The blanket news coverage last week of the opening of the C.O.P. 26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and in particular the rip roaring speech delivered by Prime Minister Mia Motley of Barbados, has put this matter back on the front burner of global policy issues. And thankfully so, even though it is quite likely to fade quickly from the spotlight as other issues, most of which are far less urgent consume the eye balls of a blinded humanity mesmerised by the latest scandal or dumb trivia peddled by social media and news outlets hungry for clients to “buy” their stories.
I have long since abandoned the hope that policies relevant to the wholesome development of my island home could continue, if even fleetingly, to embody the spirit of daring and boldness that once made Anguilla the most unique microstate on the planet. That train has not only left the station but has been derailed for the last few decades as we have steadily sunk into a formalistic bureaucratic type of governance content to follow norms unsuited for microstates simply because it is the accepted form of international practice. Whatever “box” we have now put ourselves into from issues of finance, taxation, constitutional reform, education, physical planning, or tourism development has been sealed so effectively that “thinking outside this box” has become stiflingly improbable if not impossible.
Be that as it may, on the issue of Climate Change I will continue to speak out, as consequences of our shared stupidity are too heavy to be borne in silence. So C.O.P. 26 has given me another opportunity to shout that it is time for us to WAKE TO HELL UP.
The Republic of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean, an archipelago of islands with a population of 120 thousand people, has already woken up to a reality worse that the nightmare it fell asleep to two decades ago. For some strange geotechnical reason, the predicted phenomenon of sea level rise is now greater in the Pacific than elsewhere on the planet, and has already swallowed two of that nation’s low-lying islands. As a way to avoid the inevitable, one of its former Presidents, Anote Tong, bought five thousand acres of land from the Anglican Church in 2014 on the island of Fiji for nine million dollars as an insurance policy against the disappearance of his nation. Those lands are presently used for farming with a view to being used to relocate some of his people should the inevitable, now predicted to be less than a decade away take place. So what does that tell us? That sea level rise is a problem for the Pacific and not the Atlantic/ Caribbean? That we in Anguilla live on a raised limestone island and not a coral atoll with low elevations susceptible to rising seas and therefore have nothing to fear? Or does the reality faced by Kiribati remind us of the well known proverb, “when your neighbour’s house is on fire, wet yours”?
The fact is that the newsworthy nightmare of Kiribati’s condition, as well as those of so many other island states in the Pacific, has already been overshadowed by this year’s news of unprecedented blistering wild fires in Western North America, Australia, Southern Europe and Russia; by catastrophic flooding in China, Tennessee, Turkey, Germany and Holland ; by the growing intensity of hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones; by searing heat waves in temperate climates and most frightening of all for us the rapidly melting ice caps of Greenland. It was as if God and the planet itself had coordinated a PR stunt of biblical proportions mere months before C.O.P. 26 to shout at humanity: “HEY!! WAKE TO HELL UP..
Anguilla is part of the same planet where all these phenomena took place. And what is happening to Kiribati will and IS already happening to us. For those still holding on like hypnotised zombies to the propaganda peddled on this issue by Fox News and other social media outlets, you should take the time to visit iconic Little Bay, today, a place where we love to take or send our visitors and look carefully at the beach. Better, still take a picture with your precious smart phone and then take a visit to Mr. Petty’s museum and compare your up to date photo with that telling photograph taken of fishermen hauling a seine in Little Bay in the 1970’s.
See for yourselves and compare the images and perhaps you will better understand the creeping reality that Kiribati now faces and which we are already facing ourselves. If beaches like Little Bay, Maundays Bay, The Cove, Rendezvous, Meads Bay and Sandy Ground which are all low lying zones of major if not irreplaceable economic, social and environmental, value begin to sink like Atlantis, then what is our future? Where is our future? And how do we deal with the loss of everything corporeal and spiritual that defines what it is to be an Anguillian?
I had surely thought that the experience we all shared of Hurricane Irma would have elevated this issue to one of far greater national strategic planning. I had hoped that the invasion of saragasum seaweed which continues to foul our Eastern and Southern Coastlines would have been a ringing school bell to wake up and pay attention. I believed that the rising heat, which everyone must feel and which can bring out the humble ground lizard from his burrow in the month of December, would be proof enough that THE PLANET IS CHANGING and we are the cause of that change.
I am glad that the Parliamentary Secretary attended C.O. P. 26. As far as I am aware it is the first time since I attended the disastrous Conference Of Parties COP 15 in Copenhagen that any member of our House Of Assembly has attended any of these Climate conferences. However, although it is my hope that she will return with a new sense of urgency to this issue I am afraid that a policy plan to develop a blue economy will simply not be enough to be a credible response to the threat of Climate Change. The concept of the Blue economy simply underscores the thinking behind the commonwealth ” blue Charter” and is an emerging concept which encourages better stewardship of our ocean or “blue” resources. Whereas, I support this policy completely it does not and will not make any significant impact to the fundamentals of tackling Climate Change on the local level. 75% of the climate crisis is the energy crisis and the elephant in our living room is Anglec and how we generate electricity followed closely by how we deal with vehicular transport and solid waste disposal. Unless and until we grapple with a transformative policy in these sectors linked not just to economic development but to Climate Change mitigation and adaptation we are simply not serious.
Indeed I would go further to say, we are a joke. And the thing that irks me the most is that no Government to date, and no Anglec Board to date, has been able to see the opportunity that an emphasis on Climate Change rather than economic development provides as a more effective lever to realise these transformations and to obtain the financial and technical support needed for radical reform .
Prime Minister Motley in her speech made two telling points. She asked, “when will leaders lead” and called for “voices, ambition and action”. With regard to the former admonition, no Government of Anguilla past or present has even attempted to lead on this. That is simply a regrettable fact. And with regard to the latter, our voices are mute save for a few, myself included, who now have a kinship to John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. Our ambition is non-existent and action is nowhere in sight. If our collective failure on all of the above is simply ignorance or lack of awareness then the words of the esteemed psychoanalyst Carl Jung should be food for thought. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
If it is our fate to eventually go the way of Kiribati without lifting a finger in our own defense at a time when fingers and hands by the millions are bending theirs to this plow, then I will be ashamed of my island home. If we cannot change our thinking and therefore will not change our future, I take no comfort in the fact that my generation will have little to worry about, as we will all be in graves somewhere across this island before the real trouble begins. But it is our children, and especially our grandchildren, who will face the fire as the planet begins to burn. IT IS THEY WHO WILL SEE HELL. WAKE UP!!!
