Micronesia Quotes

Micronesia. “It was near Guam,” Steve Blauner says. “A guy that sick to

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.

Proto-Oceanic is the theoretical mother tongue of the Oceanic peoples and the language from which all the Oceanic languages are thought to descend. It is a huge family, encompassing more than 450 languages, including those spoken on all the islands of Polynesia, most of the smaller islands of Melanesia, and all the islands of Micronesia except two. It is itself a branch of the larger Austronesian language family, a truly stupendous grouping of more than a thousand languages, which includes, in addition to all the Oceanic languages, those of the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, Timor, the Moluccas, and Madagascar. The very oldest Austronesian languages—and thus, in a sense, their geographic root—are a group of languages known as Formosan, a few of which are still spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island), an old Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan. Thus, at least from a linguistic point of view, the path back from Polynesia to the ultimate homeland proceeds through the Melanesian and Southeast Asian archipelagoes to an island off the coast of China, where the trail goes cold around 5000 or 6000 B.C.

As our ancestral populations spread across the globe, they encountered the same environments and selective forces that shaped the phenotypes of other populations endemic to these regions. The imprint of these regional selective forces is still evidenced by genetically determined differences in the characteristics of indigenous populations of humans, who often exhibit the same ecogeographic patterns described earlier for other native wildlife. In comparison to populations endemic to tropical regions of the continents, human populations native to lands in the higher latitudes tend to be larger and have relatively shorter limbs—following Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules, respectively. Our indigenous populations also exhibit latitudinal variation in skin color reminiscent of Gloger’s rule: darker skin (greater melanism) in the tropics, protecting native humans from the potentially destructive effects of intense solar radiation; lighter skin in high latitude populations of our species promoting absorption of the limited sunlight to levels sufficient to stimulate the production and storage of vital nutrients in the skin. On islands, the body size of primates (including insular populations of hominids) generally follows the island rule—exhibiting a graded trend toward more pronounced dwarfism in the larger species. The hominid of Flores Island (the “hobbit”) was only one-third to one-half the mass of its ancestor (most likely, Homo erectus). The island peoples of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the Philippines also tend to be relatively small in stature, again consistent with the island rule.

A friend who lives in Micronesia told me that the inhabitants of one of the islands of Polynesia were given refrigerators by a group of visiting, well-intentioned missionaries. They had noticed that the locals, who were subsistence fishermen, had to fish every day because any excess catch spoiled in the tropical heat. The missionaries thought it would be a blessing if excess fish could be refrigerated, allowing the fishermen to put their attention to other wealth-generating activities. On a return visit a year later, the missionaries noticed that there was no trace of the refrigerators in the community. Their inquiries informed them that the elders had ordered all the equipment dumped in the ocean. The reason? Refrigerating excess fish meant that surplus was no longer given to the elderly or infirm, as had been their custom for a thousand years. It was unacceptable to the tribe that "progress" resulted in more wealth for some and hunger for others.

You don't have to see it to love it. Just love it for it is good and that is love.

As far as elites’ incomes are concerned, Japan morphed from a society whose income distribution was as unequal as that of the United States on the eve of the stock market crash of 1929—a high-water mark of the “1 percent”—to one akin to Denmark today, the most equal developed country in the world today in terms of top income shares. And elites’ wealth had been largely wiped out: only Lenin, Mao, or Pol Pot could have done a more thorough job (see chapter 7). But Japan had not achieved the ideal of “getting to Denmark,” nor had it been taken over by raving communists. What it had done instead was enter—or, depending on one’s definition, start—World War II, first by trying to establish control over China and then by setting up a colonial empire that reached from Burma in the west to the atolls of Micronesia in the east and from the Aleutians north of the Arctic Circle to the Solomon Islands south of the equator. At the height of its power, it laid claim to roughly as many souls as the British Empire did at the time—close to half a billion people, or a fifth of the world population.

Incredible maybe, but also, as it happens, true. Banks had stumbled upon one of the most remarkable facts about the peopling of the Pacific, which is that all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Philippines, as well as almost all the languages of Indonesia and the Solomon Islands and some of the languages of Malaysia, New Guinea, Madagascar, and Taiwan, belong to a single language family known as Austronesian. Today there are believed to be more than a thousand languages in the Austronesian family, with more than three hundred million speakers worldwide, making it one of the largest language families on the planet.

Battles in Micronesia were so pitched and bloody that Gilbertese warriors would outfit themselves head to foot with doormat-thick armor fashioned from coconut hulls. On top of the significant humiliation of making one's entrance onto the battlefield looking like an enormous macramé planter was the fact that the armor was so bulky that it required the assistance of several squires to help maneuver you.