Science writer J. Madeleine Nash returns to the Maldives and in this first-person account writes, "Exactly where, I find myself wondering, does the sea end and the land begin?" She says the capital of the Republic of Maldives, about 400 miles southwest of the southern tip of India, "might just as well have been built on a lily pond, so low does it ride in the water."

The Maldives' nearly 2,000 islands, "arguably the lowest-lying country in the world" has an average elevation of slightly more than three feet above sea level. "What's considered high ground tops out at under 10 ft.," Nash writes. She writes that public awareness of climate change "has grown significantly" over the past two decades, and "evidence that temperatures are rising now seems incontrovertible." But progress lags, she reports, in part because environmentalists during the past three-plus decades have been so successful in addressing other environmental problems. "It's harder to rile up the public than it once was, particularly when the problem seems so diffuse, the threat so distant."

Nash points to some faint causes of optimism for the Maldives and its population of some 300,000. But "the bad news: across a big swath of the glove, the sea is still rising, eroding what for low-lying places was already a slim margin of safety." She says that the loss of "living landforms" -- coral refs and wetlands -- is another bad omen. Pointing to a 1997-1998 El Niño that "ripped through the Indian Ocean like a forest fire," Nash writes that losses to coral reefs raise troubling questions about how those reefs might survive "as the world's oceans continue to warm." In some ways, she writes, "the 1998 bleaching epidemic was almost as shocking as the damage inflicted by the tsunami, for the reefs are more than passive bulwarks against the sea; they are also the beating heart of the country's economy."