Nothing works in the Seychelles on the weekend so we rent a small car for the day, and drive around the island. Mahe and the rest of the central group are granite. About a hundred million years ago, these islands were fused, together with Madagascar and the island of Ceylon, between what are now Africa, India and Antarctica in the super-continent of Gondowanaland. They have been drifting apart ever since.
There were no people here until the French settled in the 1780s. The Brits nabbed the islands after the Napoleonic wars. They used them as a watering station and naval base and, from the 1830s, brought slaves liberated from illegal traders to work the plantations. The British allowed the mainly French planters to remain.
Within a few decades of European arrival, almost all the terrestrial habitats of the islands were trashed beyond recognition. Thick mangrove forests were completely cleared on the inner group. Virtually all the hardwood on the upper slopes was felled (causing terrible landslides in which many people died).
Every island in the Seychelles had evolved its own unique species of giant tortoise – enormous characters that had been peacefully chomping leaves since this land was joined to Africa. They were sold to passing ships because the animals made good eating. They could survive for months without food and water. Storage was a simple matter of turning them on their backs. In a few years all the species on every island except one (on the distant outlying island of Aldabra) was wiped out as sure as the Dodo and many other unique life forms.
Something very similar, says Tom, is happening today with the coral reefs. The Seychelles Government, with visions of building a new Singapore in the western Indian Ocean, have dredged the main reefs to create artificial islands off shore at Mahe for a new high tech economy. This greatly reduces the base from which corals can recover, in so far as they will, from the bleaching event that killed up to 90% of corals across large areas of the Indian Ocean in 1998.
Our first stop across the island is to visit David Rowat of the Seychelles Marine Conservation society. Rowat is a stocky sandy haired Brit who funds some conservation work with diving eco-tourism, mainly on outlying islands like Aldabra, and in the Chagos archipelago some 4 days sailing to the east.
It’s about five years since Tom and Wolf have seen Rowat. Tom describes the extensive filming and records he made on the Mahe reefs in 1997 and 98 in order to record of what was being lost. He tried to convince the authorities that his and Wolf’s organization, the Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA), be allowed to transplant specimens of some the most vulnerable coral species to a biorock structure on the nearby island of St Anne’s. This would enhance the likelihood that relict populations be maintained for future restoration work. But the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) refused to fund the operation.
The reason for the refusal, thinks Tom, was high politics behind the scenes. At the time, he says, the rich industrial nations wouldn’t fund the GEF unless developing countries excused them from liability for impacts of climate change. David raises a bushy and skeptical eyebrow. He says funding has now been made available under GEF for marine projects concerned with climate mitigation and adaptation. But he concedes that none of it has actually been used to fund anything useful, relevant or meaningful.
Next stop is a former Youth Camp on the NW side of the island near to a small national marine park at Baie Ternay. Tom and Wolf have spent the previous few days determining whether the bay would be suitable for a small biorock structure. They decided that the water is too shallow for too great a distance out into the bay to make it feasible.
We’ve come back today to pick up a couple of sprouted coconuts donated by the Marine Park Authority (MPA). Wolf hopes to plant these on the superstructure at Saya (coconuts can grow in salt water). We also pick up a large piece of driftwood which could be useful in construction.
The MPA, together with the Seychelles Ministry of Environment and the Centre for Marine Research and Technology, are also allowing Tom and Wolf to build (with GCRA’s own scant funds) a small biorock geodisic dome off the island of St Anne’s. This is something that could keep us busy for the next few days – if the hugely overdue shipments of scientific and diving equipment come through on Monday.
The Youth Camp is a sprawling military-style barracks set in a stereotypical tropical paradise. For many years, Russian, Cuban and Chinese delegations came to instill revolutionary ardour in the locals. Now the place is slowly falling apart. Hartmut and I find a huge pile of books dumped in the middle of a large hall.
Almost everything from Progress Publishing (the Soviet Union’s major publisher in world languages) and the presses of the Chinese propaganda ministry is splayed, squashed and sprawled in a heap. I pick out a copy of an account of Napolean’s invasion of Russia in 1812, written by a French officer who survived the retreat. On the way out through an improvised mechanics workshop, I find a copy of Engels’ Dialetics of Nature being used as a wedge to keep open parts of a partially disassembled outboard motor.
The Seychelles gained independence from Britain in 1976. Having abandoned the flirtation with communist internationalism once the subsidies ceased to flow at the beginning of the ‘90s, the government now talks about building the next Singapore. But the culture here is not noted for a work ethic. There is no University. And through all changes so far, a handful of guys with light coloured skins have kept a stranglehold on the economy and the lives of around 85,000 citizens who mostly have darker skins.
In the afternoon, we visit the Banyan – a massive new colonial-style hotel which is part of a top-end chain catering to the super rich in SE Asia, the Maldives and elsewhere. Wolf knows the manager’s boss in Bangkok. But the manager, Mr Forest is not in.
In the midst of an almighty tropical downpour Wolf he tries to explain to a young Australian deputy named Dani that GCRA is receiving some support from Banyan for an extremely successful reef restoration project in the Maldives, and that he wants to investigate the possibilities here too. Dani, whining Ozzie voice in a prim buttoned down outfit, shifts uneasily. She is only a moment away from calling security to throw out what clearly look like bedraggled crazy vagrants.
Back at the Vake-lele, Wolf and I play five or six games of chess and sink a lot of beer. He talks about Luther’s ambiguous relationship to the great peasant’s revolt and the heroes of the German revolution of 1848, who fled persecution by militarized aristocracies in order to set up ideal communities in, of all places, Texas. “Zey ver ze intellectuals, thinkers, artists, poets”. One of their lasting legacies, it seems, is an excellent brewery somewhere in the hill country of that state.
For Wolf, Saya is to be a place where marine scientists, divers and other skilled people come together voluntarily to research and develop coral restoration and protection methods, and to learn how better to fabricate cheap but massively strong materials that could help local communities protect themselves from some of the worst effects of climate change.
At present, the dream looks as remote as the place. Wolf hands me the part of the South Indian Ocean Pilot (9th edition 1990), which describes the Saya de Malha area. The ridge is in international waters way outside the Seychelles Exclusive Economic Zone. It is almost literally true that nobody ever goes because of the danger from shoals. Shipping lanes come nowhere near.
Saya was surveyed in the nineteenth century when almost the entire Indian Ocean was a British “territory”. In 1816, a depth of 7 just meters (22 feet) was reported in 1816 at 10 degrees and 50 minutes South, 61 degrees and 50 min East. In South East quarter of the bank, reported HM Surveying Ship Fawn (1045 tons) “there are coral patches on which a vessel might touch”.
A west-going equatorial current 1 to 1.25 knots is reported to prevail, but in early part of the year there are east-going currents of more than 1.5kn at times. “Godammit bullshit” says Wolf – a gravel voice like one of the Kaiser’s General Staff. “When ve vere zere in 1997 I could not dive und zo I kept watch just below ze surface while ze others worked on ze bottom. Holding onto ze guide rope I vas horizontal in ze water like a goddam wind sock because ze current was zo ztrong”. The explanation is probably that water is coming up from deeps around the bank and squeezed at accelerated speed over its top.
The potential of tidal energy at the site is one of the most exciting aspects for GCRA. This year’s project will use solar energy from photovoltaic cells to generate the low-density current need to begin mineral accretion and enhance coral growth. But the tidal resource could take things to a whole different order of magnitude.
Caspar Henderson
© GrainOfSand Ltd 2002 | To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower,
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