Life in insular abundance

Life reaches the remotest islands, vivacity bursting forth on land newly emerged, far from the forest. Seeds float, are dropped by birds, or come on the hulls of passing boats. Once in the soil, the roots bind the sand and turn a sandbank into an island; an island into a paradise.

The solid men at Kew never lose that schoolboy wonder, judging by a lecture I had the pleasure to attend last month with the Chagos Conservation Trust. The islands’ variety, the glee of their plant life was on display.

With the islands deserted, the progress of life can be watched. By the shore, the first plants arrive and root themselves, in a hedge of beach heliotrope and similar little flowers. Then, the coral sand stabilised, the broad leaves of bush, and finally on some islands come the trees, majestic and shading their new domain. With the plants come the birds and the turtles, crabs and insect-life.

(Regrettably, where man has stepped there also come rats, befouling and destroying, as man also befouls and destroys, but with no regret for doing so.)

Some isles are small, and with heavy undergrowth with little overgrowth to make it undergrowth, and with constant scurrying of crabs and turtles and innumerable bugs, that together make a self-sustaining island environment. Some are small but have grown forests – the coconuts that were planted, but also beauteous, flowering takamaka trees, and others whose names forget.

No one, we are told, knows where the coconut trees came from. They are taken to be unwelcome, invasive plants introduced for the plantations that once sustained a labourer population on the Chagos Islands. In truth though, some could have been planted by visiting fishermen from the Maldives, or ocean-crossing Malays, or even been washed ashore. More research is needed – such a heavy task it is for a naturalist to be set ashore on pristine, tropical islands, amongst the lapping waves on the coral-white sands and the cries of the seabirds.

The islands are small but many. Even on an apparently bare rock platform like Resurgent Island life has come and grows.

Around the Indian Ocean, life squeezes in, jostling with teeming mankind, scraped and netted and poisoned. Only in this place, where man may not set foot, is it thriving as it should. The plants allow the rest to lice – around the vast reefs and bank swirl sparkling fish, and sharks and whales, feeding the whole, dying Ocean.

This may be the last we see of them if the dark cloud the politicians have placed over the Chagos Islands snuffs it out. We have little time for knowing what wonders nature can give.