Canary in a phosphate mine

 

Editor's note: CNN sent iReporter Johnny Colt on a trip to the remote island nation of Nauru in November 2010 to get the story about the last country on Earth to post an iReport. It's quite a story, as you'll see. Since then, the tiny island's story has gotten even bigger: Nauru was recently elected to take over as chair of the United Nations' Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 43 countries working together to slow climate change across the globe and keep the ocean from swallowing them up.

(CNN) -- Endless hours of travel have left me more than a little raw.
The 12-hour layover in Australia's Brisbane International Airport is a whiz-bang. I find myself shopping for crystal unicorns and staring at duty-free liquor. Two entire shifts of employees come and go while I down 14 shots of espresso.
It's 14 hours from California to Australia, then one more flight to Nauru.
Where? Exactly. It's a tiny island nation about 1,800 miles from eastern Australia. It's in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, beyond Papua New Guinea, beyond the Solomon Islands. If the world were flat, this might be the last stop before you fell off.
Nauru first hit my radar as the last country that CNN iReport waited on to complete its Global Challenge, a race to net an iReport story from every nation on the planet.
Soon, Nauru will also hold the chair of the U.N. Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 43 countries working together to slow climate change.
It's a new role for Nauru and its 9,000-some inhabitants. They'll be the voice of places like Tuvalu and Kiribati, tiny islands that might well be erased by rising oceans; tiny islands trying to make the case to the world at large to cut emissions and extend the Kyoto Protocol, lest the ocean swallow them up.
A U.N. climate change panel in 2007 estimated the sea level would rise more than half a meter by 2100, but recent reports have indicated that ice sheets may be melting even more quickly, threatening places like Nauru, where most of the population lives in a low-lying band around the perimeter of the island.
In a lot of ways, Nauru is something like a canary in a coal mine: It's a tiny place with more than its share of troubles, most of them the kind that might have been prevented.
Nauru is battling a failed economy, widespread poor health and a natural environment ruined from the inside. They're the kinds of things that aren't altogether different from what's facing many of the rest of us, but they're magnified in a place that's only a tenth the size of Washington, D.C.
If the Pacific took Nauru, it'd wash away one of the strangest and most troubled places on Earth. In my three days there, I met a cast of characters who would introduce me to the place.