The Disappearing Islands

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.

Kai Ryssdal: Tell me who you are and why you’re famous.

Erik Hanson: I’m Erik Hanson. I work here as a radar engineer, and I was here when the flood broke down the doors, and just happened to be recording a video, and it went viral as soon as it got posted.

Kai Ryssdal: On January 20th of this year, a series of unexpected, intense waves, 20 to 30 feet tall, came crashing onto an army base in the Marshall Islands. Erik was with friends at The Outrigger. Think of it as a community center of sorts, but with beer and pizza. You see a couple of people as this video starts standing outside the front doors of The Outrigger, and then all of a sudden comes the wave.

Erik Hanson: That’s where you hear me saying hold the door.

Kai Ryssdal: Literally trying to hold back the ocean.

Erik Hanson: Well, you know, it’s just piece of it. I didn’t think it was gonna be too big, but the second one totally took out the door. My buddy Buck, he was holding somebody, picking somebody off the ground that actually grabbed the person that went through the door, so he got most of the damage from just sliding 30 feet underwater with this wave. But it was terrifying.

Kai Ryssdal: Six months after those waves devastated the island of Roi Namur, we’re here because what happened in January isn’t just about a viral video. It’s about all the ways that climate change is threatening a place that’s vital to our national security. Kwajalein has been critical to the United States for decades now, first in World War II, then in the Cold War and now for missile testing. The radars and sensors out here collect data on how American ballistic missiles are performing about which more in a minute. But if you’re not sure where to look for Roi Namur or Kwajalein on a map, well, yeah, I get that. Roi and Kwaj are two of, give or take, 100 tiny islands in the Kwajalein Atoll. Atoll, by the way, a ring-shaped coral reef surrounding a lagoon. They’re about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, smack dab in the Pacific Ocean. This is a tough place to get to. First of all, takes a couple of flights to get here, and there are only a handful of scheduled flights in a week. And even after you get off the plane on Kwaj, you have to hang out in a tin-roofed, fenced-in concrete waiting room, which some affectionately call The Cage. You gotta wait there to pass a security check, since the whole island is a military base. Needless to say, this place is remote, and that made it all the more scary when the waves hit.

Drew Morgan: So this is one of the bachelor quarters that was hit hardest. The waves went through all of these windows.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s Colonel Drew Morgan. He’s the commander of the U.S. Army Garrison Kwajalein Atoll, its official name. And Colonel Morgan is kind of like a landlord. He likes to call himself the life support system for the critical mission here, those radars. Bottom line, he’s in charge.

Drew Morgan: So we’ll go back in the golf carts. We’ll continue into what was —

Kai Ryssdal: He’s driving us around on a golf cart. That’s the main mode of transportation here, and he’s showing us where some of the worst damage was. The chapel was destroyed, a radome was wiped out, and half the island was underwater.

Drew Morgan: One of our workers, he was asleep at the time, and the waves just came through. Filled his room with water, and he was awakened by his room flooded.

Kai Ryssdal: So did you get a phone call in the middle of the night? Is that what happened?

Drew Morgan: It happened in the evening. Intramural sports are a big deal here, and there was inner tube water polo game going on I happened to be at that night when a member of the leadership came and told me that he got a phone call that that there’s been flooding on Roi and the initial reports were a little spotty.

Kai Ryssdal: They had to take a boat over to Roi, it’s 50 miles at night in choppy water, to evacuate people who needed to get out and then survey the damage.

Stan Jazwinski: The water catchment was just full of mud and dead fish, and so we were up there for weeks. We didn’t have water on Roi for about three days.

Kai Ryssdal: Stan Jazwinski has worked on Kwajalein for the last 34 years, and part of his job is to make sure there’s drinkable water on the island, which is pretty freaking hard considering you’re surrounded by nothing but ocean out here. Six months after the storm, Stan and his team are still dealing with the aftermath.

Stan Jazwinski: The aquifer on Roi, all of our wells, 100% of them, are still contaminated, and they probably will be for another year and a half. It’s going to take two and a half years of rain to repair that that one night of storm.

Kai Ryssdal: The damage from waves like the one that hit Roi is only going to intensify with climate change and rising seas. Flooding and saltwater intrusion and storms are going to make everything here more precarious, which led me to this question for Colonel Morgan.

