Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 12: Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean; With Special Guest, Simona Marinescu

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Season 3, Episode 12: Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean; With Special Guest, Simona Marinescu · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Today I'm absolutely delighted to be speaking with Christina Gerhardt, who is the author of a wonderful and very special book, Sea Change, An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Christina Gerhardt is the incoming Lear Chair at Clark University for the new climate school.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: So this is extremely exciting.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it's doubly exciting because we're also going to be speaking with Simona Marinescu, who is the UN Senior Advisor for Small Island Developing States for the United Nations.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we're talking about islands today.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: And our starting point is a beautiful, beautiful book that Christina has written.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Congratulations, Christina.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very special book.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: It is a book that recounts the uh stories, the history, the culture, and the trials and tribulations of 49 islands that are facing the challenge of rising sea levels and human-induced global warming.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you are bringing the realities, the beauty, the culture, and the struggles of these islands to the global awareness in this book.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I really congratulate you and I very much congratulate University of California Press for producing such a beautiful book because it's filled with wonderful graphics, with maps, with scientific graphics to help us understand ecological and uh climatological, hydrological changes that are underway and all beautifully put together.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's extremely uh creative, Christina, and I therefore want to ask you uh how did you get the idea to create such a wonderful book?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for the invitation to join you.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's an honor to be here in conversation with you and also with Simona about this very important topic of islands and sea level rise and the impacts uh that it will have on islands.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's two different areas of my professional work that brought me to this approach in this book.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll cite some examples from environmental journalism and then also my work in the environmental humanities academically.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've been covering the UN climate negotiations since 2009 in Copenhagen, and one of the things I noticed in covering them regularly is that when you're there for two weeks at the end of the year, you have the privilege of hearing from frontline communities about the very lived experiences that they have been undergoing as a result of the climate crisis.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I can't focus on all geographies and all impacts, so I decided to focus on islands in terms of geography, sea level rise in terms of impacts.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: But I noticed that even the best environmental journalism, I'll just single out the Guardian here because I think it's been doing a great job for a very long time.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: It will tend to focus on the US-China standoff.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to be very clear about this.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that issue is unimportant, in fact, at the inverse for resolving the climate crisis.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: But what it occludes from view are those lived experiences from a vantage point of frontline communities.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really an environmental communication story as a result of tons of conversations with other journalists.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Environmental humanities and living in Hawaii in the Pacific, where I've taught since 2011, so over a decade, brought another thread to the book, which is that history and poetry and science are not rent asunder in many islanders' viewpoints.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: I learned this in the Pacific, but it's also true for the Caribbean and other parts of the globe.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Amitov Ghosh came out to UH to give a talk last year.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Graduate student asked him what we can do about the climate crisis.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: My pencil was sharpened.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, what's he gonna say?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: He said you need to undo disciplinary boundaries at universities.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, yeah, of course, they are colonial constructs, right?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: That you're that right.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I recognize your position at Columbia in this capacity too.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the they're colonial constructs that Europe has imported.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so we do need to think, I mean, it also humanizes the conversation.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: We need to think about the history that got us to where we are.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: The poetry really humanizes.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then, you know, the maps by Molly Roy, the beautiful design of the book by UC Press designer Leah Chandra.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's this weave, and I call it the spoonful of sugar approach to telling this story, by which I mean that not a lot of us, maybe the three of us on this screen in conversation will do this.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Look at climate reports, environmental reports, or economic reports related to this issue, but the broader public might not, right?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted to use this approach with the art, with the poetry to really um reach a broader audience.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think this idea of interdisciplinarity is extremely fruitful and gratifying, I know being part of it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: And also you're taking it farther than most, and in my own experience, I led a center for Columbia University for many years called the Earth Institute.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: We brought together the climatologists, the engineers, the economists, the political scientists, sociologists, behavioral psychologists, the teachers.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: I thought we were doing pretty well, and we we were, and we we are, but you're bringing in the poetry, the humanities, the uh voice of people who are not so easily heard.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you're expanding the reach in an extremely important way, and uh I'm very grateful for that.