New Caledonia

New Caledonia is island biogeography taken to its logical extreme—a Gondwanan fragment adrift in the Pacific for 85 million years, evolving in such isolation that 74% of its 3,371 plant species exist nowhere else on Earth. This biological uniqueness extends to its economy with equally dangerous consequences: 90% of exports come from a single resource, nickel. The territory holds roughly 10% of global nickel reserves, embedded in ultramafic soils that created both the endemic flora and the mining economy. When Indonesia flooded global markets with cheaper nickel in 2024, New Caledonia's production collapsed by 52%, the Koniambo mine shuttered, and nearly 24,000 workers—a third of the private sector—faced unemployment.

The parallel to island evolution runs deeper than metaphor. Just as the endemic kagu bird lost the ability to fly because it faced no predators, New Caledonia's economy lost diversification capacity because nickel revenues masked the need. France provides the subsidy equivalent of ecological rescue—a €200 million bailout in 2024—but this creates source-sink dynamics where the territory cannot survive without metropolitan support. The 2024 riots that killed 14 people and caused €2 billion in damage emerged from this dependency: indigenous Kanaks, 40% of the population, fear electoral reforms that would permanently minoritize them in their ancestral homeland.

The July 2025 Bougival Accord attempted synthesis—a 'State of New Caledonia' within France, with its own nationality and foreign policy powers. But like hybrid species struggling to reproduce, the political compromise satisfied neither camp. The independence coalition withdrew support within a month, and the scheduled 2026 referendum has been abandoned. New Caledonia demonstrates how resource monocultures and colonial path dependence can lock a territory into evolutionary traps from which even political imagination struggles to escape.