Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands

To live in the Maldives is to live in one of two worlds. Either you belong to the capital — Malé, a micro-Manhattan in the Indian Ocean — or you are out in “the islands,” among the quietest and most remote villages this side of the Arctic tundra.

It is in these places — far from the archipelago’s walled-garden resort atolls, where no Maldivians actually dwell — that the country is picking between two visions of its future, like much of the rest of Asia, but more so.

The outer islands are steadily depopulating, as the appeal of…