There are no words or pictures that can adequately capture what mining has wrought in Nauru. To get out and stand there is to be scared, to feel the overwhelming fear of being alone in a coliseum. The small atoll has essentially been tonsured, sheared of all greenery and dug down to the rock. The thinning vegetation on the periphery — the dead palms, the pandanus trees with black crowns, the grassless golf course — is the good news. The entire interior of the island is a lunar landscape of excavated channels. With all the topsoil and phosphate gone, what’s left are sinuous stone canals marked by sun-bleached limestone towers and coral outcroppings… Without the intervention of some environmental white knight with Noachian ambitions, it’s not just the island’s economy that’s in danger. It’s the island itself… A rise in sea level of only a few feet would engulf the meager inhabitable ring of the island, leaving the coral boneyard of Topside all alone at sea, once again available to a million years of birds.
- Jack Hitt, The New York Times: The Billion Dollar Shack