Dense coconut palms and tropical vegetation line the shoreline of Strawn Island at Palmyra Atoll. Credits – Wikipedia
In December 2000, the three Fullard Leo brothers sold Palmyra to the Nature Conservancy for around thirty million dollars. By the 1990s, scientists studying the atoll’s reefs had begun making the case that Palmyra deserved permanent protection rather than continued private ownership. University of Hawaii researcher James Maragos, who had surveyed the old wartime debris sites and catalogued around a hundred coral species there, helped convince the family to allow further study and eventually championed its purchase, a story the Nature Conservancy still tells as central to its own history on the atoll. The sale did not end there. Within a year, most of the atoll’s land and surrounding waters were transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which now manages Palmyra as a national wildlife refuge and marine national monument. Where copra crews once worked the palm groves, scientists now track coral health, seabird colonies and coconut crabs, treating the atoll as a rare, mostly unspoiled baseline for how a Pacific reef system behaves without a resident human population. The arc for the atoll was simple: bought to grow coconuts, taken during wartime, returned through the courts and later sold for conservation. The Fullard Leo family’s decision to keep Palmyra out of commercial hands for much of the twentieth century, and their eventual willingness to sell it for conservation, shaped the fate of one of the most biologically rich atolls in American waters.
Today the only regular occupants are visiting researchers and conservancy staff, running a station powered largely by wind and solar energy.