On this day, August 22, 1988, two Australian scientists warned that eventually Australia might need to take in Pacific islanders whose homes had disappeared under the waves.
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 350.49 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Australia may need to take in a wave of environmental refugees from coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans, according to two scientists.
The islands’ inhabitants face being displaced by a likely rise in sea level due to the greenhouse effect, they say.
The prospect was raised yesterday at the 26th Congress of International Geographical Union in Sydney by Dr Peter Roy, of the NSW Department of Mineral Resources, and Dr John Connell, of the University of Sydney.
Quiddington, P. 1988. Scientists warn of islands’ peril. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 August
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans mentioned this sort of thing. Did nowt significant, but it came up in at least one of his speeches, iirc.
Why this matters.
The levels of injustice, the harm caused to future generations. It’s just mind-boggling.
What happened next?
Australia has basically continued to shit on everyone’s future.
On this day, July 18, 2012, a video of the poem “Tell Them” by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner was uploaded, as part of the London 2012 Poetry Parnassus
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet from the Marshall Islands. She is known for her poetry about climate change and its effects on her home islands in the Pacific, and has spoken at high level events such as the UN Climate Summit in 2014.
Jetnil-Kijiner doesn’t talk about climate change as a new phenomenon, but as another part of a history of violence in the Pacific. She weaves justice arguments that connect 20th century nuclear testing; militarism; rising sea levels, and forced migration.
In her poem ‘Tell Them’, recorded for Studio Revolt, she talks with love about the Marshall Islands, addressing a friend who lives elsewhere, asking them to pass on her message about the country people might not have heard of:
Show them where it is on a map Tell them we are a proud people toasted dark brown as the carved ribs of a tree stump
Tell them we are descendants of the finest navigators in the world
This message is not only one of pride and love for home, but also a warning and a call to action. Because the Marshall Islands are known outside of the Pacific. But they are known as an example, along with Tuvalu and Kiribati, of the ‘sinking islands’.
What Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry does that is so important, is speak on behalf of islands that are so often written off as ‘doomed’, or a ‘sacrifice zone’ for a capitalist global economy, and islanders that so easily get framed as climate refugees, as if the uninhabitability of their islands is now inevitable; unpreventable.
What I argue in my own research, is that this doomed ‘extinction narrative’ tells the story as if it is already over. Like Jetnil-Kijiner, I trace a history of violence and ‘accumulation of injustices’ where the lives of islanders are considered disposable in the pursuit of colonial expansion and capitalist extraction. At the same time, this loss of life is naturalised as inevitable, due to the ‘vulnerability’ of islands and islanders, as weak and fragile peoples and unnatural places to live.
The reason that islander poets such as Jetnil-Kijiner, Yuki Kihara, and Terisa Tinei Siagatonu, and Craig Santos Perez are such important voices in climate change politics, is because they are refusing the foregone conclusion of the sinking islands extinction narrative. They offer a different way to talk about climate change politics, where the fight for mitigation is continuing, and must continue:
But most importantly you tell them we don’t want to leave we’ve never wanted to leave and that we
On this day in 2006 Anthony Albanese MP (now leader of the Opposition and perhaps Australia’s next Prime Minister) and Federal Labor MP Bob Sercombe launched Our Drowning Neighbours, Labor’s Policy Discussion Paper on Climate Change in the Pacific.
This was part of the ALP’s use of climate as an ‘wedge’ issue to differentiate itself from the (seemingly-endless) government of John Howard (we will be coming back to him more than once in the course of this project). That use of climate as a wedge would accelerate markedly when, at the end of 2006, Kevin Rudd took over as opposition leader.
Why this matters. By the early 1980s, once the science and consequences of what was then called the “carbon dioxide problem” was basically settled, the sea level rise issue has been understood. And islands and low-lying states knew they had an existential (and not in the wanky Sartre sense) problem. And there have been endless declarations about this. And Australia, as the big beast in the South Pacific, and as the very big polluter (both domestically and via its coal – and more lately gas exports) is always going to be in the frame.
What happened next – The Labor Party formed a government in 2007, in the “first climate change election.” Refugee issues were on the agenda for Rudd and then Gillard, but not in the way that Albanese and Seccombe might have thought.. Australia is now fortress Australia, and you wouldn’t bet on a different set of policies any time soon. Meanwhile, the small island states know that they will simply not be there in another fifty years.