Moyenne Island: the world's smallest national park

For 13 thousand dollars, Englishman Brandon Grimshaw bought a tiny uninhabited island in the Seychelles and moved there forever.

When the Englishman Brandon Grimshaw was under forty, he quit his job as a newspaper editor and started a new life.
By this time, no human had set foot on the island for 50 years.

As befits a real Robinson, Brandon found himself a companion from among the natives.

His Friday name was René Lafortin. Together with Rene, Brandon began to equip his new home.

While René came to the island only occasionally, Brandon lived on it for decades, never leaving.

By oneself.
For 39 years, Grimshaw and Lafortin planted 16 thousand trees with their own hands and built almost 5 kilometers of paths.

In 2007, Rene Lafortin died, and Brandon was left all alone on the island.
He was 81 years old.

He attracted 2,000 new bird species to the island and introduced more than a hundred giant tortoises, which in the rest of the world (including the Seychelles) were already on the verge of extinction.

Thanks to Grimshaw's efforts, the once deserted island now hosts two-thirds of the Seychelles' fauna.

An abandoned piece of land has turned into a real paradise.
A few years ago, the prince of Saudi Arabia offered Brandon Grimshaw $50 million for the island, but Robinson refused.

“I don’t want the island to become a favorite vacation spot for the rich. Better let it be a national park that everyone can enjoy.”
And he achieved that in 2008 the island was indeed declared a national park.
Credit Drew Snider

 

From BBC by Antony Ham

Once a neglected wasteland, this paradisiacal eco-reserve stands as a reminder of what the Seychelles were like before tourism arrived.

Most people who buy their very own tropical island do so in the pursuit of luxury.
Brendon Grimshaw was different.
So, too, was Moyenne, the island in the Seychelles that Grimshaw bought.

 Localization in the Saint Anne Marine National Park in Seychelles with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO map)

 

Grimshaw first came to the Seychelles – an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, only eight of which are permanently inhabited – on holiday in 1962.
At the time, he was an editor working for some of the biggest newspapers in East Africa.
It was an exciting time in Africa and, as part of his job, he rubbed shoulders with Tanzania's charismatic new leader and future president, Julius Nyerere.

But Grimshaw was looking for something more than a holiday.

Tanzania had declared independence the year before; Kenya would follow a year later; and Grimshaw, an Englishman, understood that jobs such as his would soon pass to locals.
Knowing that he would soon be unemployed, Grimshaw searched for a new direction in life, one that took him closer to nature.
He dreamed about owning land in the Seychelles – ideally, he'd buy his own island.

Moyenne is a 0.099sq km dot off the coast of the Seychelles' largest island, Mahé

(Credit: image BROKER/Alamy)

 

On his first few weeks in the Seychelles, Grimshaw began to wonder whether he needed a change of plan: there weren't many islands on the market, and those that were had eye-watering price tags.
On the second-to-last day of his holiday, a young man approached him in the Seychelles' capital, Victoria, and asked Grimshaw if he wanted to buy an island.
Just like that.
They travelled together to Moyenne, a 0.099sq km dot 4.5km off the north coast of the Seychelles' largest island, Mahé.
Grimshaw fell in love immediately with its silence and its wild tangle of vegetation.
It was, he would later say, close enough to be accessible from the Seychelles' main island, and yet a world away.

"It was totally different. It was a special feeling," he told a documentary film crew in 2009.
"This is the place I'd been looking for."

At four minutes to midnight on the last day of his Seychelles holiday, Grimshaw signed an agreement to pay £8,000 for Moyenne.
The island was his.
But buying Moyenne would prove an easier task than taking care of it.

Save for a family of fisherfolk who lived on the island, Moyenne had been abandoned for decades.
With tourism starting to take off in the Seychelles, it seemed only a matter of time before someone cleared the land to build a five-star resort.

