Word: reefs
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...move by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority last year to expand no-fishing "green" zones from 4% to 33% of the reef won plaudits from scientists and conservationists, but few friends in the fishing industry. Despite a consultation process that attracted 30,000 submissions, fishermen say they were ignored by the authority - which is why they're keenly awaiting a review of its powers, promised by the federal Coalition government in return for Fishing Party preferences in last October's election. Last week Environment Minister Ian Campbell's office would only repeat that the review would be announced...
Paddling a dugout canoe in the Solomon Sea, two near-naked islanders working for the Allies were carrying a message behind enemy lines to the town of Gizo. Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana had been ordered not to stop, but when they spotted a barge wrecked on a reef, they couldn't resist the temptation to scavenge for clothing. Their disobedient detour might fairly be said to have changed the course of history. According to his family, the ailing Gasa has grown weary of retelling his story. But sitting on the floor of a shaded verandah at his neat home...
...Today, one can hover over Stevenson's single bed in his upstairs study (Fanny disliked the aquamarine walls almost as much as his coughing), gaze into his man-sized safe, and pace the verandas where the writer would listen to the distant surf crashing on the reef. But Samoa's climate hasn't been kind to his writing. A set of first editions in the museum has almost perished. "The cockroaches got to the books," says museum manager Lufilufi Rasmussen. "The covers aren't legible now, so we have to get them restored...
...charming island. It's also extremely small, not much more than a quarter-mile across. From the sandy street that runs through the center of town, you can see both the brilliant turquoise of the interior lagoon and, on the other side, waves breaking on the shallow reef that faces the Indian Ocean. There are dozens of islands like Naalaafushi in the Maldives--too many, say government officials, to provide with essential services, let alone shore up against the sea. In time, they hope, the residents of these islands (some of which have populations of not much more than...
Other ambitious projects are in the works as well, says Hamdun Hameed, Minister of Planning and National Development, pulling out a map of the islands, each one a dot on a ring of reef--an atoll--that traces out the shape of the mountain on which it formed. Here, Hameed notes, is the island of Kandholhudoo, whose residents experienced chronic flooding whenever high tides coincided with heavy monsoon rains. The last straw was the tsunami, which rendered all but eight of some 500 homes uninhabitable. Now, at the request of village leaders, the government is drawing up plans to move...