We were four days out of Gibraltor, sailing to the Carribean when Porto Santo, an Island in the Madeira archipelago appeared on the horizon. Even from a distance the island appeared starkly devoid of vegetation and scarred by great deep gouges in the earth. A few hours later, our ketch, "Lady Luck" rounded the last point of land into a bay where two of Prince Henry the Navigator’s captains found refuge from a storm in 1418. Portugal established a colony on Porto Santo a year later. One ship carried a female rabbit whose offspring thrived on the island. The island has a dry climate but the first settlers, with terracing and irrigation of the fertile volcanic soil grew grapes, cereal crops and vegetables. These crops, along with fish, made the early settlers self sufficient for food. The Portugese established a sugar cane industry, which made a few men wealthy. Christopher Columbus lived on the island for a while and married the Governor’s daughter. His former home is now a tourist attraction. Intense agricultur and rabbits decimated the natural vegetation and caused loss of topsoil. The great gouges in the earth, we saw from afar were deep ravines, evidence of terrible erosion. The only potentially flat, arable land was used for an airport.  Destruction of this once lovely island took place in less than five hundred years, scarcely the blink of an eye in the history of the world. The local people can no longer grow sufficent food and the surrounding seas are nearly devoid of fish. The islanders are dependent on imported food and goods.

Two days of fast sailing brought us to the Canary Islands, known to the ancient Arabs and Phoenicians as the "Fortunate Isles" where happy spirits dwelt in peaceful gardens. Commencing in 1402, the Spanish cut down trees, terraced hills, irrigated and cultivated the hilly islands. During the Spanish voyages of exploration, Gran Canaria grew enough food to provision ships, but now exploitation has reduced several of the islands to deserts. The main city, Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, is a crowded commercial center with jammed streets which sprawls into the surrounding hills. There are national parks where natural vegetation is preserved, but bulldozers continue to carve away hills overlooking the sea for tourist developments.  There has been outward migration for centuries, but the island is drastically overpopulated with a thirty percent rate of unemployment. The Canaries are no longer "fortunate".

When Columbus anchored off Hispianola in 1492, the natives grew fruit, cotton and vegetables on rich soil. The island was covered with trees and native plants. The Spanish decimated the native population, searched for gold and introduced cattle. In 1697, France took possesion of Haiti and imported African slaves to produce sugar. Haiti became a wealthy French colony, but by 1804 at the time of the slave rebellion the island was almost entirely deforested and the erosion of topsoil was well underway. Today, except for a narrow coastal plain, the island is barren and rocky. Villagers plant corn on steep hillsides but tropical rains carry away what is left of the topsoil, which along with sewage destroys surrounding ocean reefs. The use of charcoal for cooking further depletes natural vegetation. The introduction of basic medical care reduced infant mortality so, that despite outward migration of one sixth of the Haitian people, the population has soared.  Foreign aid temporarily supports countries such as Haiti, but without effective birth control, encourages further overpopulation.

On another voyage, I visited Easter Island, a tiny speck in the southern Pacific, thousands of miles from the nearest land. When humans first reached Easter Island, fertile soil, fish and huge rookeries of nesting birds supplied food for the Polynesians who had left their own overpopulated islands searching for a better life. They had the energy to carve, move and erect huge stone monuments facing the sea. As resources diminished, there were no longer trees for the construction of canoes, birds sought new nesting places and the eroded land no longer supplied enough food. Warfare, hunger and disease decimated the population. Today, Easter Island is barren, rocky and bereft of fertile soil. The great mysterious stone monuments still stand, reminders of a once robust people. Their descendants now depend on tourism to survive.

People living on these once lush islands depend on imported food and goods. In the past, there was always another island or or continent to absorb the surplus population. At the current rate of growth,how many more years will the world support an increasing population? Humans require not only food, water and shelter but also satisfying work and a clean environment.  There are no new islands to conquer.             

when

T ype your submission here. Or you can copy and paste from a word processing program or text editor.