Moyenne was once so overgrown that falling coconuts never hit the ground

(Credit: PhotoStock-Israel/Alamy)

Moyenne is one of the smallest of the Seychelles' inner islands: it measures just 0.4km long and barely 0.3km wide, and its coastline runs for less than 2km.
Its highest point rises to an altitude of just 61m above the water's edge.
Moyenne possesses the same paradisical white sand and granite boulders that characterise so many Seychelles shorelines, but it's also home to a dense, unbroken wall of trees that cover the island, forming a low pyramid above the water's edge.
It's a riot of green against cobalt skies and a sapphire sea, like a tiny rainforest erupting from the ocean.

Despite Moyenne's diminutive size, restoring the island's natural beauty was a massive task.
A combination of neglect and heavy-handed human intervention had left Moyenne dishevelled and gasping for air.
Weeds choked the understorey, and the island was so overgrown that, it was said, falling coconuts never hit the ground.
In the tangle of weeds, birds were noticeably absent and rats foraged in the undergrowth.

By Grimshaw's side was a local named Rene Antoine Lafortune, the 19-year-old son of a local fisherman.
The two became inseparable, and together they set about transforming the island, clearing the scrub, planting trees and forging paths through the undergrowth.
It was painstaking, back-breaking work – and it became Grimshaw's life-long obsession.

Grimshaw's initial goal was to protect Moyenne from overdevelopment.
At first, this meant uncovering the island's raw beauty and building a humble island home where he could live out his days.
But his longer-term dream was to create a natural paradise that would outlive him and remain protected long after he was gone.

Grimshaw was a former newspaper editor-turned-conservationist

(Credit: Marion Kaplan/Alamy)

"His vision was to leave an unspoiled island for future generations of Seychellois and the world," said Suketu Patel, who first met Grimshaw in 1976 and became a lifelong friend.
"He wanted a mini-Seychelles.
He wanted to try and replicate what Seychelles and its islands were like before tourists came."

It wasn't all hard work, though.
While taming the overgrown north-western corner of Moyenne, Grimshaw found two graves.
Their tombstones read, "Unhappily Unknown".
Grimshaw became convinced that pirates from centuries past were buried here; one of the beaches on the island's north side is known as Pirate's Cove.
The graves belonged to a pair of lowly buccaneers, so the story went, who were killed by two famous pirate leaders so that the dead men's spirits would haunt the island and protect the treasure.

Whether Grimshaw really believed the legends is unknown.
"For him it was fun to get up in the morning, ask, 'What will I do today? Let's go look for treasure'," remembered Patel.
Today, there are two sites marked on maps of Moyenne with a skull-and-crossbones symbol, where Grimshaw and Lafortune tried their luck looking for, but never finding, the pirates' hidden treasure.

As tourism in the Seychelles grew in the 1980s and the archipelago became synonymous with a tropical island paradise, investors turned their covetous gaze towards Moyenne.
Grimshaw received offers of up to $50m to sell the island.
He resisted every overture.

Moyenne is like a tiny rainforest erupting from the ocean

(Credit: PhotoStock-Israel/Alamy)

As Grimshaw grew older, he became increasingly aware that he had limited time left to protect the island's future.
He had no children to whom he could pass on custodianship of the island, and when Lafortune passed away in 2007, Grimshaw decided to act.
With Patel and others, he set up a perpetual trust to protect the island and signed an 2009 agreement with the Seychelles' Ministry of Environment that included Moyenne as part of Ste Anne Marine Park, but granted it its own special status.
With that, Moyenne Island National Park, the world's smallest national park, was born.

It can be easy to imagine Grimshaw as an eccentric figure.
After all, he moved alone to the other side of the world, bought an island, believed in pirates and spent a lifetime restoring a seemingly inconsequential speck of land.
But many Seychellois remain grateful for what he bequeathed to his adopted nation.

 

"Personally, I don't think he was crazy," said Isabelle Ravinia from the Seychelles National Parks Authority.
"He gave the island back to the country, which was a noble thing to do. Normally people would try to sell off the island before they die so they can obtain money to do something else. Instead, he did something incredible."

Grimshaw died in 2012 and his grave sits alongside that of his father (who later came to live with Grimshaw) and the two unknown pirates.
At his request, Grimshaw's tombstone reads, "Moyenne taught him to open his eyes to the beauty around him and say thank you to God."

