Kimbe Bay is that place. An ancient giant's bite torn from the jungle-cloaked volcanic body of a large New Guinean island, the bay is filled with crystalline water, a staggering diversity of corals, and several ID books' worth of coral-reef fishes. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of the last places where a traditional land-tenure system persists, under which local tribes and clans "own" delineated areas of land and sea. This system, that pre-dates by thousands of years modern notions of sustainability, may be the key to understanding how PNG remains one of the most intact parts of our beleaguered biosphere and why it is home to so many of the world's few remaining truly pristine coral reefs.

Although urban and industrial pollution is thus far extremely localized around a few larger centers, and unlikely to increase rapidly, runoff from deforestation in several corners of PNG is increasingly a problem. Similarly, sediment and toxic runoff from mining operations threaten local reefs. In an environmental double-whammy, wholesale removal of virgin tropical rainforest causes New Guinean hillsides to migrate to sea, where they settle on and potentially smother coastal reefs.

The Nature Conservancy and its lead partner, Mahonia Na Dari, have established an active educational program that teaches a group of 20 local high school students and visiting school groups about the sea and its importance to them, their future children, their country, and the world. Along the way, these representatives of PNG's new generation learn environmental monitoring techniques and are reminded of their own culture's tradition of sustainability - a land (and sea) ethic that is slowly being lost. The program has been so successful that Mahonia Na Dari now works with PNG's Department of Education in developing national environmental studies curricula. Such educational effort is vital to PNG's future because only a populace knowledgeable of the character of their natural surroundings, and of their ecological and social importance, has a decent chance of fending off those who would corrupt and exploit rather than conserve.

You may have already read or heard of Kimbe Bay's underwater wonderland, or perhaps visited it yourself. If not, I'm afraid that no mere sequence of descriptive words that I can come up with could ever do the place justice. Born and raised on the shores of Kimbe Bay, my enthused ravings about the place may be easily dismissed as natural bias. Fair enough. But let me point out just one unassailable fact: Kimbe Bay ranks near the top of the list of the world's most diverse marine habitats. Papua New Guinea's marine biodiversity, in general, is rivaled only by parts of the neighboring Indonesian archipelago and may well steal the title of Coral Capital of the World from what's left of the Philippines' reefs. Any way you cut it, PNG is a land of superlatives - you name it and the odds are good that PNG has more of it than any other place.

As a storehouse of "hyperdiversity," PNG's waters have value far beyond their inherent aesthetic worth, their barely-explored potential as a source of cures to some of humankind's most debilitating ills, and their value as a living resource to the people who live beside them. Terrestrially and below the waterline, PNG is a global treasure, and Kimbe Bay remains as much a state of mind as a place - a cathedral to nature that quietly inspires reverence.

Shannon Seeto
Kimbe Bay Marine Program Coordinator
and
 Shane Paterson, Ph.D.