Our Earth’s Future is about the science of climate change and how to talk about it. You will learn from scientists in the fields of climatology, oceanography, Earth science, and anthropology who study how climate change is affecting people, populations, and ways of life. Explore the multiple lines of evidence for the human-induced climate change that is happening today, and consider what that means for the future of our planet. At the end of this course you will be able to understand key scientific principles, identify and address misconceptions, and contribute confidently to conversations about climate change.
Climate Change: A View from the Pacific
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From the course by American Museum of Natural History
Our Earth's Future
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From the lesson
Living with Climate Change
Climate change is often framed as a future phenomenon, but it’s clear that people are already experiencing the consequences. What are the effects? It depends to some extent on where, and how, you live. For example, in the Pacific Islands, where sea level rise is threatening entire ways of life, communities have come together to prepare. What happens when there’s no place to go? Coastal communities aren’t the only ones at risk; food insecurity may one day threaten us all. And of course, humans are not the only species affected, and some will be at even greater risk in the future.
Meet the Instructors
Debra Tillinger, Ph.D.Instructor
The Pacific takes up one third of the globe, and
the many islands there are home to an incredibly diverse range of cultures.
They range from people in Papua New Guinea,
up in the highlands there to urban places like Auckland, to communities where
people are very self-sufficient and produce all their own food and so on.
It's a very wide range of different ways of living in the Pacific.
There's also a wide range of land forms.
So you have volcanic islands, right, as you can see here, a high island.
And many coral atolls as well, as you can also see here.
A great, diverse range of cultures,
with many different spiritual approaches to the world.
You can see, this is an example of some
Moai From the original religion that was in Rapa Nui.
The time, there's many other different types of religion and
different approaches to the world.
The Pacific Islands have a great tradition of traveling great distances.
And they've all encompassed huge, huge distances on their canoes,
taking with them a great sort of storage, a great settlement package,
survival package of different plants and
animals with them to populate the islands that they landed on.
Many of the things of the environment, things around them often incorporated into
the things that people in the Pacific Islands have made over time.
This is just an example of some bark cloth
in our collection here at the museum with fish and plants and so on on it.
Many very sort of responsive things that are made in the Pacific,
things that are able to catch particular types of fish,
using a particular kind of net.
Or fish traps like this one,
which are all particularly designed to catch a particular fish
in a particular time of year in a particular stage of its life cycle.
This very detailed knowledge of the way things are in the ocean in the Pacific.
And people can respond to that in a very detailed way, and
be able to catch things in the most effective way.
You can see it's a lovely ornament from a canoe which features a fish and
some tropic birds as well.
The birds are leaning down, you can see.
These are all important parts of the ways people link into their environment.
Not only the things that they catch and eat, it's also often totemic animals.
So a particular group might have a the frigate bird or bonito as their totem, and
those things have a very special, important part in their lives.
So as we know, there were these great voyaging traditions.
And the sea is something which people have always had a lot of respect for
in the Pacific because it's the thing that sustains them in many ways.
But it's also the thing that can end them.
And the Pacific Ocean is increasingly the thing that's coming up to get them.
And it's something that a Pacific Islander, a Samoan friend of mine who
lives here in New York said to me, the sea's always been rising up to get us.
This is nothing new.
And she also said that actually, Pacific Islanders were the ones who started
talking about climate change first.
Whether that's true or not is [LAUGH] by the by.
What's interesting about that is that perception that as Pacific Islanders,
they've been having to deal with climate change for a very long time, for
many decades.
And many decades more than the rest of us have really had to deal with it or
start thinking about it, start the conversation about it.
So this is an image of Tuvalu.
This is high tide.
This is becoming increasingly common in Tuvalu.
It's a very low lying coral atoll, and it's flat.
And there's nowhere to go when the tide comes crashing up over the beach.
So in the Pacific there's increasingly problems with salt water
rising up, flooding.
Making it hard to grow crops because the ground is becoming saturated with
salt water, either from being washed over, washed by the sea.
Or from the salt water bubbling up through the coral substrate of the atoll.
That's increasingly happening.
Also there's a lot of erosion of the coastline.
So here this is a cemetery, which has been washed away in Fiji.
Many people having to try to decide what to do about their ancestors.
Do you move them inland?
Do you actually try and do that, or
do you just have to let them be reclaimed by the sea?
It's a very difficult decision.
There's also problems with fresh water.
There's increasing amounts of drought, and
difficulty with being able to maintain fresh water reserves.
Wells like this are often having salt water coming into them, so
it's increasingly difficult.
And often it's just droughts that last for years.
It's very hard to get fresh water.
Cyclones are becoming increasingly intense.
So this is a cyclone that hit Samoa recently, which is incredibly devastating.
In places like Fiji and some other islands around in that sort of part of
the Pacific, there's been quite a lot of relocation happening already.