In his last will and testament, he expressed his final wishes: "Moyenne Island is to be maintained as a venue for prayer, peace, tranquillity, relaxation and knowledge for Seychellois and visitors from overseas of all nationalities, colours and creeds."

Thanks to Grimshaw and Lafortune's work, Moyenne is crisscrossed by nature trails today

(Credit: PhotoStock-Israel/Alamy)

The task of fulfilling Grimshaw's wishes now lies in the hands of the Moyenne Island Foundation, which is overseen by Patel.
Apart from a restaurant – the Jolly Roger – that serves local dishes like grilled fish and seafood curries in a red Creole sauce, a small museum dedicated to Grimshaw's life and two nurseries for giant tortoise hatchlings, Moyenne remains undeveloped.

How to visit Moyenne

Aside from hiring your own boat, the best way to explore Moyenne is on a half- or full-day tour with Creole Travel Services and Mason's Travel, which also take in the other islands of the Ste Anne Park.

The island has no jetty and arriving here carries a special kind of magic: nowhere else in the Seychelles can match Moyenne's sense of deserted-island discovery as you wade ashore, barefoot, through the shallows.
As you reach dry land and take your first steps along the gently climbing forest trail, the trees close in behind you and you enter another world.
Dappled sunlight filters down through the canopy to the forest floor, the temperature is cooler, and the island's 16,000 trees – mahogany, palm, mango, pawpaw – planted by Grimshaw and Lafortune surround you.
By one estimate, Moyenne has more plant species per sq m than any other national park in the world.

Every now and then, you may find your path blocked by one of Moyenne's nearly 50 free-range giant Aldabra tortoises.
They're in no hurry, and nor should you be as you watch them pass.
Back in the shallows and by the beaches at Pirate’s Cove, watch for hawksbill turtles that often come ashore to nest.

Fifty free-range giant Aldabra tortoises roam Moyenne

(Credit: Kit Day/Alamy)

Even during peak tourist season, there are rarely more than 50 visitors on the island at any one time, and never more than 300 over the course of a day.
Six islands make up the Ste Anne Marine Park, but Moyenne is the only one, aside from tiny Ile Cachee, with no hotel development or other forms of private land ownership.
And thanks to Grimshaw and his friends, Moyenne is likely to stay this way.

"There's something that grabs you when you go there," said Patel.
"If you think you have a big problem, when you're on the island you realise that it's not a problem after all.
Moyenne is what life should be like."

 

Links :

• The Mirror : 'Real-life Castaway' buys tropical island for £8,000 so he can live as a recluse
• GeoGarage blog : A grain of sand
  

These photographers chase New Zealand’s glowing waves

Alistair Bain observing bioluminescence while taking a long-exposure photograph at Te Arai Beach, Wellsford, New Zealand, in May 2020.

Credit...Alistair Bain

From NYTimes by Mike Ives

Capturing bioluminescence, a phenomenon in which glowing algae give crashing waves an electric blue glow, requires technical skill and a bit of luck.

On hot, moonless nights in New Zealand, they fan out across beaches in search of an elusive, shimmering quarry.

They aren’t hunters, but photographers chasing bioluminescence, a natural phenomenon in which glowing algae give crashing waves an ethereal, electric blue aura.

New Zealand is an especially good place to “chase bio,” as enthusiasts there say.

Even so, it’s notoriously hard to predict where and when bioluminescence will appear.

And photographing it in near-total darkness — at 3 a.m., as you stand knee-deep in the surf gripping a tripod — presents extra obstacles.

“It is very, very difficult to catch sight of, and sometimes it does come down to blind luck,” said one of those enthusiasts, Matthew Davison, 37, who lives in Auckland and sometimes stays out until sunrise shooting bioluminescence.
“But part of the appeal and part of the adventure is that, because it is so hard, that’s what makes it exciting,” he added. “When you find it, when you strike blue gold, it is just such a good feeling.”

Bioluminescence at Big Manly Beach in Auckland, New Zealand, in January 2021.

Credit...Matthew Davison

Sounding a ‘Burglar Alarm’

Bioluminescence is relatively rare on land but very common in the ocean.