How old are you? 48 ish, right? It’s possible that in your lifetime, this place won’t be habitable anymore.

Drew Morgan: No, I don’t believe, I’m much more optimistic than that. I know that we have the capability to invest in this and make it resilient. This is too important to give up.

Kai Ryssdal: I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome to How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace. We’re looking this season at how the American military, the institution that shaped me, is going to shape our climate future. The climate threat to the Kwajalein Atoll comes in two forms, the risks to the irreplaceable radar and sensory infrastructure and the risks to the Marshallese people, who called these islands home for thousands of years, and who, since they are the labor force, are the reason the Army Garrison functions at all. There’s an unusual mix of national security imperatives and the lingering human aftereffects of decades of American policy at work here.

Kai Ryssdal: Do you think the United States owes the Marshallese people something?

Abon Arelong: Yeah, they owe us big.

Kai Ryssdal: This is episode four, The Disappearing Islands. Kwajalein is about as stunning as it gets, to the point where sometimes you forget you’re on an army base. There are palm trees everywhere, a serene lagoon on one side of the island, crashing ocean waves on the other. Everybody gets around on a bike. Look Ma, no hands. Unless, of course, you’re in a hurry, and then you can rent a golf cart. There are multiple swimming pools, a dining hall. It never really gets below 80 degrees, even at night. About 1500 people live here permanently. And one of the most striking things about walking around these islands is that you can’t go more than a couple of yards without bumping into history.

Drew Morgan: What I wanted to show you over here was the Japanese ruins here.

Kai Ryssdal: It’s me, Colonel Morgan and Lieutenant Colonel Casey Rumfelt. He’s the director of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense test site. And we’re touring Kwajalein, the main island, and Roi, which is about 50 miles north.

Drew Morgan: That is a Japanese bunker from World War II.

Kai Ryssdal: Where there are World War II Japanese bunkers almost every time you turn around. There are these weathered concrete structures that look a lot like ruins.

Drew Morgan: Here’s another Japanese bunker here to our left.

Kai Ryssdal: This year is the 80th anniversary of Operation Flintlock, the invasion and capture of Kwajalein Atoll by American soldiers and Marines.

Casey Rumfelt: I don’t know. Sites like this, you really get to relive the history of it, and you feel that —

Kai Ryssdal: Totally, it’s actually visceral. I’m totally geeking out on the history. God, that is wild. It’s like right here, man, history is like right here.

It’s kind of amazing to see these reinforced concrete bunkers stand the test of time and climate change.

Drew Morgan: But an interesting contrast here in front of us, we have this Japanese bunker from 80 years ago standing tall, and then immediately here to our right is a radome from the modern Reagan test site here on Kwajalein Atoll, and it was, it was all affected by the events in January.

Kai Ryssdal: That radome was wiped out by the wave that we started this episode with. Another striking feature of these islands is all the rust. It’s on dilapidated buildings and airplane hangars. As one person put it to me, everything rusts here, even the plastic. It’s worth a mention again that these islands are surrounded by nothing but ocean for thousands of miles, unprotected from the salty sea spray. The other thing you see a lot of? Radars. Both Kwajalein and Roi are dotted with them.

Casey Rumfelt: So if you look over here on the left, that massive system is Altair, and that is our deep space radar that we have on Roi Namur. Altair is America’s radar.

Kai Ryssdal: And that sea spray I was just talking about is a big problem for America’s radar.

Casey Rumfelt: So corrosion is definitely one of our primary factors. So as we lead up here to Altair, you’ll see this system. It’s a million pounds of steel, maybe a little bit more. We have an intellectual argument on how much it actually weighs, but —

Kai Ryssdal: We who? Don’t you know? Doesn’t the army know?

Casey Rumfelt: Well, they do. Some scientist somewhere knows, but it depends on what you’re including in it. So this is where the intellectual argument goes. Is it, is it the base structure as well, or is it just the dish, or is it? And so we go back and forth.

Kai Ryssdal: You’re in charge. What do you say?

Casey Rumfelt: Yeah, it’s a million. We’ll just go with a million. It’s a very nice round number, but it’s similar to the Golden Gate Bridge, right? So we start corrosion control on one end, and then we go all the way to the next and then we gotta start right back over with very little time in between.

Kai Ryssdal: A million pounds of steel. This thing is so big we need to back way up so we don’t have to crane our necks to look up at it.

