Climate refugees: the view from the Carteret Islands

I keep wracking my brains with getting members of Congress -- and really, how to get all Americans -- active on helping to pollute less and diminish the climate crisis. Before I came to 1Sky, I was like most people in what I call the "mushy middle." I knew about the climate crisis, and yet, I was not motivated to act beyond changing my own behavior. Now I can’t understand why there are not riots in the streets demanding that we limit carbon emissions.

I have an idea: if we could bring some people from the islands that are likely to be under water first (like the Maldives) and get them to lobby Congress, then maybe Congress will understand? Something about meeting victims tends to move people in a way that statistics and graphs and pictures of icebergs melting do not.

In case you missed it, the New York Times ran an article yesterday on this very subject, focusing on the Carteret Islands:

With their boundless vistas of turquoise water framed by swaying coconut palms, the Carteret Islands northeast of the Papua New Guinea mainland might seem the idyllic spot to be a castaway. Stuart Beck, the permanent representative for Palau at the United Nations, in 2005. But sea levels have risen so much that during the annual king tide season, November to March, the roiling ocean blocks the view from one island to the next, and residents stash their possessions in fishing nets strung between the palm trees.

`“It gives you the scary feeling that you don’t know what is going to happen to you, that any minute you will be floating,”’ Ursula Rakova, the head of a program to relocate residents, said by telephone. The chain could well be uninhabitable by 2015, locals believe, but two previous attempts to abandon it ended badly, when residents were chased back after clashing with their new neighbors on larger islands.”

Click here to see the beautiful photo and read the rest of the article. I would love to bring these Island people here and have the American people meet them. Perhaps then folks would get active.