About four in five of the animals that live 200 to 1,000 meters (650 to 3,300 feet) below the surface are bioluminescent, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The glow comes in different colors on land, but in oceans it usually appears as blue-green because that is what cuts through seawater the best.

Bioluminescent organisms — from fireflies to anglerfish — create light from energy released by chemical reactions inside their bodies.

Even though many scientists, including Aristotle and Darwin, have been fascinated by bioluminescence over the centuries, the behavioral motivations for it are still something of a mystery, said Kenneth H. Nealson, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California who studied the phenomenon for decades.

Scientists generally think that organisms light up in order to communicate with one another, lure or detect prey or warn or evade predators.

The most popular explanation for why algae glow in the oceans is the “burglar alarm” hypothesis, Professor Nealson said.

It holds that the organisms glow when big fish swim by in order to scare off smaller fish that eat algae.

Bioluminescence at Big Manly Beach in January 2022.

Credit...Grant Birley

Coastal waters turn blue during periods when algae, which live near the surface of oceans, multiply in especially nutrient-rich waters.

The specific flashes of blue-green light come in response to pressure changes that waves create as they crash.

The waves pose no threat to algae, Professor Nealson said, but algal blooms light up anyway because algae are programmed to respond to pressure changes that fish create when they swim by in the open ocean.
“That luminescence is probably of no help at all to those algae that are in the cusp of the wave and giving off the light,” Professor Nealson said. 

“But if they were back a little further offshore, it could be a very good behavioral mechanism” because it could help them scare off predators.

 

Seeing Blue

Photographers who hunt bioluminescence in New Zealand, many of whom have day jobs, say that summer is generally the best time to spot it.

(Summer runs from December to March in the Southern Hemisphere.)

Nights after rainstorms are best, they say, because water that runs off land into the ocean often includes nutrient-rich material that attracts algae.

Credit...Matthew Davison

Mr. Davison, a product developer for a technology company, has a method for finding bioluminescence. First he studies satellite imagery to identify algal blooms off the coast.

Then he combs through other indicators, such as wind direction and tidal patterns, to predict where waters may glow.

He’s an exception, though. Other photographers mainly rely on a mix of luck, intuition and the occasional tip from neighbors who spot sparks of blue during walks on the beach.

“If I’m perfectly honest, probably eight out of 10 times I capture it is either by chance or just a gut feeling that it might be around,” said Grant Birley, 48, who works in the orthopedics industry and often stops to photograph bioluminescence during his two-hour commute along the coastline of New Zealand’s North Island. 

“It’s not an educated guess at all.”

One source of intelligence is a private Facebook group that was created two years ago for people in the Auckland area to discuss sightings of bioluminescence.

It now has more than 7,000 members and welcomes about 2,000 new ones each summer, said Stacey Ferreira, one of the group’s administrators.

Ms. Ferreira said she created the group so that others could “tick the beautiful phenomenon off their bucket lists,” as she did in 2020. 

“It’s been great!” she wrote in an email.

“People from every background have joined — talented photography enthusiasts, bioluminescence researchers, scientists, families and everyone in between.”

Shots After Dark

For “bio chasers,” finding the glow is just the start of the process of capturing a memorable image.

After arriving at a beach, they typically set up tripods in the surf and spend hours shooting, sometimes in near-total darkness, as blue patches flicker intermittently across the shore.

Sometimes the flicker dies off after a few minutes, and they head home empty-handed.

 

Grant Birley and Alex, his son, at Mangawhai Heads Beach in New Zealand in May 2020.

Mr. Birley often stops to photograph bioluminescence during his two-hour commute along the coastline of New Zealand’s North Island.

Credit...Grant Birley

When “bio” is present, a key challenge is deciding how long to expose an image.

Mr. Birley said the timing could range from one second to nearly two minutes and that it could be hard to check on the fly — by looking at a tiny camera screen — to see whether the exposure times are correct.

Another challenge is that images of bioluminescence sometimes include details that weren’t visible when the shutter clicked.

