¹ “United States Minor Outlying Islands” is the international designation (ISO 3166). The United States Code (48 U.S.C. sec. 1411) defines the islands as insular possessions “appertaining to the United States.”

² Calculations based on data from Marine Regions.

³ CIA World Factbook.

⁴ The act is at 48 U.S.C. sec. 1411-19.

⁵ For a discussion of guano's importance to 19th-century agriculture, see Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).

⁶ The actual number of islands resolves to 36 when duplicate claims and nonexistent islands are factored in. See “Places Claimed and/or Acquired under the U.S. Guano Islands Act,” in Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Oversees Expansion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 230-236.

⁷ Ibid., 159. For a firsthand perspective of a guano laborer, see the letters of J.M. Kailiopio in Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857-70,” Environmental History 17 (October 2012): 744-782.

⁸ Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82.

⁹ E. Behm, “Das Amerikanische Polynesien und die politischen Verhältnisse in den übrigen Theilen des Grossen Oceans im J. 1859,” Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 5 (1859): 173-194.

¹⁰ Two islands claimed by both countries, Canton and Enderbury, were shared from 1939 to 1979 under an agreement called the Anglo & American Consortium. Both islands were relinquished when Kiribati declared independence from the U.K. and the U.S. signed the Treaty of Tarawa.

¹¹ See U.S.S. Narragansett visit to Christmas Island in Edwin H. Bryan, American Polynesia and the Hawaiian Chain, rev. and enl. ed. (Honolulu: Tongg Pub. Co., 1942), 139. Cf. to Benson 's Lobos Islands incident in Great Guano Rush, 21-32.

¹² Laray Polk, “Lucky Dragon,” CounterPunch, April 5, 2007.

¹³ Nic Maclellan, Grappling with the Bomb: Britain's Pacific H-Bomb Tests (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), 36.

¹⁴ American Polynesia, 140.

¹⁵ For a complete history of this alliance see “The President—John F. Kennedy,” Grappling with the Bomb, 267-279.

¹⁶ Ibid., 242.

¹⁷ For residual problems with a similar treaty, the Treaty of Tokehega, see Gilbert Wong, “Swains Island Paradise Lost?” New Zealand Herald, November 10, 1990.

¹⁸ Calculation based on the 1923 Tanager Expedition survey (41.32 acres), reproduced in American Polynesia, and median measurements from 2017 satellite imagery (662.59 acres).

¹⁹ Katharine Q. Seelye, “Radioactive Dump on Pacific Wildlife Refuge Raises Liability Concerns,” New York Times, January 27, 2003.

²⁰ Jan TenBruggencate, “Army Completes Chemical Weapons Mission at Johnston,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 11 2001; Jon Mitchell, “25,000 barrels of Agent Orange Kept on Okinawa, U.S. Army Document Says,” The Japan Times, August 7, 2012.

²¹ For further complexity of the issue, see Fili Sagapolutele, “Gov. Lolo's Letter to DOI Cites Trump's ‘America First’ Policy as Hope for Our Tuna Industry,” Samoa News, July 17, 2017.

²² According to some sources Midway Islands (Middlebrook Islands and Shoal) weren't claimed under the Guano Islands Act. A summary of an expedition by Capt. Brooks, printed in the Polynesian, August 13, 1859, presents evidence to the contrary: “As an extensive deposit of guano was found on one of the islands, possession was taken of the group and notices left to that effect.” The Navy took formal possession of Midway on August 28, 1867.

²³ Juliet Eilperin, “Zinke Backs Shrinking More National Monuments and Shifting Management of 10,” Washington Post, December 5, 2017. See also Christopher Pala, “Loss of Federal Protections May Imperil Pacific Reefs, Scientists Warn,” New York Times, October 30, 2017.

²⁴ For obstacles to ratification, see Roncevert Almond, “U.S. Accession to the Law of the Sea Convention? A Challenge for America's Global Leadership,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 15, vol.13, no.2 (July 2017): 1-11.

²⁵ C.D. Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands.” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 780.