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's especially important for this issue of helping us to understand how we have to do things differently in this planet and pay attention to others, because uh at the at the bottom line or the core of the climate crisis is a kind of economic juggernaut system that absolutely rides roughshod over people's voices, their needs, their lives, their livelihoods, and you're bringing all of that to the forefront.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's especially important, not only beautiful, but very, very important.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to ask you, Christina, about being in Hawaii, because that's a very special place.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's got its own long history, it's got its history of the US uh imperialism, which made Hawaii part of the US uh after being uh an independent kingdom or kingdoms.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: How did uh being a professor at the University of Hawaii shape your understanding of the world and of this particular challenge of climate change?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you so much for that question.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: It gives me endless joy to acknowledge what I learned, um, what I had the privilege really to learn while I was in Hawaii.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: I learned first and foremost that it is a privilege to be in certain forums as a person first gen in the US of European heritage, to be able to participate in certain fora.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: I made sure I attended and learned, whether that was poetry sessions, things having to do with sea level rise.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look, at the University of Hawaii, I organized events on sea level rise and easily had panels led by three Hawaiian Indigenous women.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: When I had a visiting professorship on the East Coast at an institution that, given what I'm going to say that follows, shall remain nameless, but you know, otherwise was just terrific.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: I reached out to an Indigenous colleague to make sure I wasn't overlooking anyone, and he told me he was the only indigenous faculty member at that institution.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: There was no one working on sea level rise who was from a local community and a local indigenous community.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so just the centering of local voices on the faculty, people who, you know, who were coming from the region, that was really important.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hawaii is a gathering place of islanders from around the Pacific, as this week's Fest Pack, the Festival of the Pacific, that's taking place in Hawaii, also underscores.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a real weave of the kind that Sea Change, my book, tries to share of the history, of the science, of the politics, of the poetry, in the knowledge and the way, you know, traditional environmental knowledge as it gets referred to, the way that that knowledge is viewed.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'll just give you one example.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Hawaii's founding story, the the in terms of its cosmology, the Kumulipo, states within it the belief that Hawaiians as people are related to the taro plant.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that just that indicates that interwovenness, right, right there.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that wonderful?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, it's uh it's so true of all of the environmental crises also that that we face.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: The only conceivable solution on the planet is that people locally, uh, and that means uh also the estimated four to five hundred million indigenous peoples around the world have responsibility and capacity and uh empowerment to take care of their local environment.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: When I travel any place, which I do endlessly, as does Simona in uh our UN gigs, because the UN uh embraces uh and includes 193 countries in all reaches of the world, including many, many islands, which we're going to talk with Simone about in a moment.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: The thing that always strikes me is first how much wisdom there is locally anywhere you go, and how fascinating and wonderful.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: And as you said, Christina, what a privilege it is to be a visitor in a local community.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: But also this feeling, which I always tell them because coming from the UN or from the United States, I always say, you know, you're the only ones that can have a chance to save your own environment.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: No one is going to understand or care about your part of the world as much as you.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so that empowerment locally is absolutely crucial.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Now, no one can save their environment only by themselves.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: That makes this a global challenge that requires global cooperation together with the local knowledge, expertise, care, and love.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's uh what we're all grappling with, and what what I think your book helps to motivate, which is understand the beauty of these places, their history, and so on.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us, uh, Christina, about a couple of the 49 islands, uh, I think it is, that you especially fell in love with and got to know in the course of uh writing the book.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of the the islands that I engage in the book, they're not all inhabited.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some are are uninhabited and crucial sea turtle nesting sites.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some are independent, others are colonized.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to get into that complex history.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of the islands that I would highlight would be the ones that are most at risk, which in the Pacific are Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and then in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, um, in the Caribbean, the Bahamas.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why are they most at risk?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're low-lying.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I have two types of islands in the book.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Low-lying islands are atolls and high islands or volcanic islands.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the low-lying islands are most at risk because take, for example, the Marshall Islands, six and a half feet on average above sea level rise.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And depending on what figures you use, we use the figures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN scientific body for sea change.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: The estimates of other entities, you know, such as the US's National Climate Assessment Report, are much more dire.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason for that is scientists have to reach consensus, as both of you know, when they contribute to the IPCC report.