by Vince Beiser
“The World was millions of dollars worth of branded sand,” says Adnan Dawood. He should know. For several years while the World was under construction, Dawood was in charge of marketing and public relations—the man tasked with selling the world on the idea of the World. In 2003, he had just graduated with a marketing degree from California State University, Fullerton, and had taken a humdrum job with a local tile company. Dubai was just getting started on its most grandiose projects, and Dawood figured it would be a more exciting scene to be part of than selling floor tile in Southern California. He convinced Nakheel to hire him and rode the wave upward.
Dawood is a trim American-educated Muslim of Indian descent in his late thirties whose family came to Dubai when he was two years old. He left Nakheel in 2009, but he loves talking about his time there—the big money, celebrities, glamour.
Dawood started at Nakheel in 2005, while the sand was still being dredged. The islands, measuring between just under three acres to more than ten acres, were priced from $15 million to $50 million. Sales were going slowly. “We had a logo, we knew what we wanted to call it, but that was it,” Dawood said. “There was no strategy.” Dawood decided to take aim at a fat target: the vanity of the rich and powerful. “We started telling people they couldn’t buy in,” he said. Nakheel claimed that each year only fifty individuals, chosen on the basis of their ‘achievement,’ were invited to buy an island. “This was in 2006, 2007, when ego and cash were a deadly combination. The moment we said, ‘You can’t have it,’ everyone wanted it.”
Dawood and his team touted the islands as the ultimate luxury home for the one-percenter who already has everything, a private Bond-villain island nation. They played up the illusion of elite exclusivity by piling on glamour. They coaxed Annie Leibovitz into doing a photo shoot with Roger Federer on the islands. They gave well-publicized tours to celebrities from Michael Jackson to Malcolm Gladwell to Donna Karan and Donald Trump’s son Eric. A cunning look creeps into Dawood’s wide-set eyes as he details his tactics. The press loved speculating about who might buy which “countries,” especially the United Kingdom. So when Dawood learned publicity-happy billionaire Richard Branson was coming to Dubai to promote his airline, he proposed a twofer. Dawood rounded up a bunch of foreign journalists and took them on a boat out to the World. As they drew near the top of Europe, everyone noticed a classic English phone booth sitting in the sand at the water’s edge. Suddenly out popped Branson, dressed in a Union Jack–striped suit and waving a British flag overhead for good measure. The picture got both the World and Virgin a torrent of giddy publicity. “The funniest thing is, he was actually on Denmark,” said Dawood. “The UK island wasn’t even built yet!”
The celebrity rumor-mongering was such an effective attention-getter that at one point Dawood leaked word to a local news website that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were buying Ethiopia. Then he called some bigger publications to make sure they saw the website’s anonymously sourced article. Within days, outlets from CNN to People magazine were breathlessly reporting on the couple’s latest excursion to “Africa.” In the end, it didn’t really matter to anyone that the story was completely made up.
What did matter to Nakheel was that the islands started selling. By 2007, some 70 percent of the islands had been sold. Lauren MacDonald, a Canadian marketing executive, was working in London for Pepsico in 2008 when she got what sounded like an amazing job offer. Nakheel wanted her to come work on the World. They offered to triple her salary, which would also be tax-free in Dubai. It seemed like a no-brainer.
But then came the crash in 2008. “I signed with Nakheel three weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed,” she said. “I kept calling Nakheel, saying ‘It seems the situation is terrible!’ They said, ‘No problem.’ Well, within three months, that company went from four thousand employees to six hundred. I worked there for a year and a half, and the whole time I didn’t know if I’d have a job the next day.”
She did manage to sell two islands, each for tens of millions of dollars, she said—Taiwan to an Italian hotelier and Iceland to a German. “They were über-rich individuals who felt it was time to buy because you could get bargain-basement prices.”
