{"id":16278,"date":"2023-05-02T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/the-surf-bros-the-villagers-the-wave-doctor-the-tech-money-and-the-fight-for-fijis-soul\/"},"modified":"2023-05-02T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T12:00:00","slug":"the-surf-bros-the-villagers-the-wave-doctor-the-tech-money-and-the-fight-for-fijis-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/the-surf-bros-the-villagers-the-wave-doctor-the-tech-money-and-the-fight-for-fijis-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surf Bros, the Villagers, the Wave Doctor, the Tech Money, and the Fight for Fiji\u2019s Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<h2><strong>I. THE SURFERS AND THE BOATMAN<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p class=\"has-dropcap\">Five years ago, Ratu \u201cJona\u201d Joseva, a 32-year-old Indigenous Fijian boat taximan, and two Aussie lifelong surfing bros, Navrin Fox and Woody Jack, bought an overgrown five-acre patch of coastline on Malolo, among the most popular of Fiji\u2019s more than 330 islands. With its crescent beaches, Seussian palms, and proximity to the international airport, the roadless three-mile-long island has become a post-lockdown playground for billionaire yachties and privacy-seeking celebs. During my visit last July as Joseva and I puttered along the coast in his small fishing boat, we were lost in the shadow of a Millennium Falcon\u2013size $45 million superyacht.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">But Malolo also attracts another crowd: surfers like Fox and Jack who come to ride *the wave\u2014*the one Kelly Slater has called his favorite\u2014Cloudbreak. After Fox and Jack met Joseva on his boat taxi on a surf trip around 2014, the three men decided to go in on a sliver of undeveloped land, the rights of which were controlled by Joseva\u2019s village. They secured a 99-year lease for $50,000. While the rest of the island was going high-end, they imagined building four little eco-friendly bures for their families and friends.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Jack, a laid-back 42-year-old with long curly blond hair stuffed under his red baseball cap and maritime tattoos on his arms, is a surfboard shaper in Yamba, Australia. He saw the Fiji property as his home away from home. \u201cWe wanted our kids to grow up here,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<aside aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"PullQuoteEmbedWrapper-sc-efPupL iopJjs\">\n<div class=\"PullQuoteEmbedContent-sc-fzOJTx jOXYkQ\">\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cI don\u2019t care how smart you think you are. You don\u2019t go ripping up a pristine reef.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p class=\"paywall\">As Joseva steers us onto the shore, his dogs leap from the boat looking for mullet. They come up empty. \u201cNo fish,\u201d Joseva explains. That\u2019s because there\u2019s no coral either, and without it, the ecosystem crumbles. What was once a pristine coastal reef is now a graveyard. A 25-foot-deep channel cuts a 100-foot path through to the beach, where a large graffitied barge spills with rusting junk. Nearby, a gate runs through the center of their leased land, with deserted security booths on either side. A sloppily painted sign hangs from a post with a misspelled warning: \u201cNo Trespas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The <em>Walking Dead<\/em> vibes only worsen along the zombie reef\u2019s trail. Dozens of giant rusting construction trucks, their windows blown out by cyclones, line the road, leeching fluid into what\u2019s left of the mangroves. Corroding steel girders and pipes litter the brush. Stacks of lumber rot into a stream turned toxic green. It\u2019s like this for more than a mile of coastline, marked by warning signs in Chinese. At the end, there\u2019s a small, fading strip of signs illustrating what this site was to be: a 61-acre tropical wonderland of 370 thatch-roofed bures, sparkling pools, and beachfront bungalows. It was going to be the largest resort in Fiji and the island nation\u2019s first casino, and its name was Freesoul.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">In 2018, Fox, Jack, and Joseva discovered that the mysterious builders behind the project had illegally seized their land and were willing to resort to violence to defend it. Five years later, their battle has become a full-on war for the heart of paradise that\u2019s as bizarre as Fiji is beautiful, a parable of powerful international developers, pearl farmers, Silicon Valley billionaires, and a surfer-scientist who promises that he can solve coastal degradation <em>and<\/em> provide rideable breaks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">At the center of it all are the locals fighting not only for their own environment, but for the future of a planet already underwater.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"paywall\"><strong>II. THE LAND<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cBula!\u201d A dozen village elders and chiefs clap as they exclaim the Fijian greeting, \u201cwelcome.\u201d The men, among the hereditary leaders of the nation\u2019s 70 major clans, wear their formal short-sleeve, button-up tropical shirts and dark sulus. They\u2019re gathered for a <em>talanoa,<\/em> a traditional forum of dialogue among the Pacific people for airing concerns and resolving conflicts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">It\u2019s midmorning in July 2022, and we\u2019re in a large blue pearl-farming shack, built on stilts over a still, sparkling bay of Taveuni. Lush, volcanic, and remote, Taveuni is famous for its robust reefs, kaleidoscopic corals, and bountiful marine life. It\u2019s the fear of losing their environment to destructive developers that has brought the villagers together. Because, as they learned, one of the consultants on the Freesoul project now had designs to take over their reef too. \u201cOur marine reserve to us is our life, it\u2019s our heartbeat, the heartbeat of every person,\u201d says Joseph Stolz, the 63-year-old Fijian spokesperson for the chiefs. \u201cYou don\u2019t come to me and say, \u2018I will stop your heartbeat.\u2019 I\u2019ll kill you first before you stop me,\u201d he says, \u201cthat is how dangerous the issue is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The battle of the Freesoul development starts with the Indigenous Fijians. They comprise about half of the million people who populate the country. Most of the rest are the descendants of the Indian laborers who served the former British colonial rulers. The Indigenous locals like Joseva live off the land in poor coastal villages\u2014growing kava roots, hunting for pigs, fishing for wahoo. This turned crucial during the first years of the coronavirus; it shuttered the nation\u2019s more than $1 billion tourism industry, which accounts for 40 percent of the $4.3 billion Fijian GDP.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/style\/2023\/05\/fiji-surf-wars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I. THE SURFERS AND THE BOATMAN Five years ago, Ratu \u201cJona\u201d Joseva, a 32-year-old Indigenous Fijian boat taximan, and two Aussie lifelong surfing bros, Navrin Fox and Woody Jack, bought an overgrown five-acre patch of coastline on Malolo, among the most popular of Fiji\u2019s more than 330 islands. With its crescent beaches, Seussian palms, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1717,1718],"class_list":{"0":"post-16278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-fiji"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}