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: But so we're looking at on the more dire end, eight to ten feet of sea level rise by the end of the century.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: The IPCC says three feet.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: But so back to the six and a half feet of uh sea level rise predicted for Maduro, you can see the writing on the wall.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure you know Simona could could talk a little bit more about some of the impacts of this with regard to migration.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have been tracking with keen interest what um conditions need to be met in order for a nation-state to be an independent nation-state, and having land that exists is one of them.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So if you do not have land, that raises a lot of questions about the future of island nations to actually exist.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, Marshall Islands, I would single out, and then Kiribati, for its former head of state on Note Tong's policy of migration with dignity, which people did discuss, um, had different viewpoints on, but that gets into migration policy.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: My migration with dignity is an agreement whereby he made arrangements, should his people need to migrate, that they could do so.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was just listening to the UN report that came out this morning about the situation of migration.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And aside from the conflicts that are going on, obviously the climate crisis is the second issue right up there motivating migration right now.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a really important issue to grapple with.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: Christina, on this question of uh how much sea level rise, uh, as you say, whether it's the IPCC, which uh estimates roughly one meter of sea level rise, or some of the more dire predictions, I have the incredible privilege of having as my colleague at Columbia University James Hansen, who is a name uh you will surely know.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I think uh almost all of our listeners, I hope they know, but they should know, because uh, in my view, he's one of the great scientists of our age and one of uh the great people of our age.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: He's been warning about climate, of course, for many, many decades and producing the leading studies by the U.S.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: government for many decades as the chief climatologist of NASA, which he was until recently.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: But apropos what you said about where the estimates are, what Jim Hansen has uh told me for more than uh 20 years now, is uh that it's worse than we are told.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because, as exactly you said, Christina, the IPCC, which is a very important organization and institution to bring to the world's understanding what is the scientific consensus, is almost inherently a little bit behind the actual pace.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so Jim Hansen has been telling me already back to 2002, it's worse than we think in terms of sea level.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's worse than we think in terms of the breakup of the ice sheets of West Antarctica and of Greenland, which are the main reasons why the sea level will rise by many meters, uh, most likely.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And Hansen has been emphasizing for 20 years that the consensus is lagging the cutting-edge science, which is showing more dramatic disintegration of the ice sheets and happening faster.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: And he has been right because the IPCC catches up with him, typically at a lag of five to ten years, I would say from my experience.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that means that the more dire end of this prediction of even many meters of sea level rise as being possible by the end of this century or early in the next century is real.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, as we speak, I have to emphasize I myself live on a small island economy.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: It goes by the name of Manhattan, used to be called Manhattan for the uh Indian name that was the original name of this small island.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it too will be subjected to devastating consequences from a multimeter sea level rise.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: So this is not only about places one might say are, quote, remote, not remote to the people there, but remote to the people who may be reading the book.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's very immediate and very close at hand.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to turn to you, Simona.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: You've been so actively involved in leading the UN processes on the small islands, and you are in touch constantly with heads of state and with the governments around the world of these countries that are facing this common challenge and this potential catastrophe.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: What is your experience and explain a little bit about what you've been doing and how the UN is organized around this?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, uh Professor Sachs.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Gerhardt, great honor to join you today in this conversation.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to start by first commending uh Professor Gerhardt for putting together this incredible piece of literature that combines science and culture and provides such a great account of what seeds are about in terms of their identity, their traditional knowledge, their traditional practices.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: This was a celebration for seeds, the publication of the book.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: So as I speak, I think most of them would have already read it and started to use it in national conversations.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: There is one element that stands out in the book, among, of course, many other very interesting ideas and messages that the book conveys, which is the significant anthropological feature that seeds have in terms of humans and nature connection, the Nexus.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Nowhere else people depend so much on the environment, considering that should there be no boats, if there are cyclones and hurricanes, they will not be able to have access to very basic goods.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: The land and the ocean surrounding are the main sources for their living.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a this is a central message of the book.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you so much once again, uh Professor Gerhard.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: The uh small island developing states are looking at the next 10 years as their last chance, their last option to be able to survive a climate catastrophe.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the global action to be taken over the next 10 years is most consequential for them.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they are calling, of course, for climate justice and for solidarity around uh seeds, considering that they are most vulnerable to uh the impacts of climate change.