwise stark boundaries, create new dependencies that may be difficult to wean away from, and open the island to various kinds of “invasions,” from exotic species to exotic financial instruments (not to mention people with exotic hair fashions or body piercings).

Researching considering the special case of island economies – which are so often have “unfavorable locations” (from a motorway perspective) and “limited accessibility – have come up with three avenues for the economic sustainability of islands:  tourism, virtual work (e.g. operating call centers or on-line casinos), and education.  But of course, other places compete in these domains, places that are not remote islands, nor evenly remotely island-like.  So one word sums up how islands can create competitive advantage, using a process very like their unique natural evolutionary patterns:  differentiation.  (Koufondontis et al.)

Economically successful islands learn to harness their innate capacity for uniqueness.  By being small-but-different, by making things differently and uniquely, islands can change their image.  And creating an attractive image is the name of the game for islands in a global economy.  (Gaki et al.)

And what is attractiveness a function of?

Desire.

Islands have to make people want to be there … even when those people are somewhere far away.

Many Kinds of Islands

Most of us have relationships to at least one island – if not as a home, then as a vacation destination, or even just as the dream of such a destination.  It is not hard for people to relate to islands.  The very concept of an island sits somewhere deep in the human psyche, perhaps because we ourselves are island-like:  not “No man is an island,” but “Everyone is an island.”

So while one thinks first and foremost of an island, an ö, in physical terms, there are of course many kinds of islands.  There are pockets of urban density that, in their economics and culture and even in aspects of their environment, are more like islands than not.  There are cultural and linguistic islands, of course, which may be concentrated in one place, or may be scattered across the planet, connected by bonds of kinship, whether the language is a special dialect from tiny place, or the jargony language of a uniquely small profession (say, the “island” of lute players).

We can extend the concept of island almost indefinitely – and indeed, it is useful to do so.  Planet Earth is, after all, an island.  It floats alone in the sea of space, experiencing “limited accessibility” to the rest of the universe (or even to its nearest neighbors), even if its location appears quite “favorable” relative to the nearest star, our sun.  And of course, it requires only a reminder – and not a lengthly explanation – that nearly all the properties of islands described above could be easily applied to our planet as a whole.  We would not be suffering now from the problems of global warming, species extinction, and resource scarcity were we living considerably closer to other planets with ample resources and some extra room.  We are forced to confront our global-island problems because of the island-like limits we face, and our island-like capacity for differentiation, also known as evolution.

Looking out still further our entire galaxy could be seen as an island, so vast are the distances between these clusters of stars.  And more than one school child and astrophysicist has contemplated the possibility that the entire universe is, itself, a vast “island” floating in a sea of … something else.

Zooming back down to Earth, and to the image of one specific island (you choose which one) struggling to find both prosperity and sustainability in the midst of a complex, globalized, environmentally stressed world, it is clear that “island thinking” is not just a fun little metaphor; it is absolutely critical to our success as a species on on this planet.

What Islands Can Teach Us About Sustainability

The case of islands is so special and important that it has merited the creation of an entire international bureaucracy focused on their special development needs.  Studies of the “Small Island Development States,” or SIDS in UN-parlance, are unsurprisingly revealing, but surprising nonetheless.

A comparison of their environmental situation, for example, makes it plain that islands are much more vulnerable to decaying natural conditions – an illustration of the “short feedback” principle noted earlier.  Over 70% of SIDS analyzed for a UN-sponsored study were categorized as Highly Vulnerable or Extremely Vulnerable in environmental terms.  This compares to only 41% for all countries.  When it comes to water availability, the health of their biodiversity, and their susceptibility to the problems of climate change, islands get hit first.

Island economies are increasingly vulnerable as well.  Energy price increases hit them first and hardest.  Tourism can drop off drastically at a terrorist-moment’s notice.  And of course the feedback loops being short means that environmental wear and tear can produce economic weakening, as the island of Okinawa has experienced during the last decade.  Researchers studying that situation report that while numbers of visitors have increased, the apparent cost is a decline in attractiveness – the quintessential asset of the island, the engine of desire.  The visitors are still coming to Okinawa … but the growth has slowed, and the expenditures per tourist have declined as well.  Okinawa, it seems, just isn’t as beautiful and desireable a destination as it used to be.  (Source: Kazaku)

What happens when, instead, an island invests in increasing its attractiveness, meaning here that mysterious mixture of beauty, allure, fun, and “difference”? Studies of Sri Lanka suggest that islands can thrive when they build a beneficial feedback loop out of their attractiveness and their economics:  the development of “Eco-Tourism” has saved that islands elefant population, which in turn have increased its attrativeness as an eco-tourism destination.  (ArabianBusiness.com, 9 June 2008)

Islands teach us that treating nature as the precious asset that it is can generate greater long-term economic sustainability.

This, of course, is an important lesson for thinking about Island Earth as well.

Conclusion:  Islands of Ethics

Islands may at first sight seem an extreme example for all kinds of dynamics, and therefore not so relevant to the vast majority of people who live on the larger, continent-sized islands we call the “mainland.”  But as we have seen, this is such a wrong way to think as to be dangerous.  Islands are the early warning systems of our planet.  And they can be our “sustainability laboratories.”

What’s required of islands, in order to achieve long-term economic prosperity in ecologically healthy ways, is the same thing that is required of all of us:  a willingness to understand limits, a willingness to live within them, a willingness to innovate and change so that the systems we create, as humans, fit comfortably together with the natural systems in which we are embedded.

That willingness is fundamentally an ethical choice.  The word “ethics” does not mean that it is entirely optional:  the survival of our species requires that certain behaviors be cultivated (cooperation, invention) while others are discouraged (murder, freeloading).  The “musts” of sustainability live tightly together, as do people in an island community, with an emerging vision of ourselves, as people who seek not just economic development, or even sustainable development, but good development.  Good people make good islands.

Good people are also at work all over the world, trying to make a better world.  Islands can help show us the way.  If islands cannot be made sustainable, nothing can.  If islands can, then everything can.

And islands can.

ö

References Cited

Koufodontis, Iason, Vassilis A. Angelis, Eleni Gaki, and Maria Mavri, “Enhancing the Tourism Image and Creating Identity and Branding for Island Regions through Virtual Organizations,” University of the Aegean, Quantitative Methods Laboratory, 2008 (submitted to AICIS conference)

“Eco-Tourism saves Sri Lanka’s elefants,” ArabianBusiness.com, 9 June 2008

Gaki, Eleni, Vassilis Angelis, Maria Mavri, Iason Koufodontis, “Island Regions: Measuring their Prospects of Development,” University of the Aegean Quantitative Methods Laboratory, 2008 (submitted to the AICIS conference)

IRIN News, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Papua New Guinea:  The World’s First Climate Change Refugees,” 8 June 2008, available at this web address: <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=78630>

Kazaku, Hiroshi, “Sustainable Island Tourism: The Case of Okinawa,” University of the Ryukyus, undated English translation of Japanese academic paper, available on the web from this address: <http://www.yashinomi.to/pacific/pdf/kakazu_02.pdf>

Marks, Kathy, “Paradise Lost:  Climate change forces South Sea islanders to seek sanctuary abroad,” The Independent (UK), 6 June 2008

South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission, “Building Resilience in SIDS: The Environmental Vulnerability Index,” 2005, available from this website: <http://www.vulnerabilityindex.net/>

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