Consuming Ocean Island Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba [Paperback]

Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer. As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human impact on the environment.

Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner (University of California Press, 2013). ISBN 9780520275829.

By bringing gritty ethnographic detail, an omnivorous approach to sources, and surprising narrative innovations to bear on such topics, Teaiwas book moves the social history of Earths biogeochemical cycles into fertile new terrain.Consuming Ocean Island is an ethnographic and analytic tour-de-force. Writing an intimate cultural history of the island of Banaba, Kiribati, conjoined with a history of phosphate and its extraction, Katerina Teaiwa places us amid unsettling stories of mining and its violent transformationsphosphate turned to fertilizer, a bountiful Pacific homeland left desolate, a people and their islands very earth dispersed around the globe. In part a moving family story, this brilliant ethnography offers new ways to track globalization, dispersal, and creative recovery.Recommended.Teaiwa displays artfully the powerful potential of interdisciplinarity as an approach toward gaining a richer and deeper understanding of Pacific pasts andlCZ