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Gerhardt spoke about the exclusively atoll countries, uh, three of which are in the Pacific.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: I served in the Pacific for quite some time, over five years.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Could you just explain just for a moment uh what were you doing in the Pacific?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: I served as the representative of the Secretary General in some of the small island uh developing states uh in the Pacific as UN resident coordinator in Samoa, Cook Islands, Nihua and Tokelau.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a very pleasant surprise to see them reflected uh within the book uh extensively, and uh also some of the political aspects around the seeds in the Pacific.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh critical to acknowledge that exclusively atoll countries cannot have any kind of internal displacement because there is no place to go.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And those are Kiribas, Tuvalu, and Marshall Islands in the Pacific and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: The others, like Cook Islands, where we have seven atoll uh islands, the northern group of the Cook Islands out of the 15, would be at risk, of course, but there is a possibility for some of the people to relocate on the higher lands of the other islands.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there is nowhere to go.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the main message of the book.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let me add to that that the UN has started more and more using a cultural lens into uh developing uh programs and supporting small island developing states, understanding how important that approach is to preserve the identity of those nations that are very proud of their heritage and also very concerned of how this heritage could be lost over the next decade.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: The climate mobility aspect that uh Professor Gerhardt spoke about is a big topic right now.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about a pact for the future this September, in which seeds want their needs, their case to be featured very clearly, and the pact for the future to acknowledge that immediate interventions, access to resources for climate adaptation are needed in small island developing states.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: They all have, Tubalo, for instance, has a great climate adaptation plan.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: They talk about elevating the ground, they talk about reclaiming some of the land from the water.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: It does come with a price, and climate justice means that whoever is responsible for what is happening to small island developing states would need to make a contribution to reverse the impact on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, what we are doing right now is to implement a new 10-year program that was just adopted in Antiga and Barbuda.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: We had the honor to have you, Professor Sark, in some of our meetings.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's called the Marshall Plan for seeds.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to take into consideration what defines them culturally, politically, and also in terms of their inherent issues that they have.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we hope that we will have a conversation like this alongside the upcoming summit of the future this September.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And again, great commitment, but commitment needs to have resources behind, and the vision needs to walk with a lot of global support.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we count on you, Professor Sachs, to keep the lights on seeds.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you so much.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's very good and timely to remind all of the listeners that in September, that is September 2024, there will be a most unusual session at the United Nations called the Summit of the Future.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh the brainchild of uh UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and very much supported by the member states, the 193 countries that are members of the UN.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea is take a moment and think, where are we?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: Where are we going?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: The timing is a little bit the following.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: We're roughly three quarters of a century since the founding of the UN, and roughly three quarters of a century till the end of this century.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, we're halfway between 1945 when the UN was established and 2100.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a bit of trying to take stock.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's so much every day of urgency, uh complexity, war, dangers, events, events, events.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea of the summit of the future is to uh try to look a little bit ahead.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Simona mentioned the pact for the future, which is supposedly, hopefully, to be a meaningful, a meaningful statement of the 193 governments of the UN about the future.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: And you remind us, Simona, that the small island developing states are organized.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: They are uh small countries.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: There are a lot of them in the UN.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: How how many in the CIDs, by the way, in the group?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: 37 SIDs out of the 57 um are members of the United Nations.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: 39 out of the 57 are actually independent countries, if we add Cook Islands and New West.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we talk about roughly 20% of the membership of the United Nations.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: But they also manage 16% of the exclusive economic zones of the ocean.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the ratio between ocean and land is 29 to 1.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: For Capo Verde is 97 to 1.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that tells you that large ocean states, as they want to call themselves, should have a voice and should be recognized for the investment that they make in the health of the ocean, which is a global common, which is a global public good.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they are small in terms of land mass, big in terms of land plus ocean, and extremely important to the health of the planet moving forward.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that's a very good reminder.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot of our ocean commons uh that are in the economic zones of these countries and of their both source of livelihoods for them, and of course, of the risks that they face and the need for global solidarity.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to uh come back to Christina to ask her about how you wrote such a remarkable book.