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Coral reefs are the ocean's richest ecosystem in terms of biodiversity and productivity. They are restricted to tropical waters where conditions of salinity, temperature and sedimentation are suitable. Where they grow, their main benthic organisms deposit substantial limestone skeletons, such that they effectively make their own habitat which sustains their dynamic nature and supports the wide range of species which inhabit them. Reefs grow to the low tide level, thus providing a breakwater, but the richest parts lie 5–20 metres below the surface where light is still sufficient but where sediment and turbulence are not severe. Reefs may occur as narrow fringes bordering a continental coast, to huge offshore barriers of corals, to series of atolls that support entire nations; the biogenic nature of corals is enormously important to mankind.

This chapter provides an introduction to connection games in general. It also recounts how Sperner's Lemma, a result about labeling a triangulation of a simplex, can be used to prove that someone must win at Hex—the best-known connection game—as well as The Game of Y®, (or simply, Y) another well-known connection game. Moreover, the chapter proves a generalization of Sperner's Lemma and uses it to show that there is always a winner in the many variations of Atoll and Begird, two connection games which can be played on a variety of boards and include Hex and Y, respectively, as special cases. These “must-win” results have significant strategic implications—if one prevents the opponent from making the desired connection, one would be able to make this connection by necessity.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, an archipelago of low-lying coral atolls in eastern Micronesia, is one of four sovereign nations that may be rendered uninhabitable by climate change in the present century. It is not merely sea level rise which is expected to undermine life in these islands, but the synergy of multiple climatic threats (Barnett and Adger 2003). Rising oceans and increasingly frequent typhoons will exacerbate flooding at the same time that the islands’ natural protection—coral reefs—will die from warming waters and ocean acidification. Fresh water resources will be threatened by both droughts and salt contamination from flooding. Although the reaction of the coral atoll environment to climate change is uncertain, it is likely that the islands will no longer be able to support human habitation within fifty or a hundred years (Barnett and Adger 2003: 326)—quite possibly within the lifetimes of many Marshall Islanders living today. In the public imagination, climate change in vulnerable, remote locations is the intrusion of contamination into a formerly pristine environment, of danger into a once secure sanctuary, of change into a once static microcosm (see Lynas 2004: 81, 124). Archaeologists, of course, know better than this: every place has a history of environmental upheavals, and the Marshall Islands is no exception. Researchers agree that coral atolls are among the most precarious and marginal environments that humans have managed to inhabit (Weisler 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 27), existing only ‘on the margins of sustainability’ (Weisler 2001). The islands in fact only recently formed: while the reefs are tens of millions of years old, the islets that sit on them emerged from the sea only recently, probably around 2000 BP (Weisler et al. 2000: 194; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2), just before the first people arrived (Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2). The new home that these early seafarers found was not so much an ancient safe haven as a fragile geological experiment—land whose very existence was tenuous long before humans were altering the global climate.

New volcanic islands may be colonized from neighboring islands rather than from distant continents. The source islands may subsequently erode and subside, and eventually form atolls or submerged seamounts. Island taxa persist more or less in situ as dynamic metapopulations on individually ephemeral islands. These metapopulations may evolve by vicariance during rifting and basin formation, as in continental groups. In the Pacific, phases of Cretaceous volcanism associated with the South Pacific superswell have produced large igneous plateaus. Some of these include fossil wood in sedimentary strata intercalated with the volcanics. This chapter examines clades that are widely distributed in the central Pacific and endemic there, and relates these to the complex geological history.

This chapter traces the history of the discovery of the wreck that turned out to be the remains of the navy gunboat USS Saginaw, a wooden side-wheel steamer that was lost at Kure Atoll on October 29, 1870. The survey of the physical artifacts and the history associated with the ten-year service of the USS Saginaw together open a window onto one of the unique maritime narratives of the Pacific Ocean. The importance of finding such artifacts underwater goes beyond the initial excitement of discovery. The survey of shipwreck sites like the Saginaw's, with the application of a little historical and archaeological imagination, is actually a form of time travel.