That is because a camera sees far more than the naked eye, especially in long nighttime exposures.

“In the daytime you look and say, ‘There’s a tree and a sunset and a cliff and I’ll move over to the left,’” said Alistair Bain, 38, a high school teacher who lives near Mr. Birley on the suburban Whangaparaoa Peninsula, north of central Auckland. 

“You’ve got none of that at night.”

 

Mr. Bain observing the bioluminescence at Big Manly Beach in August 2017.

Credit... Alistair Bain

Chance Encounters

For all the challenges, photographers say that hunting bioluminescence is rewarding in part because the phenomenon is endlessly surprising.

One clear night, Mr. Bain drove about 40 miles to a beach where he hoped to photograph the Milky Way galaxy.

When he arrived, he saw not only a sky full of stars but a glowing shoreline

 “That was a special one to come across by accident,” he said.

Another time, Mr. Davison stepped out his car at a beach with low expectations.

It was raining, and he assumed that would be a problem because heavy rain typically spoils a bioluminescence show.

But in this case, the rainfall was gentle enough that it had activated glowing algae across the ocean’s surface for as far as he could see.

So he grabbed his camera and started to shoot.

“Unless you’re there, unless you capture it, no one would believe — could not even possibly imagine — what you’re witnessing,” Mr. Davison said. 

“That’s why I love taking photos and videos of this. The best way to share what you’ve seen is through the power of an image.”

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Glowing life in an underwater world

Image of the week : where the big waves are

Currents north of Antarctica meet no resistance from any landmass... 

meaning bigger, nastier waves. (Wave data from NOAA).

@NathanCShephard

Inside the world's biggest fish farm

By 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that the world's population will reach 9.1 billion people.

This is 34% more than it is today.

To eliminate mass hunger, food supplies must grow at a faster pace, and world food production must increase by 70%.

Current methods of fish farming will not be able to meet the global demand for fish safely and sustainably.

In this video, we will tell you how the new largest and most complex fish farm in the world works, and whether similar technologies are able to provide us with food in the future.

Wild fish stocks are declining at a rapid pace.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that 53% of the fishing grounds are fully developed, and the global fleet of fishing vessels is two to three times higher than the sustainable state of the world's seas and oceans.

If we do not cut back fishing in the very near future, then all types of wild commercial fish could disappear by the middle of the century.

Did you know that aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector In the world?

This is as a result of seafood being one of those rare types of food that is very useful to humans and at the same time easily scalable in production.

With the help of innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence and microscopic fungi, almost every country with access to the sea will be able to completely solve the issue of its own seafood shortage.

And today we will look at exactly how advanced technologies will help feed the entire planet.

People have been going to the sea for food since ancient times.

In the last century, fishing has become so widespread that hundreds of marine life species have become endangered.

Thus, according to The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, more than 90 species of fish, including sharks, rays, and other cartilaginous fish, are at risk in European waters alone.

As Nicholas Dulvy, a marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, points out "There's been no effective movement on fisheries management in the Mediterranean in the last decade". To make matters worse, different countries have various fishing laws and what is prohibited in one country may easily be allowed in another.

This results in fishing boats being able to catch even illegal fish species and simply sell them on another market.

China’s nine-dash line proves stranger than fiction

The nine-dash line map contributes to a form of “maritime territorialisation”

(Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

From The Interpreter by Bec Strating

 
Vietnam recently banned the film Uncharted from domestic distribution due to a scene depicting an “illegal image” of China’s infamous “nine-dash line”.

This is not the first time popular culture has become embroiled in the politics of the South China Sea.

In 2021, the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs lodged a protest with Netflix about its series Pine Gap, co-produced with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

The Guardian criticised the show for “great amounts of yakkety yak interspersed with occasional scenes of bonking” in a memorable one-star review, but it was the depiction of the nine-dash line that landed the production in hot water in Southeast Asia.

The Philippines’ Movie and Television Review and Classification Board reportedly ruled that two episodes showing the nine-dash line “violated Philippine sovereignty” and were “unfit for public exhibition”.

Vietnam also lodged a complaint over Pine Gap, and Netflix removed the entire series from Vietnamese distribution.
 

