Saving Paradise

 

One of the world's most beautiful nations, the Republic of Maldives is under siege from development and global warming, and that means trouble for the islands' luxury hotels. Now the Four Seasons is going environmental to help repair a country.

SWIMMING WITH MANTA RAYS IN HAN_ IFARU BAY, A LAGOON ABOUT THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL FIELD IN THE REPUBLIC OF MALDIVES, MUST SURELY COUNT AS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL EXPERI_ ENCES OF A PERSON’S LIFE. It is, at least, for me. In the warm green water, cloudy with the plankton the mantas consume, these beautiful animals swoop and dive, their enormous mouths open wide as they feed. I’ve traveled all over the world to see mantas, from the Galapagos to the remote Pacific archipelago the Socorro Islands, but those journeys required boat trips of hundreds of miles and diving in chilly water with limited visibility. Here in Hanifaru Bay, I’m wearing a swimsuit and equipped with a mask, snorkel and fins, and I’m surrounded by half a dozen of these gentle, curious animals with wing spans up to 15 feet, so close I have to resist touching them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just me and the mantas in the water. There are other people, lots of other people, thrashing excitedly. The water’s surface churns like a crowded swimming pool. After about 15 minutes of such bumper-swimming, I give up and fin back to my boat. The natural beauty is incredible. The humans, frankly, are spoiling it.

Four Seasons at Landaa Giraavaru, one of the three Four Seasons resorts in the Maldives where I’m staying on this trip, knows that this influx of humanity is a mixed blessing. The hotel wants people to come see the mantas—a “Manta Watch” stay at the resort costs up to $7,205 for four nights—but all that eco-tourism won’t help anyone if it drives the mantas away.

So the resort has done something unusual for a luxury hotel: It’s become actively involved in promoting environmental measures in the Maldives. In conjunction with the environmental group, Save Our Seas, it’s launched what it calls the Maldivian Manta Ray Project. The hotel is funding a full-time biologist, a Brit named Guy Stevens, to study the mantas, consider the impact tourism is having on the population and think of ways to protect them—including working with the Maldivian government to establish Hanifaru as a marine park, where the number of visitors can be restricted.

Four Seasons has three resorts in the Maldives—one at Landaa Giraavaru, another at an island called Kuda Huraa, the third a 129-foot luxury yacht called Four Seasons Explorer which tours the island waters. Each is stunning in its own way. The two island resorts are blessed with remarkable natural beauty (white sand beaches, crystalline water, balmy weather, abundant marine life) and characterized by Four Seasons’ excellence—discreet, attentive service, excellent food, soothing spas and small touches such as topnotch toiletries and flowers in the rooms. The Explorer features skilled dive masters, but with a crew member for every guest and on-board massage services, it’s far more luxurious than your standard dive boat.

A villa at Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru; A hawksbill turtle, often seen in Maldives waters

Growing coral at Landaa Giraavaru; Four Seasons Explorer

All this luxury comes at a price. Typically, it’s more than $1,000 a night, depending on your room and season. And from an environmental perspective, building resorts on tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean doesn’t seem to make much sense. Travelers have to fly from all over the world—at the moment, mostly Russia, China, Japan and the U.K.—to get there. Housing these visitors, feeding them, entertaining them—it all requires energy and creates waste.

Consider the logistics of simply, say, preparing a meal. Fish is local, of course. Coconuts too. But mostly, food comes from around the globe: spinach from Italy, tomatoes from Sri Lanka, beef from Australia, lamb from New Zealand, wine from France and Italy and the United States. Just about everything in the Maldives comes from somewhere else.

“I think there are two things that every great hotel must do,” Armando Kraenzlin, the general manager of Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru, tells me one evening. Kraenzlin has been with Four Seasons in the Maldives since 2000, and he is the driving force behind its environmental pursuits. “One thing is to create a sense of place for the visitors,” he says. A hotel must not feel generic. “The other is to be accepted by the community in which it operates.” In the Maldives, that means working to try to save the country.

For tourists, the Maldives is the definition of an island paradise. A country that consists of some 1,190 islands in 115 square miles of the Indian Ocean, it is surely one of the most beautiful places in the world. The islands are made of sand and coral and vegetation, and seen from the small seaplanes in which tourists travel from island to island, they are uniformly gorgeous.