In May 1970, Look magazine ran an International Paper Company advertisement, “The Story of the Disposable Environment,” which envisioned a time when “the entire environment in which [we] live” would be discarded. “Colorful and sturdy” nursery furniture “will cost so little, you’ll throw it away when [your child] outgrows it,” the ad enthused, adding for the socially conscious, “experimental lowbudget housing developments of this kind are already being tested.” International Paper never addressed where the disposable housing, furniture, and hospital gowns, or the toxic chemicals used for processing raw materials and manufacturing products— or the fossil fuel emissions—would end up. More than 30 years later, we live with the consequences of that vision, which has transmuted the real environment that we depend on into a nightmarish one, dominated by colossal and increasingly hazardous wastes. For nearly all of human history and prehistory, people dropped their wastes where they lived, expecting the discards would largely disappear. When wastes were relatively minor and all natural materials, many of them did disappear through “natural attenuation”—the diluting or neutralizing effects of natural processes. But even after tens of thousands of years, many items in ancient garbage remain recognizable, and poking through prehistoric dumps can reveal significant details about long-gone people and their ways of life. History shows that soils and waters have limited capacities for processing even natural wastes. Garrett Hardin underscored these lessons in his 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” From Roman urbs urbii (cities) to nineteenth-century industrial complexes, the refuse dumped in and around larger population centers issued foul odors and helped spread diseases. Public health concerns eventually forced towns and cities to provide sewers, “sanitary” dumps, water treatment, and more recently, sewage treatment. Nowadays, however, our sewers and dumps receive a sizable proportion of synthetic chemicals with unknown properties as well as millions of tons of toxic wastes, hazardous to humans and other living things.

This chapter explores the diversity of coral reefs and atolls and the factors governing their patterns of distribution. It highlights the important reasons for studying and mapping coral reefs, and describes the major factors that threaten the coral reef ecosystem. Reef ecosystems are now facing overexploitation brought about by sophisticated technology that supports intense fishing and collecting of corals and mollusks. Another threat to coral reefs is coral bleaching, or the loss of photosynthesizing symbionts due to progressive global warming.

Storm surges will be the working force of sea-level rise. As the sea rises, surges extend further inland and to higher elevations. These powerful forces transport debris that crashes into everything else. Atolls are particularly vulnerable, not only because of sea-level rise, but also because sea-level rise is pushing up the groundwater table and reducing its volume. Also pollution of the shrinking freshwater layer by human activities is a major problem. Arctic villages are threatened because of permafrost melting causing shorelines to be more vulnerable to erosion. Barrier islands make up 10 to 12% of the world's shorelines and because of their ability to migrate with the sea-level rise are a major problem for development of any kind.

The climate refugee problem will dwarf the current political refugee problem facing western Europe. Bangladesh with millions of people on the delta will provide the greatest number of refugees that will flee to India or Myanmar. India is building the Great Wall of India in anticipation of this future flow of humanity. Currently, most people leaving the delta are fleeing to Dhaka or to other major cities near deltas. On a local scale all over the world, beachfront dwellers will be moving back, often into already crowded cities.

This chapter emphasizes the “embodied temporality” of species by looking through the lives of albatrosses. Albatrosses are pelagic, nomadic birds that comfortably cross huge expanses of water each day. Despite their adaptation as “wanderers,” they remain utterly tied to the land, as they need to lay eggs and raise their young. Midway Atoll, located roughly halfway between the United States and Japan, is a breeding place for both Black-footed and Laysan albatrosses. In recent decades, one of the most visible anthropogenic effects on many small Pacific islands like Midway has been the presence of plastic items. As they head skyward and seaward in search of food for growing chicks, albatrosses invariably collect plastic items that they mistake for food. These plastic items cause malnourishment, dehydration, starvation, and other health problems when ingested by the young.

International settings for military-to-wildlife conversions often bring cultural considerations more actively into view than their counterparts in the United States. Along broad expanses of militarized landscapes such as the Iron Curtain borderlands of central Europe or the Demilitarized Zone of the Korean Peninsula, the political and historical contexts of these sites are maintained along with the explicit or de facto nature reserves that have emerged along these areas. These international settings provide important examples and lessons in how militarized landscapes are treated, managed, and understood over time.

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.