 The nine-dash line is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

to illustrate claims to the South China Sea.

In 2019, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines banned the joint DreamWorks/Pearl Studio film Abominable from cinemas for showing the nine-dash line.

In Vietnam, film distributor CJ CGV was fined VN$170 million (US$7400) for showing the film.

At the time, tensions were high, with China and Vietnam engaged in a stand-off for months as the Chinese vessel Haiyang Dizhi 8 conducted surveys within the disputed waters around the Spratly Islands.

Complaints were also raised in Vietnam and the Philippines about the use of the nine-dash line in the Chinese series Put Your Head On My Shoulder and US series Madam Secretary, both shown on Netflix.

It’s not just television and films that have portrayed the nine-dash line.

The American broadcaster ESPN was heavily criticised for televising a map featuring the nine-dash line in US coverage in 2019.

The Philippines and Vietnam also refused to stamp new Chinese e-passports featuring the nine-dash line. In Australia in 2020, a recalled textbook used in Victorian schools also featured the nine-dash line.

Why is this a problem?

When maps of Australia, for example, are used in popular culture, the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone or continental shelf claims are not likely to be depicted

(pure julia/Unsplash)

The nine-dash line is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to illustrate claims to the South China Sea.

One of the key issues though is that the nature of the claim is deliberately ambiguous and it has never been made explicit by the CCP what the nine-dash line represents.

Instead, it has been left to analysts, academics, international lawyers and an arbitral tribunal to interpret what the CCP is claiming through the interaction between its words, policies, actions, laws and maps.

The nine-dash line encompasses approximately 90 per cent of the three million square kilometre South China Sea. Within this area, China makes sovereignty and maritime claims.

Some Chinese analysts view the nine-dash line as a maritime border, reflected in the use of dashes rather than a continuous line.

Moderate Chinese legal scholars have argued that the nine-dash line reflects China’s sovereignty and, drawing partly on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), sovereign rights to fishing and other resources.

Yet there are concerns that the nine-dash line may suggest that Beijing conceptualises the seas as part of its sovereign territory and domestic jurisdiction.

This is not just reflected in maps, but in how Beijing has sought to use naming, administrative and legal strategies to exert control over maritime area and land features, including those that are not subject to sovereign appropriation, such as low-lying elevations.

The nine-dash line map contributes to a form of “maritime territorialisation” in which sovereignty over maritime area is represented and reinforced.

Strategic narratives are one component of lawfare: the use (and misuse) of law for strategic ends.

Even great powers need to justify their exceptionalism, and one method is through the use of quasi-legal rhetorical and representational justifications for their claims and activities.

Maps play an important role in bolstering such strategic narratives.

The use of popular media comes in handy because it can contribute to normalising images and maps that may be legally dubious and deeply political, yet are not being disseminated by political parties or actors.

When maps of Australia, for example, are used in popular culture, the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone or continental shelf claims are not likely to be depicted.

This is because these maritime jurisdictional entitlements are accorded to Australia by UNCLOS, and these zones do not have the same relationship to the nation as land. In these maritime areas, Australia has sovereign rights, but does not have absolute sovereignty.

In contrast, the nine-dash line map contributes to a form of “maritime territorialisation” in which sovereignty over maritime area is represented and reinforced.

While the dashes may reflect a maritime rather than a territorial boundary, their representation in popular maps suggests that land and sea are analogous and linked to nationhood in a way that does not reflect contemporary international law. 

 

Links :

• Rappler : PH orders Netflix to withdraw ‘Pine Gap’ episodes with China’s 9-dash line
• The Economic Times : China adopts new parameters for South China Sea claims
• The Interpreter : Law of the sea: A contested watershed ruling/ How the South China Sea ruling has changed int'l maritime disputes
  
• Business Insider : Here's what's behind the 'nine-dash line' that sparked the South China Sea conflict
• EUObserver : The South China Sea should be of concern to Europe 
• GeoGarage blog : Understanding the South China Sea : a very brief overview to ... / Geographer: China’s claim to South China Sea not rooted in History