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you you mentioned to me just before we got started that you actually, of course, know many of these places, but you wrote the book during uh the COVID period, which is uh all the more remarkable.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Even if you could help us to inspire other authors, how could you do such a phenomenal thing during the lockdown period?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: The book is really based on hundreds of interviews.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Every single chapter included was based on hundreds of interviews.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So with climate scientists, with local NGO workers, with members of the frontline communities, people who are local farmer fisher folk, because a lot of islands, there's a couple of exceptions in the book.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Singapore, Bahrain would be examples that are exceptions.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: But most of the islands in the book have really small economies.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So they rely on subsistence farming for their nourishment.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And these really small economies, you can measure them by GDP, you can measure them by average salaries of people who live there, but it means a large portion of the diet is really what people uh farm and fish themselves.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're living at that threshold, it means that any drought that you're going to be experiencing is going to impact any kind of nourishment much more intensely.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it means that any sea level rise is going to have a much larger impact.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, hundreds of interviews for every single chapter that's in the book.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: So were you on Zoom every day, morning till night?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was Zoom morning until night, lots of emails with people, um, and just lots of reading of scientific reports, complemented by poetry that I was reading and then history books about the different islands.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: And there's amazing synergies that I found between the Pacific and the Caribbean and some of the writings and the histories.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that comes back to your question about what I learned, you know, living in the Pacific.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly the history of Hawaii that you mentioned connects to the history of Guam, uh, connects to the history of the Philippines, connects to the history of Puerto Rico in the US-Spanish uh war, right?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Which is when a lot of those territories had the U.S.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: incursion.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the history of colonialism and the history of stretching to the present day of US imperialism and using a lot of these islands as military bases is a thread through the book as well.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: How many of these places that you covered actually have uh military bases on the mainly U.S.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: military bases, I assume?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, mainly U.S.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: military bases.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's a paragraph that I have in the introduction that I kept taking out, because as any good editor will tell you, it's just a list, and any good editor will tell you that a list is not an argument.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I kept putting it in.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's a paragraph that that includes the hundreds of military bases around the world that the U.S.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: has that are based on islands.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's extraordinary.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, you made me think of that.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: I I constantly refer to the fact that the U.S.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: has, well, it's estimated around 750 to 800 military bases overseas in about 80 countries, but I had not kind of focused on this obvious fact.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: How many of them are islands?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, how many of them are forward positioning of U.S.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: uh military hardware and so forth?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the military and tourism, those are the biggest industries or motors, if you will, of island economies.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I was tracking during COVID with great curiosity whether island economies, and there were conversations afoot about this in Hawaii, whether island economies would retool because the tourism industry was effectively shut down.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: And and what uh what was your finding about that?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because this was a very hard period for these countries.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, unfortunately, those transitions have have not moved ahead.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, the the military, I'll just take Hawaii as an example.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: The military takes up about a quarter of the land there, and the tourism industry takes up another quarter of the land.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Both of those mean that the available land for growing food has been radically reduced.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And in Hawaii, we import about 94 to 96 percent of our food.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that figure is similar in Puerto Rico, and I tracked throughout the book, I started tracking that figure because that's one of the chains of reliance, right?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: The importing of fossil fuels in Hawaii.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: We use fossil fuels for our electricity, which is obviously ridiculous.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Joseph Stieglitz, another colleague of yours, came out at some point and he said, Why are we not using wind and solar here as our source of energy?