Yet the Maldives has problems that the escape-minded tourist will never see. Its population is small—around 300,000 people who live on about 200 islands—but growing. Poverty is chronic; the majority of Maldivians make less than $1 a day. About 100, 000 Maldivians live on the capital island, Malé, which is by far the country’s most developed island, and crime and drugs have become chronic there.

The biggest challenges, though, are environmental. Solid waste is an issue; it’s piling up. So is reef preservation. Most Maldivian men are fishermen and depend on the reefs for their livelihoods, but those reefs are at risk from rising water temperatures.

The greatest threat is global warming. If scientists’ worst-case projections of rising water levels play out, by the end of this century the Maldives will no longer exist; it’ll be underwater. Even if the islands don’t sink, about half of Maldivian homes are within 100 yards of the sea; it wouldn’t take much of a rise in sea level to threaten them.

CAN A LUXURY RESORT REALLY ACT AS ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFACTOR?

In November 2008, newly-elected president Mohamed Nasheed commenced a plan to purchase land for relocation in New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka. “It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” he explained.

Six months later, Nasheed announced plans to make the country carbon-neutral by 2020. (A mostly symbolic step, since the Maldives produces .001 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, but nonetheless one that resorts such as Four Seasons will have to take seriously.) Six months after that, Nasheed held a meeting with his vice-president and cabinet on a sandy bottom 40 feet underwater, everyone clad in scuba gear. "We are trying to send a message to the world about … what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked,” he explained later.

Some environmentalists would probably argue that the best thing a hotel could do in such a situation is to go away. But that wouldn’t help the Maldives. The tourism industry is an increasingly large part of the country’s economy—24,000 Maldivians work in it—and Four Seasons has instituted technical and vocational programs to train locals. In any case, the environmental issues that threaten the country’s survival are hardly of its making. From global warming to over-fishing, Maldivians are at the mercy of far larger nations such as China, India and the United States. Even if tourism weren’t there, these problems would be.

Given the size of such threats, can a luxury resort really act as environmental benefactor? Four Seasons genuinely seems to be trying. In addition to the manta project, it’s built a “marine discovery center” on Landaa Giraavaru that promotes marine research and education among the guests, particularly the children. This can be tricky— say, promoting shark conservation (the Maldives banned shark fishing in 2009) when more and more of your guests are from China, home of the environmentally devastating shark fin soup. “We don’t single anyone out,” one biologist tells me. “We just talk about the sharks, and people get it.”

Another project: to study the clownfish, a small orange fish found in the Maldives. The clownfish had the misfortune to be Nemo in the Pixar film Finding Nemo, which led to a boom in aquarium demand for the fish, which led to species decline. Four Seasons wants to breed the fish so that locals could profit from the aquarium trade and stop depleting the ocean.

And at both Landaa Giraavaru and Kuda Huraa, Four Seasons is promoting the development of artificial reefs. In 1998, a small rise in water temperature due to El Niño killed 90 percent of the Maldivian reefs within 15 feet of the surface. They’re growing back—but no one feels confident that the same phenomenon won’t happen again, and every bit of reef life is precious. So Four Seasons is experimenting with steel frames (they look a bit like spiderwebs) to which naturalists attach small sprigs of coral. Some 300 of these frames are planted off the beach at Kuda Huraa, another 500 at Landaa Giraavaru. Guests can snorkel through them and see the coral growing, the fish darting in and out of these manmade homes. The project seems to be working—and Four Seasons offers guests the chance to underwrite it by sponsoring different-sized frames at a cost of $150, $300 and $500.

"The biggest environmental challenges in the Maldives are sound waste management, protection of coral reefs and switching from oil to renewable energy,” President Nasheed emailed me in response to a question about Four Seasons’ environmental work. “Resorts have an important role to play; some pioneering resorts are phasing out plastic bottles and cutting the amount of waste they produce, investing in schemes to monitor and protect the reefs and introducing renewable energy. These resorts are helping to prove that you can have your creature comforts and still protect the planet."

Curator