PARADISE REQUIRES SACRIFICE
I
t is one of the world’s most remote islands—a green Garden of Eden in the great blue vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Tikopia lies at the eastern edge of the Solomon Islands and it is perhaps the most remote of them all. It takes three days of travel by boat to get to the provincial capital, Lata, and five days to reach the country’s capital, Honiara. The nearest island, Anuta, is 80 miles away and is even smaller than Tikopia, which measures only 1.9 square miles. That means: If you live on Tikopia, you have to live off of Tikopia—finding almost everything you need on the island itself. Tikopia’s inhabitants have been doing precisely that—and doing it well—since 900 BC when the island was first settled. Sometime before AD 1200, the people of Tikopia developed a sustainable orchard system that permitted them to maintain a relatively small and stable population, which encouraged collective decisionmaking. Around 1600, for example, they decided to remove all of the pigs from the island because they were eating and destroying crops that were useful to the human population, and the inhabitants turned to sustainable fishing instead. But paradise comes at a price…
Over the centuries, the population of Tikopia mostly hovered around 1,200. Given its size of just 1.9 square miles, that makes its population density almost seven times that of the United States. And given the island’s reliance on its own production of food, population control has been a very big issue. But the people of Tikopia have come up with effective, albeit stringent, solutions to maintain an optimal number of occupants and thereby prevent famine. Family planning is extremely strict: Only the eldest son of each family is allowed to father children, unwanted pregnancies are prevented or aborted, and parents become celibate as soon as the eldest son is old enough to marry. And if worse came to worst— for example, after a bad harvest or a typhoon—the residents knew what they must do. Fathers would go out to sea in canoes with their sons, never to return; unmarried people ended their lives with a rope made of palm fronds; newborns were deposited under a leaf in the snow-white powdery sand—as if they’d never existed. The harsh measures were the methods used to relieve population pressure until the introduction of Christianity in 1858 gradually altered the ancient traditions. Today more and more young people are leaving Tikopia voluntarily to seek their fortune on other islands. In October 2018 the island’s King Ti Namo made the first royal visit to the Western world to share his concern about the greatest danger his paradise faces today: climate change.