Casey Rumfelt: Just imagine a satellite dish on steroids.

Kai Ryssdal: In Alaska, up in Utqiagvik, the radars on the coast there are to detect missiles and unidentified aircraft entering our airspace, kind of like a first line of defense. Out here, the mission’s pretty different. Missile testing. When the United States wants to test a ballistic missile, they’ll launch one, usually from California, out toward the Kwajalein Atoll, where the radars and sensors collect data on whether they’re working the way we expect them to.

Casey Rumfelt: We’re the honest broker. That’s what testing is inside of the Department of Defense, is we’re the honest broker. So when they send something out, we send the raw data back to that program office and we say, this is how your system performed.

Kai Ryssdal: Vital and necessary to national security, yes?

Casey Rumfelt: 100%. 1,000%.

Kai Ryssdal: What happens if you can’t do it anymore because there’s a bigger wave than took out The Outrigger?

Casey Rumfelt: To my knowledge, right now, we are the only long-range land impact site that the United States has.

Kai Ryssdal: And why does that matter?

Casey Rumfelt: Well, it matters, because every one of our adversaries are doing the same type of testing, and so in order to stay relevant, we have to be able to test that technology. We got to test that, because it’s that important. You can’t have a mistake when you’re testing something that’s flying 5,000 miles at a really fast speed over populated areas.

Kai Ryssdal: And every now and then, the army collects data for private companies too.

Casey Rumfelt: When SpaceX, when they have something fly overhead, they sometimes ask us for data. This system will pick that up, make sure that it’s on the right trajectory that it’s supposed to be on. We give all those parameters right back to SpaceX, and we say, this is your data. I don’t even know if it’s on the right track that you wanted it to be on, but this is your data. And then they look at it and go, actually it is, or it isn’t, or whatever. So we and we charge them full price for that, by the way.

Kai Ryssdal: As well you should. Elon Musk can afford it out of his own pocketbook.

—

There’s an unavoidable expiration date for the Marshall Islands. Sea levels are rising three to four times faster in the Pacific than in the rest of the world, and one study led by the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests that islands in the Kwajalein Atoll could be uninhabitable by the middle of this century.

Stan Jazwinski: About five or six years ago, we got 10 inches of rain in one day, and there was a lake from the ball fields. You could have gotten into a dinghy at the ball fields, and you could have gone all the way to Coral Sands Beach, which is like a mile and a half, without having to get out of your dinghy. So that’s how, how Kwajalein is prone to flooding.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s Stan Jazwinski again, the guy in charge of Kwaj’s water supply. He says 65% of the island’s drinking water comes from capturing rainfall. One storage tank can hold a million gallons of water, but it goes pretty quick.

Stan Jazwinski: The residents of Kwajalein consume about 140,000 gallons each day. So that tank, if our plant broke, that tank would last us probably seven, eight days. So if something were to happen here, then we would have some major problems.

Kai Ryssdal: As sea levels rise, storm driven flooding is going to worsen, even something as basic as drinking water is going to be at risk. Some of the island’s drinking water is stored naturally underground, and the risk with more intense flooding is that saltwater seeps in and makes that drinkable water undrinkable. Alternatives like desalination plants or even shipping it in, obviously take an enormous amount of fuel and money. Kwaj is in a delicate balance out here. But if it is, as it seems inevitable, that Kwajalein will someday become uninhabitable and the military base will disappear, then why stay? Here’s Colonel Morgan and Colonel Rumfelt one more time.

Drew Morgan: Its strategic position in the Pacific is unmatched. I mean, the reasons that we that the U.S. knew that this was part of the pathway to victory in the Pacific and World War II, that’s still true today. And the sensors that we have now are critical to modernizing our ballistic missile inventory. This is the only place we can do that.

Kai Ryssdal: Other than the incredibly important strategic location, this is just a dumb place to put metal stuff.

Drew Morgan: It’s the, the worst place to put it, except for all others. We’re in this, in this little sweet spot where, like, if you wanted to put a radar that sees what we can see, this is where you would want to put it. This was our choice.

Kai Ryssdal: I want to dig in a little bit to the challenge that’s going to face this place in the next 40 to 100 years. Sea level rise, climate change, freshwater contamination, all of those things are going to make operating this more challenging. Discuss.

