MB Civic

PALMYRA ATOLL

A SUPPLY SHIP docks at this remote Pacific atoll just once a year, delivering equipment and foodstuffs to sustain the full-time resident population — currently holding at five.

A few weeks ago, the ship brought something more unusual than its normal cargo: a satellite dish.

And with that high-tech device now ashore, the unspoiled tropical paradise of Palmyra, one of the most isolated and difficult places to get to on earth, is poised to move into the high-speed Internet world.

Therein lies a philosophical debate. Is the Internet compatible with a sanctuary whose very ethos lies in its detachment, its disconnect, from the world as we know it? Or is the Web’s arrival akin to an oil spill washing up on Palmyra’s shores?

It is no small question. Palmyra, part of the equatorial Line Islands 1,000 miles south of Hawaii and thousands more from the nearest land mass, is the only undeveloped, forested atoll left in the tropical Pacific. Its coral reefs support five times the number of species found in the Florida Keys, and its lush habitat is home to more than a million nesting seabirds and to the world’s largest land invertebrate, the rare coconut crab.

Palmyra was purchased by The Nature Conservancy in 2000 (it is the Conservancy’s staff on the atoll that currently numbers five), and it has since been designated a US National Wildlife Refuge. Until now, it has had no standard phones, TV, radio, or Internet, only a satellite phone.

None of the island’s unspoiled ecosystem will be damaged by Internet access, of course. But what will change is the contemplative experience of another kind of inhabitant of Palmyra: the humans. Why not link Palmyra’s status as a jewel-in-the-crown nature preserve with a parallel effort to preserve it as an archaic way of life for humans, sans Internet?

The answer lies in the conflict between science and civilization. Palmyra is used not only as a reservation, but as a research station for studying climate change, disappearing coral reefs, invasive species, and other environmental threats in the region known as an intertropical convergence zone. Left largely alone after the US Navy used it as an airbase and refueling station during World War II, Palmyra is best known, to the privileged environmentalists and scientists who know it at all, as a veritable petri dish for research and exploration.

For a scientist, an invitation to Palmyra is like box seats at Fenway Park on opening day. Researchers are put up in one-room bungalows with lights and ceiling fans powered by diesel generators. They eat communally and perform research in the new $1.5 million laboratory. The experience is hardly Spartan but, without communication capability, it is a place that time forgot. And the missing ingredient, Internet access, would make the research that much more meaningful.

I recently sailed into Palmyra’s blue-green lagoon on the brigantine Robert C. Seamans, a 135-foot-long tall ship operated by the Sea Education Association of Woods Hole. There were 11 crew members aboard, along with 22 college students doing an intensive marine biology “sea semester.” For these students born into the post-Internet world, it was a life experience to be on land with no possibility of contacting their families back home.

But that situation is not going to last. With high-speed Internet coming to Palmyra, the atoll will become wireless even before Boston does. Anyone will be able to surf the Net or e-mail. Indeed, Palmyra caretaker Matt Lange worries that Internet access will change the way people think, behave, and even talk while on the atoll.

Will the ethos of isolation on Palmyra be ruined by the Internet? Will visitors be less attentive to the atoll’s natural wonders when the real world is just a click away? Rather than sit around after dinner singing or leafing through old scrapbooks of the Navy’s stay in Palmyra as the Seamans’s crew did, will conversation veer to the newsy or the worldly — the latest baseball scores or missteps by the Bush administration? Indeed, will Lange, like a vigilant parent, have to resort to setting rules about computer use so the Internet doesn’t come to dominate life?

In the end, Internet access will inexorably change the Palmyra experience. When a visitor uses the Web, the experience will be the same as everywhere else. And that will make it less of a special place.