Just as the World had been getting in gear, the river of cash that had birthed it suddenly dried up. Out in the actual world, the financial crash of 2008 wiped out billions of dollars of investor capital. A pile of naked sand in the middle of the Persian Gulf suddenly didn’t seem like such a great investment after all. Dubai’s entire real estate market tanked in spectacular fashion. At one point, the emirate was so broke it had to borrow $10 billion from its wealthy neighbor, Abu Dhabi.
Nakheel laid off hundreds of employees, including Dawood. Several executives were arrested in ensuing corruption probes, resulting in prison sentences for at least two of them.
The artificial island building basically ground to a halt. All the sand had been put in place for the Palm Jebel Ali, but that was as far as the project got. It remained an empty, artfully shaped pile of grains, unblemished by a single road or structure. The proposed Palm Deira was put on hold. And the World stopped.
Developers went broke. Some went to jail for bouncing millions of dollars in checks. Investors filed lawsuits over hotels and villas that never got built. At least one committed suicide.22 Kleindienst’s company nearly went bankrupt. “It was very stressful. I had to lay off people who were good friends. I had to tell them, ‘Guys, you have to find another job,’ but they knew there was no other job to go to,” Kleindienst told Britain’s Daily Mail in 2010. “For many people the Dubai dream was over.”
For people concerned about the natural environment, though, it was more like a respite from a nightmare. Building new land in the water may be good business, but it is brutal on the ecosystem. “Land reclamation is one of the top three causes of damage to the Persian Gulf,” said John Burt, a marine biologist at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus who has been studying the gulf ecosystem for years.
For starters, pulling those huge armadas of sand up off the ocean floor destroys the habitat of whatever was living there. “Engineers call them ‘borrow areas,’ though they never return what they’re borrowing,” said Burt. “They have a lot of great euphemisms for environmental degradation.” The borrow areas are typically just sandy bottoms with little evident life. Still, says Burt, “I’m sure there are organisms there that just haven’t been documented.”
All the sediment that gets stirred up by these dredging operations also clouds up the surrounding water for what can be a long time. It’s the same issue that bedevils beach renourishment projects in Florida, only on an even larger scale. The increased turbidity—the amount of sand and silt suspended in the water—can essentially suffocate fish, crustaceans, and other creatures. It also blocks sunlight from reaching plants deep below the surface.23 That’s not just a concern for academics like Burt: an island-building project in eastern Indonesia was put on hold in early 2017 after a series of protests by local fishers who feared the dredging would wipe out local fish stocks.
Then there’s the issue of what all that sand gets put on top of. The Palm Jumeirah was built on a flat, sandy bottom. The millions of tons of sand that made the Palm Jebel Ali, however, were dumped right on top of three square miles of coral reef.24 The reef had been designated a protected area, but such considerations tend to take a back seat to development in the gulf. In nearby Bahrain, a far bigger coral reef has been almost completely destroyed, largely thanks to land reclamation.25 Other projects in the gulf have buried oyster and sea grass beds.26
The man-made landmasses also shift the pattern of the gulf’s currents such that they no longer carry sand to existing beaches. As a result, Dubai has had to spend millions in recent years to replenish some of its mainland beaches with sand trucked in from construction sites.
“Humans will continue developing coastlines, but there are ways to do it more sustainably,” said Burt. “Within one
or two generations we’ll have lost most of the ecosystems along the coast. I’m not a citizen of the UAE. But if I were, I’d be pretty upset about what I was leaving behind for my kids and grandkids.”
Brendan Jack, a Nakheel spokesperson, was quick to assure me about the company’s concern for the environment. Nakheel transplanted some of the coral from the reef now buried under the Palm Jebel Ali, used independent consultants to find areas where it could extract sand with minimal damage, and made Van Oord set up underwater curtains to limit the spread of silt during dredging, he told me. And as a bonus, the rocky breakwaters around the islands are now home to all kinds of marine life.
“True, there are impacts, and it’s not the same as before,” he said. “But that’s true of any construction activity. That’s just reflective of human activity anywhere on the planet. It’s all pros and cons. We try to minimize the impacts and maximize the benefits.”
