Islands of the Gods (6-minute Video)

In the northwestern waters of Lake Victoria, 84 islands tell a story of paradise vanishing.

These are the Ssese Islands in Uganda, where 66,000 people reside at the intersection of economic development and environmental distress.

The largest island, Bugala, stretches over 40 kilometers. For generations, the Baganda people called these the "Islands of the Gods." The name Ssese comes from the tsetse flies that once kept them isolated and protected.

That protection ended in 2003.

The Ugandan government launched the Vegetable Oil Development Project to make the country self-sufficient, and palm oil plantations became the prominent landscape feature.

This marked the beginning of rapid economic and environmental transformation. In less than two decades, isolation became integration, paradise became profit, as the forests were cleared and cut down.

Twenty-five thousand acres of land on Bugala Island alone have been converted into palm oil plantations.

That's over one-third of the entire island, rainforest replaced by monoculture.