Casey Rumfelt: Well, I think that you can’t assume that this is what we’re going to be operating in 100 years.

Kai Ryssdal: It’s already been here for 60 years Colonel, come on.

Casey Rumfelt: Well, I know that, but, but that even more of a reason supports my my point that this system, as you see it today, will will not be what we’re operating in 100 years. The other thing that I think, and I fully believe in this, is that whatever challenges we face, if the United States sets their mind to it, they’re going to figure out a way to solve that problem. And so does that mean that we have to actually raise elevations? Does that mean we build buildings taller? What does that actually mean? I have no idea, but I do know that we can, we can we can solve it.

Drew Morgan: There are engineering fixes that will can make us successful.

Casey Rumfelt: Absolutely, that’s right. So you might not know this, we actually have a team at MIT that actually are on the island, and they help us strategize, you know, 20, 30, 40 years out with both technology and then environmental things. And then, you know, if you were to ask somebody in the ’50s, are we going to be able to go to the moon, everybody would’ve been like, no way. And then all of a sudden, guess what we did in the ’60s? So I think that, I think that we can solve this. I don’t think this is outside of our reach.

Drew Morgan: If we can land on the moon, we can solve the problem here.

Kai Ryssdal: Let me back you guys up for a minute on the whole America can do anything it sets its mind to, right? I wonder if you’re whistling past the graveyard.

Casey Rumfelt: You’re gonna have to help me with that analogy. What do you mean?

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, putting your fingers in your ears and going, la, la, la, la, la, la. We can fix it.

Casey Rumfelt: Okay. I would say that what we’re doing here is is not trying to fix fix anything, right? So I’m not trying to fix anything. What I’m trying to do is the task that the United States has tasked us with, and that is space surveillance and testing, and we’re going to be able to do that for a long time. Now I do think that we have to look ahead and start addressing some of the challenges that you’re talking about, we will find those solutions.

Kai Ryssdal: We’ve heard that a lot from military officers and leaders so far in this series, that they’re just going to keep their heads down and get the mission done. Which, fine, but climate change doesn’t care about missile testing or U.S. national security strategy. Climate change doesn’t care if you’re Chinese, if you’re Russian or if you’re American, and it doesn’t care if you’re Marshallese either. Because, look, this is a story and a series about U.S. national security, but the Marshallese people have called these islands home for centuries, and now they’re caught in between our national security strategy and a warming planet, and unlike the Americans who work on Kwaj, the locals have nowhere else to go.

Abon Arelong: The ocean will make us leave. Our best friend is going to be our worst enemy.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s after the break.

BREAK

Kai Ryssdal: 7:40 in the morning, that diesel rumble you might hear in the background is the ferry we’re on. Just pulling into Ebeye from Kwajalein.

—

The next morning, after touring Altair and talking with Colonel Morgan and Colonel Rumfelt, we head to Ebeye, the next island up the Kwajalein Atoll. A 20-minute ferry ride. 1,000 Marshallese, give or take, go back and forth from Ebeye to work on Kwaj every day, mostly because the Americans pay about three times more than what they can get working on Ebeye. It’s only 20 minutes, but it’s a very long way. Unlike Kwaj, there’s hardly any vegetation. Most of the island is housing. About 12,000 people live here on an island just over a mile long and less than a quarter mile wide. It’s among the most densely populated islands on the planet.

Abon Arelong: Good morning.

 Voice 1: Hayley, Caitlin, okay.

Abon Arelong: Abon.

Hayley Hersman: Abon, so nice to meet you.

Kai Ryssdal: Kai. Good to see you.

Abon Arelong: Morning, Kai.

Kai Ryssdal: Abon Arelong, our fixer, is 35. Born and raised here. He left for school, Honolulu, but came back.

Abon Arelong: I had a passion to come back to give back to the people of Ebeye.

Kai Ryssdal: We hired him for the day to help us get around. Abon works with the city on disaster response. He met us as we got off the ferry, and he got us to our first stop, which was a meeting with city officials.

This is a big green building and a conference room. Conference rooms in Ebeye are the same as conference rooms in all of the United States. It’s everywhere. A conference room is a conference room is a conference room.

We’re sitting down with Harden Lelet.

Harden Lelet: I’m the city manager.

Kai Ryssdal: City manager.

