The Nauru scenario

I’ve always found it somewhat strange, that nobody is really interested in making a strategy game about managing societal decline. I like the Tropico series, in part because they actually make somewhat of an effort to simulate the problems you run into once the era of economic growth comes to an end.

You build farms and they will cause the soil to erode. You can build logging camps and run out of trees with poor management. Finally, you can build mines and deplete the ores. There are other issues you can run into: You can overpopulate the island and be left with a bunch of elderly people who cost money and occupy scarce physical space.

But I notice people don’t like it. They make mods that make the resources infinite. They play the game, find out that your ranches with your cattle eventually suffer soil degradation and want a refund. The game isn’t really exaggerating what happens either. On a mountainous island, soil is just easily lost. If you live in a river delta you don’t really have to worry about soil erosion, but if you live in the mountains, it’s easy to end up left with bare rock, unable to grow anything.

Now you know me, to me it can’t be realistic enough. If I had to improve the Tropico series, I would improve the mining system, to have waste rock that needs to be deposited somewhere, rather than just having ores that run out.

Your miners would store all the waste rock somewhere and they would build a big dam to contain all the waste rock. Then that dam would contain the waste rock, you would eventually shut down the mine and then fifty years later, the dam would collapse, all the waste rock would slide down the mountain and destroy all your buildings. A disaster, created by people who are dead once it unfolds.

The unfortunate thing about Tropico 4 is that it has all these mechanics built into them, but doesn’t really explore them much. You generally start the game in 1950 with 50 people living in shacks, then end it 30 years or so later, with around 200 people, living in splendor.

I would much rather play a Nauru scenario.

Most of Nauru looks like this:

Around 80% of the island was at some point a guano (bird poop) deposit. This is full of elements you can use as fertilizer, so people mined it, until eventually they exhausted all of it. Most of the island now looks like this, with old coral making these weird edges, on which birds over thousands of years pooped until it turned into an island millions of years ago. They can’t really do anything with this land, it’s unsuited for agriculture, you can’t build houses on it, so they just let it overgrow with vegetation, very slowly depositing new soil.

You have a bunch of bird poop on the island used as fertilizer, you become very rich, then eventually you run out of bird poop, the money you earned is wasted and then your population is obese and miserable. That’s the Nauru story. So what do you do then?

Now you become dependent on various scams, to earn money. In the real world, Nauru now just depends on scams. Nauru is the depressing stagnated real-life version of Tropico.

There is the tax evasion scam. They have no income tax, so they just sell passports to people who don’t want to pay taxes. They facilitate money laundering too. They also signed up to be a de facto prison island for Australia, where Australia sends any illegal immigrants it doesn’t want, in exchange for foreign aid.

But my favorite Nauru scam has to be the diplomatic recognition scam. Nauru will diplomatically recognize any country, if you pay them enough:

Nauru has used its position as a member of the United Nations to gain financial support from both Taiwan (officially the Republic of China or ROC) and China (officially the People’s Republic of China or PRC) by changing its recognition from one to the other under the One-China policy. On 21 July 2002, Nauru signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC, accepting US$130 million from the PRC for this action[99] (US$211 million in 2023[100]). In response, the ROC severed diplomatic relations with Nauru two days later. Nauru later re-established links with the ROC on 14 May 2005,[101] and diplomatic ties with the PRC were officially severed on 31 May 2005.[102] On 15 Jan 2024, Nauru severed ties with the ROC and re-established diplomatic ties with the PRC.[103]

In 2008, Nauru recognised Kosovo as an independent country, and in 2009 Nauru became the fourth country, after Russia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, to recognise Abkhazia, a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia. Russia was reported to be giving Nauru US$50 million in humanitarian aid as a result of this recognition[99] (US$69.5 million in 2023[100]). On 15 July 2008, the Nauruan government announced a port refurbishment programme, financed with US$9 million of development aid received from Russia (US$12.5 million in 2023[100]). The Nauru government claimed this aid is not related to its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[104]

The stupid thing of course is that despite the whole island just being a desolate exhausted rock by now, the economy kept “growing”:

And nobody really learns a lesson from Nauru either. Here we have a woman who visited Nauru back in 2015. It’s worth reading, especially to see the pictures of the abandoned presidential house that was torched by an angry mob in 2001. The president’s mansion now looks like this apparently:

But she concludes:

When I got off the plane, I had the feeling Nauru would be a unique place in the Pacific, but it was a weird and eerie kind of unique. I’m certainly glad I went, just to try and understand a bit how such a tiny country and its history could truly be real… but I don’t know if I’d go again. It’s a sad little place, and I just kept wishing I could time travel and visit it back in the 80’s when the place was booming and all the hotels were filled with foreigners that could have enjoyed Nauru with me.

Of course she has visited at least 200 countries and plans to visit all of them. For middle-class white millennial women, the whole world is little more than a bucket list. Because Nauru is technically a country, it’s just another place on the list that has to be marked off. But I wonder, what she has learned from seeing all these places. When everyone decides to embark on her goal, of visiting every country on the planet before turning 40, the result is that we all end up living on Nauru.

I wouldn’t mind visiting the whole world too. Exploring the Amazon, seeing Nauru, visiting dying small American towns where everyone injects opioids and votes for Trump, I understand why one would want to do this. But every journey like this, pours a small African village worth of carbon into the atmosphere.

Maybe air travel is actually carbon-neutral, if you take into consideration all the exotic viruses and mosquitoes that manage to hop along for the ride. But even then, tourism outside of Northern Europe has something very exploitative to it. In Spain they spray you with a water pistol, because they’re sick of the tourists. I don’t mind visiting my friends in the UK by train for a festival, but you have to strike some sort of balance.

And in places like Nauru, you will just find yourself surrounded by people who have none of the opportunities you have in life. And then your conclusion is apparently: “Well I wish I could have visited it during its economic boom in the 80’s when the unsustainable exploitation of its natural resources had just begun instead of visiting it in 2015 when I could have learned a useful lesson from seeing the end result of my hyperconsumerist lifestyle.”

Reading this kind of has me wish one of the local brown maids would have just picked up her passport and her ticket in her room and flown back to her home instead, to spend the rest of her life giving yoga lessons in Iceland and fly off to the other 100 countries she hasn’t visited yet, as she is left stranded on Nauru.

I just can’t imagine flying to some third world country to enjoy yourself as the brownoids clean your room and serve your food. I would feel constantly confronted with the question: “Why do I get to live like this, while they have to live like that?” It just feels like taunting God to me. At least in Norway or England, you exist on an equal basis to the people you meet.

The Nauru scenario, is basically late stage Tropico. But most of the time, you would have won the mission before the end: “Congratulations El Presidente, the people of Nauru became rich off bird poop!”

Not for long Penultimo!

I sometimes wonder if the Babyboomers still have souls, or if we’re just existing in a kind of global Tropico scenario that they already exited in 1999, after they collectively clicked the “win” button.

When I grow tired of the default missions Tropico 4 has to offer, I will see if I can design my own mission, a kind of Nauru scenario.