²⁶ In 1862, chemist J.D. Hague recorded six of the seven as inhabited by native populations in his article, “On Phosphatic Islands of the Pacific Ocean,” Am. Journ. Sci., 2nd ser., vol. 34, no.101 (September 1862): 224-243.

²⁷ U.S. State Department, Office of the Legal Advisor, “The Sovereignty of Guano Islands in Pacific Ocean,” vol. 3, ed. E.S. Rogers and Frederic A. Fisher (Washington, D.C., 1933): 570-976. Available online from the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library.

²⁸ The British didn't have a legal prohibition on mining inhabited islands, much to the detriment of Nauru and Ocean (Banaba) Islands. See Great Guano Rush, 137.

²⁹ The South Pacific Commission, now the Pacific Community, may have been more influential in post-war planning because it brought together Islanders “who accelerated regionalism's emergence.” See Steven R. Fischer, The History of the Pacific Islands, 2nd rev. ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013), 221.

³⁰ Other territories defined as U.S. possessions include the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. See 10 U.S.C. sec.101 and 37 U.S.C. sec. 101.

³¹ Lealaiauloto Aigaletaulealea Tauafiafi, “Pacific Celebrate U.S. Tuna Treaty Renewal: Why, How Much, and Who are the Winners?” Pacific Guardians, June 12, 2016; “Tokelau's Tuna Success—Testament to Pacific Solidarity's Multimillion Dollar Effect,” Pacific Guardians, August 12, 2016.

³² Latif Nasser, “When Island Nations Drown, Who Owns Their Seas?” Boston Globe, October 19, 2014.

³³ Soons, email comm., December 28, 2017. For discussion of what constitutes an island or a rock under UNCLOS, see T.Y. Wang, “Japan is Building Tiny Islands in the Philippine Sea,” Washington Post, May 20, 2016.

³⁴ James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Paul Hearty, Reto Ruedy, Maxwell Kelley, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, et al., “Ice Melt, Sea-Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2 °C Global Warming Could be Dangerous,” Atmos. Chem. Phys. 16, (March 2016): 3762.

³⁵ For more on the plight of Bikini Islanders, listen to Jack Niedenthal's interview with Koro Vaka'uta, Radio New Zealand, March 26, 2015; and his interview with Jenny Meyer, Radio New Zealand, August 7, 2015.

³⁶ Rayfuse, email comm., May 7, 2017.

³⁷ A.H.A. Soons, “The Effects of a Rising Sea Level on Maritime Limits and Boundaries,” Netherlands Intl. Law Review 37 (1990): 230.

³⁸ Law of the Sea Convention, Part VII, Sec. 1, Art. 87.

³⁹ Fiji presided over the UN Climate Change Conference (COP23) held in Bonn, Germany in 2017. Serafina Silaitoga, “Villagers to Move into New Homes,” The Fiji Times, January 15, 2014.

⁴⁰ “Climate Change Part of Refuge Ruling,”Radio New Zealand, August 4, 2014. To read more about Alesana and his family, see Anke Richter, “Hell and High Water: When Climate Change Comes Lapping at Your Door,” North & South, June 2017 (posted online here).

⁴¹ Jonathan Perlman, “NZ Plans Special Visa for Climate Refugees,” The Straits Times, December 11, 2017.

⁴² Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation And Vulnerability, Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. J. J. McCarthy, O. F. Canziani, N. A. Leary, D. J. Dokken, and K. S. White (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 867.

⁴³ Archaeological evidence suggests these islands were of significant cultural use by Polynesian long-distance voyagers. Bryan's American Polynesia describes ruins and objects associated with individual islands: Howland (paths, pits); Washington (ruins, stone work, canoe); Fanning (ruins, adzes, fishhook); Christmas (ruins); Malden (platforms, grave, house sites); Caroline (graves, adzes, temple platform, marae); Nassua (shell adzes, pearl-shell breast ornaments); Hull (ruins); Phoenix (ruins); and Sydney (ruins).

⁴⁴ Christian Parenti, “Military Soothsayers,” Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 13-20.