It’s Jack’s job to explain or excuse the actions of his employer, but he does have a point. Any kind of development entails environmental costs. The world can take the loss of a coral reef here or a fish habitat there, tragic though they may be. But focusing only on such local impacts is missing the forest for the trees. The bigger question is, can the planet handle the whole way of life that Dubai both represents and embodies—the air-conditioned, car-dependent, energy-guzzling, resource-intensive “good life”? With that in mind, it’s worth knowing that residents of the United Arab Emirates lead the world in per capita consumption of water and electricity, and in waste production. These desert dwellers use 145 gallons of water per person per day, the highest rate in the world.27
Meanwhile, the global economic recovery set the money train rolling again. Kleindienst’s investors returned, and construction started up again in 2013. The other islands are also showing signs of life. The Palm Jebel Ali was still on hold in late 2015, but building was under way on the Palm Deira, now recast as Deira Islands, a smaller, more conventional-looking development including a marina, hotels, apartments, and acres of malls. In early 2017, another group of investors announced plans to build two new artificial islands, adding another 1.4 miles to Dubai’s coast.
On the yacht ride back from the World, we relaxed on the upper deck on buttery white leather couches, enjoying the sunshine and warm breeze. A demure young woman in a white uniform poured us Moët in flute glasses. Bowls of fruit, nuts, olives, and, inexplicably, Doritos were scattered around. (I munched on a few of the chips, because when would be the next time I’d have a chance to pair Doritos with champagne?)
I had a last question for Kleindienst. “In a lot of the international press, even among people here in Dubai, people laugh at the idea of the World,” I said. “They say it’s a failure, a big joke. Does that bother you? Do you think about that?”
Kleindienst paused for a moment, then responded with a short lesson about modern Dubai’s short history. “The father of Sheikh Mohammed, Sheikh Rashid, he decided to build Jebel Ali port,” he said. “When he decided to build this port, his people asked him if he’s crazy. Why he is building out there this huge port? Today it’s one of the biggest and busiest ports in the world. Attached to it is a free zone with more than two thousand companies. And this is a cornerstone of Dubai’s success. Nobody is laughing about him today anymore. And when they see [the Heart of Europe] built, nobody will laugh anymore.”
The next day, I went to see the Palm Jumeirah, then the only completed version of all Dubai’s artificial waterborne Edens. It has continued to grow ever more elaborate and lavish. After a look at some of the more opulent hotels, I visited the home of Carrie Hart, a slender, elegant entrepreneur, festival promoter, and devoted Burning Man attendee originally from Minnesota. She moved to Dubai a few years ago with her oil trader husband and their two small children.
We sipped mint tea and snacked on delicate little pastries on the poolside verandah of her marble-floored villa on Frond F of the Palm Jumeirah. A few yards away, the golden sands of the artificial beach sloped gently away into the turquoise waters of the gulf. A few hundred yards across the water lay Frond E, edged by a similar beach and lined with a similarly lush collection of homes. Behind them, back on the mainland, loomed the skyscrapers of Dubai.
Hart and her husband were attracted here from London, where they had been living, by the warm weather, safe streets, and generally high quality of life. “We decided to live on the Palm because why live in the desert when you can live by the sea?” she said. Her kids go to a private school and play ice hockey in the Dubai Mall’s indoor rink. It’s very safe; each frond has a gate monitored by a guard. Her biggest worry is that her children might get hit by one of the Ferraris or Lamborghinis that her wilder neighbors like to zoom up and down the frond’s single road.
It’s easy to arrange such a Xanadu when you build the entire place, including the land it sits on, from scratch. On the Palm, everything is artificial except the air. The land you walk on, the desalinated seawater you drink, the imported foods you eat—everything was brought there and manufactured by human hands. And so much of it is sand: sand forms the ground under your feet, sand makes the walls around you, sand is in the plate glass sliding patio door that looks out onto your sandy beach.