Interservice rivalry between the United States Army and Navy over the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests was an example of a larger rivalry over roles, missions, and budgets that was endemic to U.S. defense policy immediately after World War II.The tests became embroiled in this larger conflict because of the perception that they could be employed by either service to argue its case for the lion’s share of resources in the postwar world.Therefore, each service went to great lengths to try to assure the press and public that the tests were not “rigged.”What is most interesting, however, about the atomic bomb tests of Operation Crossroads was the fact that the test results were so inconclusive.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to analyze a community in which women operate within a vernacular Catholicism and imagery of Mary that support opportunities for women to influence opinion and events, and emphasize the value of women as mothers. Despite attempts that missionaries may have made to define appropriate female roles, including what it means to be a mother, local notions of motherhood filter and shape the impact of the Catholic message. On Pollap, women experience and perceive motherhood not so much as a biological process, with a focus on childbearing and then remaining at home to care for them, but rather as a cultural process that encompasses the production and distribution of key resources. Local belief also posits power in speech and its ability to define and shape appropriate behavior—a belief that women exploit to their advantage in various opportunities made available through the local church structure for them to speak to others beyond their local network of kin. Thus, women play a role in defining appropriate behavior, articulating ideas, and influencing activities in the community. The book examines how Pollapese women define their own Catholicism, how they live it in practice, and how these definitions and practices affect their autonomy and their ability to shape their lives, support the well-being of their kin, and influence community events.

This chapter considers claims about culture loss at hearings of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands, including the impact of nuclear weapons testing on the people of Rongelap Atoll. The concept of cultural property is used to identify the referents of discourse about culture loss, including local knowledge, subsistence production, and connections to place. For example, the absence of breadfruit and pandanus trees on the atolls where the people from Rongelap were relocated prevented them from teaching subsequent generations how to build their distinctive sailing canoes, contributing to the decline of long-distance voyaging and the loss of knowledge about navigation by the stars and wave patterns. These discussions have been taken up by international debates about noneconomic loss and damage resulting from climate change, a matter of considerable significance for the people living in the Marshall Islands, given their double exposure to both nuclear radiation and rising sea levels.

This chapter documents and reflects on some of the cultural significance of discourse markers in kapsen Mwoshulók (Mortlockese) storytelling (tittilap) at Pakin Atoll of the Federated States of Micronesia. It shows how fieldwork on tittilap cannot merely be accomplished by using a voice recorder alone. Discourse analysis provides the tools for understanding how speakers of a language both access bodies of knowledge (such as abstract grammatical patterns and generalizations based on previous conversations) and create and interpret new instances of that knowledge, and “discourse” in this case refers to the intricate nuances of the tittilap. A grammatical technique of particular interest in the tittilap are its use of discourse markers, which are the words used to move talk along, whose meaning heavily depends on the context around them.

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes, concepts, and methodology. Gossip can be seriously understood only when embedded in a larger context of social relations and symbolic dynamics, as it is only a vehicle through which agents get things done or undone. This book explores this embedding. Its overarching theme is the emergence of political practice in the everyday and, in particular, the complexities of politics in small-scale societies where hierarchy and egalitarianism coexist in sometimes uneasy fashion and where the boundary between public and private is at best wafer thin. The book is based on fieldwork conducted in Nukulaelae Atoll, part of Tuvalu, known in colonial times as the Ellice Islands and independent since 1978. Today it is one of the world’s smallest microstates with around 11,636 inhabitants. The discussion rests on two analytic traditions: the microscopic analysis of interactional data, traditionally grounded in linguistic anthropology; and the macroscopic analysis of large-scale social processes, an approach associated with the sociocultural subfield of anthropology.

The chapter presents the author’s account of his experiences on Nukulaelae Atoll, including some of the initial impressions he formed when he first arrived in the early 1980s. These impressions would later turn out to be as important to an understanding of political and social process on the atoll as the more nuanced insights he would eventually derive from the experience of years of cumulative fieldwork. He describes life on Nukulaelae, focusing in particular on the intimacy of contexts in which gossip takes place. He discusses islanders’ self-representations to themselves and the outside world in the course of history and in modern times, self-representations that foreground problematically an ideology of harmony and consensus.