Once Upon A Thilafushi - Dark Mountain

Environmental Safeguard Specialist Mohamed Asif mounts his motorbike, offers me his only helmet.

‘That’s OK,’ I say. ‘You have it.’

I ride pillion through Malé – past a mosque, tea jetty, basketball court and warehouse until we reach the waste disposal area. It’s a straightforward process: garbage trucks queue along the harbour, dump the city’s trash into a heap that gets forced by backhoe onto a barge that, once full, chugs west for Thilafushi. I imagine my own trash hurtling onto the barge: last night’s packet of chocolate malt Milo, the empty container of suntan lotion, last nibbles of Maldivian noodles. It all gets crunched by the compactor. Residential trash like this barely accounts for that which is heaped up on Thilafushi, though. This barge will soon queue behind private barges, the majority of which come from resorts or outlying atolls where waste removal for demolition and construction is big business. The materials in these latter barges are saturated with a slurry of compounds, including heavy metals like lead, mercury, and arsenic.

‘As-salamu alaykum.’ Hazim Ibrahim approaches our motorbike.

‘Alaykumu s-salām,’ Mohamed replies, hugging his friend, who happens to be the assistant manager of Waste Management Corporation.

‘The speedboat isn’t here yet,’ Hazim says. ‘Let’s wait under this canopy.’

I had been steeling my gag reflex all morning, assuming we’d be taking a slow, fetid barge to Thilafushi. The prospect of a government speedboat, of wind whipping through the hair, comes as mild relief.

Mohamed and Hazim look off in the distance. They stand up, greet a sputtering speedboat. It anchors at the ramp, honks. We board, and within minutes, we’re passing by water taxis and the slow haul of big barges.

The island is artificial, made of a matrix of concrete columnar cells pegged into the seabed. Each pit could be filled with the annual waste production of six hundred Americans.

The island is artificial, made of a matrix of concrete columnar cells pegged into the seabed. Each pit could be filled with the annual waste production of six hundred Americans.

‘Thilafushi is not environmentally engineered,’ Mohamed says. ‘Not really engineered at all.’

As we approach, I see a crumbling block of concrete at the island’s edge. When the concrete cracks, it releases the waste from within it, in whatever form that takes. Toxic compounds, pesticides, microplastics disintegrate or solvate into one of the world’s most precious marine ecosystems.

When I first learned of microplastics, the plastic debris whose diameter is less than one-fifth of an inch, I assumed it was ingested by coral the same way the apocryphal spider climbs into a human’s sleeping mouth. Rather, microplastics enter the coral deliberately – not just as a side dish, but in some cases, as coral’s dietary preference. Global inventory of such plastic particles numbers 50 trillion. Coral are already facing off against bleaching events and invasive species. Add to that an appetite for plastic dust, and it’s clear they aren’t long for our oceans.

In the short term, they will cease to provide essential habitat and nutrition for marine life. Eventually, the biological pump embedded within that habitat, a ‘pump’ which fixes carbon – sinking the chemical downward through complex food-web exchanges – will be diminished and then shut off entirely. Consider that 90%’of all carbon that has ever existed on Earth has been dissolved into the cold deep sea where it is permanently stored, at a depth of one thousand fathoms or more. Without coral, surface carbon will be freed up, released upward into the atmosphere to resume its infamous role as a greenhouse gas.

I crouch at the bursting cell, see its sandy substrate exploding with antennae-like threads of synthetic fibre. It is perched on the edge of the ocean like a toxic piñata waiting for the barrel of a wave to bust it loose. I think of how, just this morning, I unleashed thousands of microplastics upon the Maldivian landscape when I machine-washed clothes with synthetic fibres (acrylic, nylon, polyester); brushed my teeth and scrubbed my body with exfoliating shower gel (microbeads); took a car to the Department of the Environment, its tyres wearing and tearing on a road just feet from the ocean (styrene residue). This is not to mention all the polymers I inadvertently loosed into the environment through random mechanical acts that got me clumsily from Point A to B, possibly poly-E, poly-P, poly-ET, poly-MMA, poly-A, poly-S, and poly-VC.

No sooner am I standing on Thilafushi than I am told to climb into the cab of a new pickup, which will shuttle us through the industrial sector to the fill. Dozens of workers commute from Malé every day. Others, migrant workers or bachelors from distant atolls, stay on the premises year-round. They are the managers and operators and associates of the enormous warehouses we ride past. Or they’re boat manufacturers, methane bottlers, cement packers. Some process and clean materials sourced from the rubbish, package it in bulk for companies who make recyclable textiles: bags, clothes and handicrafts. Many tourists buy back a few ounces of disguised waste at the gift shops, paper dyed and dried and sculpted by local artisans into a collectible crab, shark, or ray – or in my case, concentric coasters. More than an ironic gesture of travel capitalism, these products are business-savvy upcycling, a wager that they can get us tourists to take their trash home with them after all.