“I just love it,” said Hart. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
* * *
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In Dubai, the conversion of underwater sand into artificial land is making developers rich and wealthy buyers happy. But a few thousand miles away, the same process has spawned an extraordinarily dangerous confrontation between the world’s two mightiest nations.
Five hundred miles off the southern coast of China is a hotly disputed patch of the South China Sea. Some 10 percent of the world’s fish come from here, and perhaps more critically, billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas lie under the seafloor.28 It’s also one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. So it’s no surprise that virtually every country in the region—China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines—lays claim to a scattering of rocks and reefs called the Spratly Islands that sit strategically in that area.
Since the 1970s, in an effort to bolster their claims, most of those countries have enlisted dredged-up sand from the seafloor to build up one or another of these tiny islands to a size that could accommodate an airstrip. These were relatively small additions; the biggest before 2014 was a reclamation project by Vietnam that added sixty acres of land to its outposts.29
Then China, which holds seven Spratly outcroppings (one of which it seized from Vietnam in a 1988 clash that left dozens of soldiers dead), decided to assert itself.
In recent years, along with its vast, state-directed expansions of road and rail networks, urban infrastructure, and practically every other aspect of its economy, China has also built up an armada of oceangoing dredging ships, among the biggest and most technologically advanced in the world. It buys some ships from abroad, but increasingly manufactures its own. The country’s annual dredging capacity—the volume of sand and muck it can haul up from underwater—has more than tripled since 2000, to more than a billion cubic meters. That’s more than any other nation.30
The pride of this fleet are enormous, technologically advanced craft called self-propelled cutter-suction dredges. A boom arm, capped with a cutter head—a large steel ball studded with teeth—protrudes from the bottom of these ships down into the seabed. The ball spins around, its teeth tearing up sand, rocks, and whatever else is down there, while a built-in pump sucks the grains up into the ship. The slurry is then shot through a pipeline floating on the water’s surface, which can extend for miles, onto a reef or rock, where it piles up to create new dry land. China’s mightiest dredge, the biggest in Asia, was launched in 2017. Dubbed “the magical island-maker,” it can haul up nearly 8,000 cubic yards of sand and other material per hour from depths up to 100 feet.31
China has made the manipulati
on and movement of sand into a potent tool of statecraft. In late 2013, Beijing set a fleet of ships to work expanding its pieces of territory in the Spratly Islands. In satellite photos, the ships look like a flock of confused sperm32 swimming away from the ova of the growing islands, the tails of their pipelines flailing behind them. Within eighteen months, these ships built nearly 3,000 acres of new land. That’s seventeen times more land than all the other regional claimants have added to the islands in the past forty years combined.33
This de facto territorial expansion set off alarms from Manila and Hanoi to Washington, DC, for several reasons. For one, all that land-building has been calamitous for the nearby environment. Most of the coral and other life-forms on the seven reefs themselves were, of course, destroyed by the mountains of sand dumped on top of them. The dredging also churned up sand and other debris that clouded the waters for miles around, harming other nearby reefs that provided habitat for countless fish, as well as endangered giant clams, dugongs, and several species of turtle. In 2016, an international tribunal convened to address the Philippines’ complaints about China’s activities in the South China Sea produced a study that concluded “China’s artificial island-building activities . . . have caused devastating and long-lasting damage to the marine environment.”34 An American marine biologist called it “the most rapid rate of permanent loss of coral reef area in human history.”35
But even more disturbing than the new islands’ environmental impact are their geopolitical implications. Almost as soon as the sand was dry, China began building military bases on the Spratlys. The armed forces have installed antimissile weaponry, runways capable of handling military aircraft, structures that US officials believe are designed to house long-range surface-to-air missile launchers, and port facilities that may be capable of accommodating nuclear submarines. “This is extremely worrying for nearby countries,” says Gregory Poling, an expert on the South China Sea with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They now have Chinese air and naval bases right next door. China is establishing de facto control, so that it won’t matter what the international community says.”