And the government's able to fund the relocation in a place like Fiji.
You can see that the government has decided just put sort of little green
boxes on the hill.
And I don't know whether they actually talked to the villagers about what sort of
houses they might like.
But I think this what they've got, and
they didn't have much choice about in the matter.
So there's all sorts of changes on all sorts of levels within the Pacific.
And Pacific Islanders are pretty unanimous, I think,
in wanting to make sure the rest of the world knows that they're having incredibly
difficult problems, incredibly difficult challenges ahead of them.
But also that they're not just victims,
that they're doing what they can to make a difference to their own lives.
And to make sure that they're not contributing to
the emission of greenhouse gases, and that
many islands have decided that they're gonna be going carbon neutral by 2020.
There's a lot of them who have decided they're gonna be completely sustainable in
terms of energy and also throughout the measures that they're implementing.
Replanting mangroves to protect their shorelines,
all sorts of measures to reduce pollution and degradation of their environments.
You can see here, this is Majuro.
This is one of the main parts of the atolls in the Marshall Islands.
You can see the landform here makes it pretty clear about why there's problems
with rising sea levels.
If you're living in a place like this, it makes it pretty difficult.
You can also see why navigation is such an important part and
living with the sea in an effective way.
And with things that really sum up how much people have been able to understand
and read their environment.
And how every little movement of the currents as they intersect,
and each detail of the particular birds they see.
And the scent that come in the wind, and all these different things about their
environment as they were traveling through it.
And now becoming unpredictable and slightly unknown to them,
and it's unsettling.
And it means that the ability to predict the coming weather, which makes
a huge difference on whether you're gonna go and make a canoe voyage or not.
Whether you're gonna be able to go out and fish the way you'd like to.
When you're gonna be able to fish next is now becoming a little unsettled,
and they're not sure about their environment anymore.
It's increasingly difficult to predict.
Marshall Islanders are often having to think about moving,
and that's one thing we talked about before with talking about
them moving to Arkansas and other places around the world.
But at the moment, you can move and know that you can still come back home and
visit everyone at home again.
It's still at the stage where you don't have to say goodbye to home as yet.
But they will know that there's this concept that maybe their islands won't be
there anymore.
And it's a very difficult thing if your
whole culture is based in the land and grounded in the land to
then think about how you might have it not be there anymore.
It's an extraordinary thing.
You might just about yourselves if you could no longer visit
the land that's important to you,
the places that are special to you, your home if that was completely gone.
If you couldn't ever come back to New York,
if you could never come back to the place that you feel you family is rooted,
how would you think about the ways you might deal with that?
It's something that we're all, around the world,
going to have to deal with much more in the future.
Here's one of those that's built in that same traditional form that uses modern
European materials in it, and you can see that this is here just after cyclone Evan.
And it's that particular has weathered quite well, but
a lot of the houses didn't.
And it's certainly something that people are having to think about much more is
what sort of building are we gonna stick with as cyclones get more and
more intense.
I was involved in a project over this past year.
We're just sort of starting to finish the project up,
which was called Rethinking Home, Climate change in New York and Samoa.
And we were bringing two groups together, one in New York and
one in Samoa to talk about the impacts of severe weather on coastal communities and
their connections to home, and their senses of identity, and personal security.
And this is just a really fascinating set of investigations about what sort of
things actually are threatened for people when their homes are threatened.
And thinking about how there's actually quite a lot of similarities
between the sorts of things that people have felt after Hurricane Sandy,
as they did after Cyclone Evan.
We've had workshops here and in Samoa, and people have come back and
forth between the two places.
I'll be having a book coming out of that project as well.
So, Pacific Islanders are increasingly reaching out to the rest of the world to
try and get their message across.
And they're using forums like YouTube and Flickr, as well as things like the U.N.
forums on climate change, and other more sort of governmental forums.
Artists are increasingly expressing their concerns and anxieties.
And the other thing that's happening is a lot of people in the Pacific are having
many more debates and discussions about what they should do.
They feel that, okay, no one else is helping us.
We're going to have to help ourselves.
What do we do to deal with these problems?
And in the Marshall Islands, the main narrative there is self blame.
They feel that they're to blame because they've given up their
traditional ways and taken on American ways.
What they need to do is return to going by canoe rather than having an outboard motor
on your boat, returning to traditional foods rather than bringing in tin foods.
Return to using sorts of power that they can produce themselves rather than
using electricity and so on.
So there's a lot of sense that, I guess there's a way that they can try and
control the changes in their environment by changing the way they are in the world
and returning to traditional ways and giving up American ways.
So it's quite sobering and humbling to think that
the Marshall Islanders who produce something like 0.0001 of
greenhouse gas emissions are feeling to blame for climate change.
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