I’m finding it hard to believe that all of this – the warehouses, tenements, people and food stalls – all operate atop cells of decades-old garbage. Hazim says that when a business excavates for new foundations on this side of Thilafushi, workers always unearth old building materials. ‘That’s what goes on the very top of the cells: glass, concrete, drywall and rebar. But there’s tons of garbage too. You never know what’s down there.’

When the last of the cells was filled in the 1990s, planners decided enough was enough. They had tripled the area of the original lagoon to 4.6 million square feet. Rather than continue pouring out more concrete to expand Thilafushi’s footprint across the Indian Ocean, new barges and dump trucks began engineering an artificial mountain on the western perimeter of the artificial island: waste piling up, and not out. By now, Thilafushi is indisputably the highest point in the Maldives, a nation whose average elevation is no taller than Danny DeVito.

Ben and his father Viti, Fiji, 2023 by Nick Brandt. From the series SINK / RISE

We arrive at Mount Thilafushi, and I look instinctually skyward at the smoke rising from the rubbish peak. I invest the landscape with the gawk of the sublime, an ‘awe induced by seeing an immense or dynamic technological object,’ as historian David E. Nye defines it. Whereas many objects associated with the technological sublime celebrate the ‘power of human reason,’ Thilafushi contradicts its own reasoning: how is it that the humans who developed this particular social construction of technology are the same ones who produced enough waste to necessitate it? Because of this, in Thilafushi, there is also a failure of reason, the same sort of failure that makes irreconcilable the simultaneous genius of nuclear fission and its grotesque packaging as the atom bomb. When we get to the coastal side of the rubbish, I’m instructed to put up my window.

‘The fumes will asphyxiate you,’ Mohamed says.

‘Knock you out,’ Hazim echoes. He closes the truck’s air vents, lifts his shirt over his nose. I look at the water instead of the landfill, remembering the viral video that shows contractors for a local resort emptying trash directly into the ocean from a dhoni. Hazim admits some contractors, not wanting to make the trip all the way to Thilafushi, will go off-shore, far enough to be undetectable, and opt for deep-sea disposal, introducing non-biodegradable microplastics into the Indian Ocean’s food chain.

We are driving the circuit that surrounds the rubbish like a pace car on a three-mile racetrack. Black smoke plumes are absorbed into the clouds, noxious origins of damning complaints from nearby tourists. Hotel reviews confirm the fickle force of trade winds, equally prone to calms and squalls. Those who spent their vacations with their noses in their collars asked for refunds, a matter that hotel managers were obliged to take to the capital. Ultimately, it’s unsatisfied customers that instigated the final push to decommission the landfill at Thilafushi – and not the ticking of the ecological time bomb.

I ask if I can get out of the truck. The driver stops, lets me out like a taxi at the world’s most improbable destination. I step back to take it all in.

Hazim wants to remind me that it’s all going away soon. ‘Next year, the burning will stop.’

I detect some sentimentality.

‘We’re already capping parts of the landfill,’ he says. ‘We’ll start baling the waste soon – for the incinerator.’

Mohamed points to where the incinerator will go. While half of the energy is promised to Japan, the rest will be enough to power the industrial sector of Thilafushi, some activities on Malé and Hulhumalé as well. No more eternal flame, no more toxic winds, no more nosy writers. I have spoken to enough people by now to know it’s not likely to be a near-future – that the current pre-approval phase for public option might itself take years.

I approach the waste in a way suggestive of reverence – as if it’s fine art and not rubbish I’m studying, as if this is a museum and not a landfill. I am waiting for it to cohere, to resolve like a self-portrait. There are water bottles, tree clippings, pipes filled with goop, cardboard shreds, pierced garbage bags, nylon straps, cracked paper, e-waste, planks of wood, crumpled tarpaulin, and yellow-blue-pink plastic bits. In a few steps, it’s a different frame: pink towel with red pattern, blue boat and yellow door, wires wound around a rod; over there, a tire and a hubcap, Styrofoam packaging, chipped bricks, glass bottles, detached nozzles. Air catches empty sacks of rice (made in India) and cereal (Malaysia) and cement (United Arab Emirates).

Everything has a dusty, rusty, melty, mouldy patina to it. One assumes, given enough time, it will, all of it, deteriorate into substrate. The pieces upon become the upon-which. And the upon-which, through erosion, will become the sea.

If fine art is a composition, then this is a decomposition. Everything has a dusty, rusty, melty, mouldy patina to it. One assumes, given enough time, it will, all of it, deteriorate into substrate. The pieces upon become the upon-which. And the upon-which, through erosion, will become the sea. There is enough incidental sunlight, rainfall and macronutrients to grow clusters of grass, which shake with the breeze. Dyed scraps of cloth jut from the wall of rubbish, flapping like the flags of a fragile embassy.

As I keep strolling, I glimpse workers and wave at them.

Hazim tells me to stop. They might think I’m trying to communicate a directive.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘They don’t wear respirators? Nothing to cover their face?’