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: That could be said for a lot of islands.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the simple answer there is that importing fossil fuels keeps those islands tethered to the US.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Military dollars, you know, in the Marshall Islands, for example, is another way of keeping islands tethered.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: A high proportion of the US military, in terms of people who serve in it, are Pacific Islanders.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Again, these figures are not often tracked because islands aren't a focus in people's imaginations unless it's winter and it's a holiday that people want to take.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think these kinds of economic connections are also really important to tease out if one wants to think about how to make islands independent and sustainable, meaning both economically and environmentally.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Simona, how uh in your uh work in Samoa and you had responsibility for the UN system uh in in a number of the countries, how did you see local action in this regard?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so I'm very thankful that this topic came up because the entire Pacific, a sunny place and that also has wind, unfortunately has not come even halfway into the energy transition.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a big priority for all of the states in the South Pacific, including the ones I covered.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Out of my four, for instance, only Tokelau, which is a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand, connected only to Samoa by a boat once a week, has completed the energy transition, is totally powered by uh solar energy.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: However, the energy demand is growing.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: So even in places in which we are more advanced, there is more work necessary.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Electricity is very expensive across the Pacific.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: It has a lot to do with the poor health that the Pacific people have.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's so costly, most of the families could not afford to have air conditioning and to uh create a climate environment into their homes to be more conducive to better health, to even refrigerate the food and have access to better food.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: As we know, non-communicable diseases are extremely present in the Pacific with very, very high rates of deaths caused by that.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: By bad diets, is the point.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, bad diets, because good diets would require access to electricity that is more affordable.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the islanders pay a few tala, for instance, in Samoa, to uh prepay electricity to turn on the TV.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the maximum that they could do, considering how high the price is.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there are plans to move into an energy transition to complete by 2025.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those plans have been delayed by COVID, unfortunately.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: But again, resources are necessary, know-how, technology.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why we welcome the decision of uh small island developing states to have a series of institutional mechanisms as well moving forward attached to the agenda, such as an innovation and technology uh mechanism, as well as a bank, a dedicated bank to seeds to give them access to financing.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is critical.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: So energy transition is fundamental.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of military presence, I just wanted to mention that most of those countries, because they have been traditionally peaceful, would not have their own defense.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And um there are some concerns on trade security, on human security along the corridors in the region in the Pacific.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in that regard, of course, some solutions need to be thought through.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: But fundamentally, those are peaceful nations and they want to enjoy that for as long as possible.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they're peaceful nations often caught up in uh great power politics, competition of who's gonna be the dominant influence in a particular place.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: So just another dimension of their vulnerability.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: Christina, as we close, uh I'd like to ask you about your incoming position.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: You uh have been professor at University of Hawaii and visiting professor at many, many distinguished institutions and career uh in uh environmental humanities and in journalism as well.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: What is the Lear chair, uh, your incoming position at Clark University?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Because this is very exciting.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward so much to being back on the East Coast.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just a short train ride away from New York City and all the exciting things that happen there, uh, UN Columbia among them as hosts of events.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you'll be in the neighborhood.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: That'll be great.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: The Lear Chair at uh Clark University comes in part with the responsibility to help co-found a school of climate, environment, and society.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: We just received a very generous contribution.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be looking for the dean.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Over the course of the summer and early fall, we'll be doing a search for the dean of this school.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that held appeal during my on-campus interview there was the fact that I'm working in environmental communications, journalism, and environmental humanities.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to bringing that weave to colleagues and students as well as the community when I move out to Boston to Worcester to take up this job.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's wonderful.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: And the very name of the school that it's Climate, Environment, and Society, uh, I think makes it a perfect home for you, Christina, and your unique work.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you will be in the neighborhood, so I'm sure that Simona and I and you uh will be together uh at the UN, I hope at the summit of the future in the fall.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: I want to congratulate you again, Christina, for Sea Change, an atlas of islands in a rising ocean, because you're telling the scientific story, you're mapping the realities, and you're also bringing uh people from around the world to us uh to hear their voices uh and hear their realities.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: And this is exactly what we need for our human spirit and for our ability to cooperate.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a it's really a great contribution.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Let me thank both of you, Christina Gerhardt and Simona Marinescu, two real leaders uh in the quest for climate justice and environmental justice and a decent world, and especially two leaders uh for the world's small islands that are facing so many challenges but have so much culture and history and beauty and biodiversity to share with all of the world.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you both for being with me and being with all of us on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and thanks to all of the listeners who have joined in.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 37:23
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