The Pacific Island nations often cited as the most likely to disappear because of rising sea levels include Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.
Kiribati has a population of just over 100,000. The Marshall Islands about 52,000. And Tuvalu close to 10,000.
The problem for small Pacific Island nations is that on a world scale they don’t count.
The only leverage they have is morality and common humanity.
When Micronesians sought justice and redress, the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger is reported as saying “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”
“Many of us from the Pacific Islands are old enough to remember how our small populations were used in the past to justify some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in the form of atomic and nuclear testing,” says Teresia Teaiwa.
Teaiwa is senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.
“Today, all we have to challenge the giant perpetrators of climate change are moral arguments. And a bit of hyperbole,” she says.
Recently the outgoing President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, compared climate change to trans-Atlantic slavery.
Was he really comparing climate change to nearly 400 years of brutalising enslavement of peoples stolen and sold out of Africa? Among them my maternal ancestors, Teaiwa asked.
Teaiwa is of Kiribati and African American ethnicity.
“Anote Tong’s speech helped me focus my reflections in a way that I ended up appreciating.”
“He made me think about slavery and climate change in simultaneously personal and systemic ways,” she said.
Tong said slavery “was a system that was justified solely by its profitability.”
“Morality was all that opponents of slavery had to argue against slave plantation economics.”
This is the same with climate change, Tong argued.
Climate change is the consequence of a system justified solely by its profitability.
The fossil fuel and coal industries, for example, are profitable.
But they’re also immoral.
They’re reaping profits for the few, while spreading the costs around the world.
“If we are to learn anything additional about the abolition of slavery that might be useful to our struggle with climate change, it is probably this: abolition was achieved in what must have seemed like a glacial pace to slaves all around the world.”
“And the most painful truth is that slavery has not been abolished.”
“There are more trafficked and enslaved labourers today than there have ever been in human history.”
“We have been and continue to be slaves to economic systems that are and always will be the ruin of us.”
Source
- e-tangata.co.nz
- Image: itelegraph.co.uk