Harden Lelet: Yeah, so it’s basically —

Kai Ryssdal: You’re in charge, right? I mean, I won’t tell the mayor, but you’re in charge. Yeah, okay.

Harden was also born and raised here on Ebeye.

What was it like growing up here?

Harden Lelet: Those were happy days, just from my experience. I mean, yeah, those were happy days. We had less people back then, yeah, we did not have to worry about so many things going on.

Kai Ryssdal: I wonder if you can see the change from when you were a kid to today. Can you think of any changes you could tell us about?

Harden Lelet: Oh, yes, the islands are sinking. Yeah, that’s absolutely true, yeah. But we see the changes. I see, you know, the physical changes that happens to the coral islands, the reefs, islands that we’ve been living in for the last, you know, 30, 40 years. Some of the islands within these atolls, they’re gone. They’re not here. I mean, when you go there, you just see only beaches or sand. There’s no trees, just just beaches.

Kai Ryssdal: Do you, and look, I’m asking you to speak for the whole community, but do you feel forgotten out here?

Harden Lelet: Yes, yeah, we, I mean, I’m, I’m a descendant of one of the families that migrated from the mid-atoll corridor. It was in the ’50s, ’60s, when they started, the U.S. government, you know, asking if they could lease these areas.

Kai Ryssdal: After the second World War, between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, the most famous or infamous of which were in the Bikini Atoll, a bit more than 200 miles from Ebeye. Marshallese who lived in or even near that mid-atoll corridor that Harden was talking about were forcibly relocated, many of them to the Kwajalein Atoll, and in the decades since, they’ve been dealing with cancer and birth defects and other chronic health problems, and areas of the ocean which had kept the islands fed for millennia are now contaminated.

—

Do you feel like the United States owes you something? Not you, but the Marshallese?

Harden Lelet: Yes, yeah. I mean in terms of, you know, you know, give us something value. Give us something very valuable that you know might replace the islands that were here once before.

Kai Ryssdal: The United States has a Compact of Free Association with the Marshall Islands. It was renewed this year. It covers our lease of Kwajalein, Roi Namur, and nine other islands in return for $2.3 billion over 20 years. And Marshallese citizens can live and work in the United States without a visa. The government of the Marshall Islands has laid out its own plan to make their country livable through the middle of the next century, the National Adaptation Plan, it’s called. It estimates the cost to protect the islands and atolls at $35 billion.

—

So when you’re an old man, when you’re 85 and you have grandchildren running around, maybe great grandchildren, what’s this place going to be like for them?

Harden Lelet: To be honest? Right now, what I’m thinking, I want to build this place, you know. I want to build this place, you know, for, you know, the generations to come. And I want to, you know, be able to provide a better living, you know, living conditions. We’re trying to, you know, make sure this place, you know, survive in the next, next 20, 30 years. Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal: Are you hopeful?

Harden Lelet: I am very hopeful. Yes.

Kai Ryssdal: Why? Because it doesn’t look good.

Harden Lelet: I think if there’s a will, there’s a way. We’ve always had that, you know, can do attitude. With the culture, you know, with, you know, the close-knit community that we have, you know, the educations that we’re getting today, the resources that we know, the friends that we do have, you know, that can provide us the, you know, the resources, the support. Then yes.

Kai Ryssdal: While it was developing its National Adaptation Plan, the government did a survey. The overwhelming majority of Marshallese said they didn’t want to leave.

So tell us where we’re going. What are we doing?

Abon Arelong: We’re going for a stroll around Ebeye.

Kai Ryssdal: That’s Abon again, our fixer on Ebeye. And we loaded up in his car after our meeting with Harden to get a tour of the island.

Abon Arelong: Welcome to the slum of the Pacific.

Kai Ryssdal: Why do you think they call it that?

Abon Arelong: I don’t know. Maybe because it looks not that great.

Kai Ryssdal: We pass densely packed streets, people carrying buckets of water back to their homes. There are kids running around on the side of the road playing with stray dogs.

Abon Arelong: This whole area right here. This is where when king tide came, this was all washed away.

Kai Ryssdal: There’s all sorts of debris near the road, rusted out school bus and abandoned machinery.

Abon Arelong: Every day debris is washed up.

Kai Ryssdal: It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the vibe is like in the car. It’s heavy.

Kai Ryssdal: Granted I’ve known you about six and a half minutes, but you seem, I can’t decide if it’s angry or depressed, or just, I don’t know.

