THE LAST PETROSTATE

GUYANA IS BETTING ON A PARADOX. THE CARIBBEAN NATION WANTS TO CASH IN ON OIL. IT PROMISES TO USE THOSE BILLIONS TO PREPARE FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

- MONTE REEL

GO TO THE SEAWALL IN GEORGETOWN LATE ON A Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find Guyana with its guard down. Everyone’s “ liming”—a term that washed onto this South American shore decades ago from Trinidad that means hanging out, talking about nothing. To lime isn’t to deny the existence of challenges or threats, it’s to temporarily deny them the power to darken your state of mind.

Families sit side by side on the waist-high concrete wall, feet dangling, the sea breathing hard behind their backs. Across the shoreline road, vendors under nylon canopies sell fried fish and plantain chips. Just after the sun sinks into the water, the rear doors of minivans swing open, speakers pulsing with reggae and hip-hop. Every now and then, the sea asserts itself, slamming against the wall, spraying a salty mist. Less often, maybe a couple times a year, it sends waves all the way to the road. On very rare occasions— like that unforgettable January back in 2005—tides and rain conspire to swallow the seawall whole, deluge nearby homes and carry offsome of the people there.

Theoretically, every one of Guyana’s 800,000 or so residents could claim for themselves about 66 acres of real estate inland, safe from the sea. Much of that land is forested, some of it full of rare wonders, like endangered polychromatic tree frogs and waterfalls spilling from green plateaus. In reality, roughly 90% of the population is crammed into the narrow floodplain hugging the Caribbean. Almost half of them live in Georgetown, the waterlogged capital, most of which sprawls across a coastal basin that’s about 7 feet below sea level and depends on a network of drainage canals to remain habitable.