Nantucket: The World’s Most Exclusive Sinking Lifeboat
Nantucket—an island whose name sounds like a sneeze and whose property prices make Swiss bankers weep—has quietly become the world’s most exclusive lifeboat. While the rest of the planet trades memes about climate apocalypse, the global elite have been rehearsing for it on this 14-by-3.5-mile sandbar 30 miles off Cape Cod. Their rehearsal, naturally, involves purchasing shingled mansions that sit just six feet above the rising Atlantic, a level of optimism usually reserved for people who also buy NFTs.
From Tokyo to Timbuktu, the island’s brand is now shorthand for “I have more money than introspection.” A single waterfront teardown recently traded for $25 million, a sum that could vaccinate a small nation but instead will house a hedge-fund manager’s dog-walker. Locals, who still remember when cranberry bogs outnumbered Lamborghinis, have responded with the traditional New England protest: passive-aggressive lawn signs reading “Welcome to the Vineyard—No, the Other One.”
Yet Nantucket’s absurdity is also a global weather vane. The same nor’easters that rattle its triple-glazed windows are now drowning fishing villages in Bangladesh. The same Gulf Stream that keeps the island’s roses blooming in November is stalling, prompting German climate scientists to coin the term “Nantucket Syndrome”—the delusion that wealth can outrun physics. When a storm sliced the island in two last winter, CNN ran split-screen footage: on the left, billionaires sipping Barolo in candlelit cellars; on the right, Haitian refugees bailing out their rafts with bare hands. Same ocean, different deck chairs.
The island’s infrastructure is a master class in late-stage capitalism. A gallon of milk costs more than a barrel of Brent crude; the fire department drives trucks imported from Switzerland because, apparently, American ladders aren’t chic enough. The airport’s private-jet queue backs up to such lengths that pilots idle long enough to finish Proust—though most passengers prefer the executive-summary version. Meanwhile, the ferry that brings over the people who actually clean the mansions still runs on diesel from 1987, an irony not lost on the Brazilian au pairs who spend three hours vomiting into Nantucket Sound every Sunday night.
Internationally, Nantucket has become a geopolitical Rorschach test. Chinese investors view it as a hedge against their own property crash—buy a cottage, get a democracy included. Russian oligarchs treat it as a convenient place to park wealth while sanctions lawyers argue over the definition of “frozen assets.” An Emirati prince recently tried to install a retractable roof over his estate so his falcons could hunt in any weather; the conservation commission denied the permit, proving that even on an island floating in money, there are limits—mainly aesthetic.
And then there is the whale in the room, or what’s left of it. Nantucket’s historic whaling industry once lit the world’s lamps; now the only things being harpooned are interest rates. A Japanese delegation visited last summer to study “heritage branding,” hoping to repackage Fukushima-adjacent seafood as artisanal. They left inspired, though slightly confused as to why the locals still toast “to a dead whale or a stove boat” while sipping $40 lobster rolls.
As COP delegates in distant conference halls debate carbon credits, Nantucket’s high tide line creeps imperceptibly closer to the infinity pools. The island’s solution? A $900 million plan to pump sand from offshore and spray it like artisanal dandruff onto eroding beaches—an approach that works roughly as well as using a Chanel handbag to bail the Titanic. Still, the project has been applauded in Davos as “innovative resilience,” which is how the ultra-rich spell “denial.”
In the end, Nantucket is less a place than a parable: a charming, cedar-shingled warning that the world is dividing into those who can afford rising seas and those who will simply sink. The rest of us, watching from our cheaper, drier corners of the planet, can take solace in one cosmic joke: the same tides that threaten to swallow the island also keep its real estate prices buoyant. Nature, it turns out, has a wicked sense of liquidity.