Abon Arelong: I think I’m good, yeah, I don’t think I’m angry or depressed. It just, it just saddens me, and it’s scary to see the sea level rising. It’s, it’s, it’s not looking bright. Like the ocean is coming quicker than we thought.

Kai Ryssdal: So I was talking to some of the folks who run that base and work the radars and are responsible for things, and I said, you know, what are you going to do? Climate change is going to make this place uninhabitable in 40, 50, 60 years. And they said, we’re going to fix it. We’ll adapt and take care of it. Sounds like you think the United States is kidding itself.

Abon Arelong: Yeah, and sir, it’s not 40 to 50 to 60 years. It’s within the 15 to 20 years, like there’s the ocean right there.

Kai Ryssdal: We didn’t plan to turn the microphone on our fixer. We paid Abon for his time, and paying sources isn’t something that Marketplace does, but what he had to say once we started talking is critical to this story, because he sits at the intersection of a gut wrenching and legitimately existential reality. Help Ebeye and its people fight to stay here, or help his community get out before it’s too late.

Caitlin Esch: You said people have been living here for thousands of years. What is it like to be the last generation?

Abon Arelong: It’s, it sucks.

Kai Ryssdal: That was producer Caitlin Esch from the back seat. Abon is, as you can hear, not as positive as the older generation, like city manager Harden Lelet.

Abon Arelong: Like you was hearing from them earlier, they’re like, Oh, they still see themselves here in the next 20 years. I don’t.

Kai Ryssdal: That older generation like Harden want to build Ebeye up, literally, higher sea walls, elevated roads and buildings. Abon says money would be better used to come up with an exit strategy.

Abon Arelong: We’re already on a mass migration. There’s there’s more Marshallese in the States than in the Marshall Islands.

Kai Ryssdal: Seems to me you’re a next generation leader, right? So this is gonna be your job.

Abon Arelong: It’s gonna be my job to remove our people.

Kai Ryssdal: They don’t want to go though. Everything you read in all the surveys say people don’t want to go.

Abon Arelong: If the water is up to your hip, you have to go. You’re not gonna stay with the water up to your hip in your living room. I mean, we’re the front runners for this and yup, it’s not looking good for us.

Kai Ryssdal: Do you guys, I mean, when you’re out with you know, your friends or whatever, do you talk about climate change? Or do you really rather prefer not to?

Abon Arelong: Yeah, we do. We sit down and chill and talk about where are we gonna go in 15 years? I know people don’t want to leave, but we’re just gonna have to face reality. We have to leave.

Kai Ryssdal: Do you think the United States owes the Marshallese people something?

Abon Arelong: They owe us more than our lives, like the nuclear testing 67 bombs, a thousand times greater than Hiroshima, and not getting our justice? Yeah, they owe us, they owe us big.

Kai Ryssdal: There is radioactive debris from those nuclear tests that’s stored in the Marshall Islands. And while the Department of Energy says the risks of a leak are low, the thing we know about climate change is that risks change and threats multiply pretty quickly. When we were on Kwaj, me, Caitlin, Hayley, and our engineer, Drew, I’d go for these long bike rides at night after we were done reporting. It takes about eight miles to take a lap of the whole island. It’s nice and flat, but it’s dark out there at night. I mean, there are some streetlights, but you are in the middle of the damn Pacific Ocean. And peddling slowly through the humidity in the dark, I’d get to thinking about the challenge. The challenges really that are playing out out there. The Pentagon is trying to keep its strategic assets, the base and the radars, operational as the oceans rise, and Morgan and Rumfelt were probably right. They’ll figure out a way. Marshallese people, though? Abon said it, if you remember, they don’t want to leave, he told us, but they’ve got to face reality. So there are two climate realities out there, one where things, although they’re going to be different, are going to work out, and another, where they’re probably not.

If you’ve been liking this season of How We Survive, do us a favor, leave a rating or a review. It really helps the show. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Hayley Hershman produced this episode. The How We Survive team includes Sophia Paliza-Carre and Katie Reuther. Caitlin Esch is the Supervising Senior Producer. Nancy Farghalli is our editor. Sound design and original scoring by Chris Julin. Mixing by Brian Allison. Our field engineer out in the Marshall Islands was Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is the Vice President and General Manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly.