Aubade
Sinking Feeling
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
¶ Marcus Stephen, the president of Nauru, a very small island in the South Pacific with an anything-but-idyllic recent past, contemplates the similiar futures that larger, better-known polities may be in for as a result of the same man-made processes that are sweeping Nauru’s ocean tides higher and ever higher. He will address the United Nations Security Council today, and urge them to make it impossible to say, as he does in the Times, “Yet the international community has not begun to prepare for the strain they will put on humanitarian organizations or their implications for political stability around the world.”