As Safeguard Specialist, all Mohamed can do is shrug. ‘We tried. We had a training day. Helped them with fitting the masks to their heads. Explained it was to keep them from inhaling airborne particulate. But then, we saw them the next day and they weren’t wearing them. We explained it wasn’t optional, but they claimed it was uncomfortable, wearing them all day like that.’

I sidestep grey clumps resembling cat litter.

‘Anyway, I’ve got three dozen, brand new, just sitting in my office.’

Former garbage collectors for the city, all of the landfill workers are Bangladeshi. ‘Is that all of them right there?’ I ask. I’d read there were just six of them, but I can see double that in my direct line.

‘No, there are forty-some in the valley,’ Hazim says, gesturing to the centre of the landfill.

‘Have you ever been in there? Like all the way in?’

Hazim shakes his head. Mohamed too.

If I am stupidly imagining something pastoral on the interior of the colossus, a verdant enclave with the best composting in South Asia, an unspoiled culture constructed from the debris of deconstruction, it’s because I need the fantasy of a utopia to balance out the hellscape façade before me.

For over two decades, they’ve climbed these hillocks, scavenging its scant objects of value. Then, they push the rubbish into discrete mounds, every day reforming the waste into a jagged monument with putrid peaks. When the peaks get too steep for the dump trucks – here, I think of the vertiginous theatre of a monster truck rally – the state-owned waste management service, WAMCO, caps it off, tamping it down into a plateau, off limits for future deposits. Elsewhere, the force of the backhoe’s loader bucket makes for navigable roadways through the slush. Once it’s as compact as can be, they ignite it. By burning it to ash, the peaks reduce, and the cycle begins again the very next day.

Trump has tweeted that global warming is fictional, is mythical, is stupid, is bullshit, is a canard, is a hoax, is a con job, is based on faulty science and manipulated data, is non-anthropogenic, is created by and for the Chinese. It is easy to deny climate change in this manner because it is a higher-order hyperobject, invisible to us across space and time while still being massively there. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of marine debris, is yet another hyperobject difficult to apprehend without satellite imagery and time-lapse technology. But this mountain, a monument of trash, is at the perfect scale for human confrontation. To see this mountain is to imagine oneself at its perilous peak, and the asthmatic journey it would take to get there: lungs filled with gallons of hydrogen sulphide, the gaseous byproduct of broken-down organics, rancid reek of rotten egg.

I eventually retch, step toward the truck, decide I’ve seen and smelled enough.

We boat back, loudly throttling through chop. Hazim falls asleep like a cat under a sliver of sun.

I tell Mohamed there is a satirical petition in the United States to rename a New York City landfill the Trump Dump.

‘Trump Dump,’ Mohamed repeats the words, has himself a chuckle, then goes quiet and hugs himself against the wind.

‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

‘Addu atoll,’ he says, the southernmost. He tells me where Hazim is from, an atoll whose name I’ve never heard.

‘How are things there?’ I ask about reefs, erosion, saltwater inundation. When I mention tsunamis, though, Mohamed sits up, leans toward me so that he can be heard.

‘The tsunamis hit us hard not long ago. Four islands were lost.’

‘Lost?’ I ask. How hadn’t I heard of it? Read of it?

‘Not lost. But abandoned.’

‘Oh.’

At some point, it’s economically unthinkable to rebuild. Communities consolidate. Home is wherever one can carry it.

‘Besides,’ Mohamed says, ‘even if there was money, it’s too wet to build on it anymore. Unsafe.’

‘Is there ever talk of migration?’

Hazim wakes to answer me. ‘No. We don’t even ask the question.’

Mohamed says it too. ‘No.’

‘Never?’

They acknowledge the rumour that the Maldives was looking to buy land in Australia.

If it was a rumour, it was one begun by the former president Mohamed Nasheed himself. Earmarking a portion of the billion tourist dollars that come in each year for a new home in Oceania was to be ‘an insurance policy’ against the worst possible outcome. Once a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, Nasheed said, ‘I can move, you can move. But where would all the… sounds, all the culture and all the colour go? We’ve been there in the middle of the Indian Ocean for the last 10,000 years.’

Just as I am thinking of another polite angle, Hazim interrupts as if he can hear my thought forming.

‘No, we don’t even speak of it. Internal migration is fine, but we will stay until the very last minute.’

You can read the complete story in the new issue of Dark Ocean

IMAGES: Serafina at Table; Ben and his father Viti; Petero by Cliff, Fiji by Nick Brandt
From the series SINK / RISE

SINK / RISE is the third chapter of ‘The Day May Break’, an ongoing global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. This third chapter focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. The local people in these photos, photographed underwater in the ocean off the coast of the Fijian islands, are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises.

Everything is shot in-camera underwater.

Nick Brandt’s photographs focus on the impact of environmental destruction and climate breakdown, for both some of the most vulnerable people across the planet and for the animal and natural world. He has had solo gallery and museum shows around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles. All the series of his work are published in book form. nickbrandt.com