This Issue

International Wildlife, Jan-Feb, 2002

A Former Marine Relives the Battle Over Tarawa

Curtis A. Moore, author of our story on climate change in the Pacific, is a former U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam. His reporting took him to "Bloody Tarawa," where in 1943, marines waded 500 yards through a withering fusillade of Japanese bullets. The attack, the first amphibious landing of World War II, established the viability of invading a heavily fortified beach, a strategy that would make victory possible for America.

Moore is an expert on environmental and energy issues. In 1985, as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, he staffed the first-ever congressional hearing on global warming. We assigned him to travel to the tropical Pacific because that is where scientists predicted that some of the first effects of global warming-- including rising sea levels--would show up.

International Wildlife's coverage of climate change goes back to 1981, when we first reported the threat and linked it to human burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Over the years since, global climate change has become the most-covered issue in our pages. At first, our reporting was hypothetical. As time passed, we began to examine real impacts on wildlife.

In this issue, we take a look at the effects on people. In all likelihood, Tarawa will soon cease to exist. The struggle to keep that from happening, Moore finds, has haunting parallels with the battle of Tarawa in which more than 1,700 U.S. Marines and sailors died. Just as there was no escape for the Americans and Japanese locked in combat then, there may be no escape today for Tarawa's people--or for the rest of humanity. "The only way to avoid our otherwise certain future," Moore concludes, "is to alter it now."

The Editors

Copyright 2001 National Wildlife Federation. All rights reserved. The above article may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without prior written consent of National Wildlife Federation.