The Island President: A Must-See Film Premiers Friday at SIFF in Seattle
Please join Three Degrees for this Friday’s premiere screening of The Island President. Part of Seattle’s International Film Festival, The Island President is a film about a remarkable man, the Maldives’ President, Mohammed Nasheed. At 1.5 meters above sea level, his country—the Maldives—is facing an unimaginable future. Democracy and coastlines are equally threatened, making Nasheed one of the most vocal and one of the most tested climate justice leaders in the world. This film changes everything you think you know about climate change.
This Friday night’s 7:15 p.m. screening will feature a post-screening Skype conversation with its award-winning Director, Jon Shenk.
May 4–17, SIFF Cinema Uptown (511 Queen Anne Avenue North in Seattle)
Tickets: $10 | $5 SIFF Members | $9 Youth (20 & under) and Seniors (65+)
Matinees: $7 | $5 SIFF Members
SIFF Cinema passes and vouchers are valid at the box office.
* If you’re out of town, check The Island President’s website for a screening near you.
From director Jon Shenk (The Lost Boys of Sudan) comes the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting the literal survival of his country and everyone in it. After bringing democracy to the Maldives after thirty years of despotic rule, Nasheed is now faced with an even greater challenge: as one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of three feet in sea level would submerge the 1200 islands of the Maldives enough to make them uninhabitable.
The Island President captures Nasheed’s first year of office, culminating in his trip to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, where the film provides a rare glimpse of the political horse-trading that goes on at such a top-level global assembly. Nasheed is unusually candid about revealing his strategies—leveraging the Maldives’ underdog position as a tiny country, harnessing the power of media, and overcoming deadlocks through an appeal to unity with other developing nations. Despite the modest size of his country, Mohamed Nasheed has become one of the leading international voices for urgent action on climate change.
On February 7, 2012, Nasheed was forced to resign the presidency under the threat of violence in a coup d’etat perpetrated by security forces loyal to the former dictator. The future of the president, and the island, remain unclear.
President Nasheed at Columbia University
Last week, I was in New York City for my brother-in-law’s wedding. While I was there, I had the lucky fortune to hear President Mohammed Nasheed speak to an audience at Columbia University. President Nasheed is a climate justice hero, so despite the wedding festivities, I convinced my husband to make the trek with me uptown.
Nasheed was democratically elected president of the Maldives in 2008 and became a vocal climate justice leader on the world stage, made famous by his underwater cabinet meetings and his relentless hope despite all odds. In February, President Nasheed was ousted by a military coup and he was forced to resign. (See Small Island States Lose Powerful Voice by Maxine Burkett.) During his talk at Columbia, he reiterated his faith in humanity, even though his recent treatment has left many of his supporters feeling quite hopeless.
President Nasheed spoke briefly with Columbia Law School’s Center for Climate Change Law Program Director, Michael Gerrard. And then President Nasheed took questions from the audience. In his responses, he proved himself to be more witty and interesting than the question-askers, with his answers sounding strikingly smarter than the questions dealt to him. He did not seem irritated (although I was) at the countless questions seeking his soundbyte position on cap and trade, carbon sequestration, and other subjects that seemed to ignore the political (and climate) realities of his recent political ouster. “It is not possible for the current government of the Maldives to talk about anything but pepper spray and tear gas,” he said. Yet people still kept asking him his opinions on carbon trading.
Democracy, said Nasheed, is the best measure of climate adaptation. But most people in the audience seemed disenchanted with democracy as a tool for change. Not many seemed to take it seriously, even though Nasheed constantly spoke of democracy as the only tool that could secure the fate of his presidency, the future of the Maldives, and the solutions to climate change. Yet some still complained. Protests are too hard to organize. Can’t we just set up a website? It worked for Kony, why not the Maldives? Really?
I began to wonder, what if people weren’t allowed to ask any questions? (Yes, as I pump up democracy, I understand the irony in the rhetorical question that I’m posing.) Or, what if we spent more time teaching students in universities how to ask a good question: where would the conversation go? Where would it go if—instead of listening to ourselves talk—we listened beyond the hollowness of the easy solutions limiting our inquiries? If we allowed ourselves the creative space to think beyond “let’s just build a website” or design a new plastic bracelet that said “What would President Nasheed do?” One solution, however, did seem to catch President Nasheed’s fancy. Love. Tell the romance of the climate story, he said:
“The romance has to be articulated. If you want to love anything you have to love the Earth. Lure people through love and romance.” He insisted that a young woman pursue love as a climate solution after she asked him why she should care.
Below are snippets of his talk that I captured on my IPhone. They are not all direct quotes, and I apologize up front for that. But below are my best attempts at capturing his words while tapping my phone like a monkey (in pre-wedding haste, I accidentally left my pad of paper in my hotel room).
President Mohammed Nasheed, March 29, 2012. Columbia University, Low Library.
- I believe in human ingenuity.
- We’ve worked against the odds before and we can win. We must win.
- It will take the Maldives 50 years to become uninhabitable. The Maldives has been in the Indian Ocean for 5,000 years, and it has a written history of 2,500 years.
- A grandmother said to me: “President, I can leave if you want me to. But where would the colors, the sounds, or the butterflies go?”
- You cannot relocate a culture. You can move people away. But you cannot keep a civilization in tact.
- The UN negotiations exist for the sake of process. We cannot expect a result.
- Unless we don’t have millions of people in the streets, these conferences won’t being change. Don’t expect anything from a UN conference. Only you can make change.
- If the people of this land [the U.S.] decide to do something [about climate change], there is nothing more powerful than that. In the U.S., climate change will become an election issue. It’s really up to the people of the U.S. to bring this change.
- [Climate change] is happening. The option we have is to brace ourselves with adaptation.
- Many people understand climate change as an earth science issue. We need to make people see it as an economic issue…as a human rights issue… as a romance.
- Democracy is the most important adaptation tool.
- Today is done. The day is gone. The sun has set. The only thing we can do is for tomorrow. To think about tomorrow.
- The corals are our first line of defense for the islands and the beaches.
- The foundation of democracy movements is protecting humans, but also protecting the climate. Democracy is the best adaptation measure. Climate change and democratic movements go hand-in-hand.
- For democracy to survive in developing countries, we must ask big countries not to be so hasty to defend the status quo.
- Yes, it’s easy to remove a dictator, but it’s very very ambitious to crush hundreds of years of…practice. The comeback of dictatorships must be avoided.
- I think we must be thinking about extreme ideas. We are consulting with Dutch to build 5 floating islands. It’s extreme but we need extreme ideas.
- Other than people in the streets, I have no other advice. There is no easy way. Otherwise, you can’t influence the politicians to act. You must influence the next election. Just do it.
- The coup is a Maldives thing. Climate change is everyone’s thing.
- There is no science in questioning science.
Headed to Global Business Network Scenario Planning Training
In April, Three Degrees is excited to attend the Global Business Network‘s upcoming scenario planning training in Berkeley, California. Global Business Network has worked over many decades to mainstream and popularize scenario planning from a military tool to one keyed for more general audiences.
Jeni and I have used scenario planning tactics at community adaptation workshops, at academic conferences (including the Three Degrees Conference), scenario planning workshops, and in our teaching of the Climate Justice Seminar. Its fundamental principles—”take the long view,” “think from the outside-in,” and “embrace multiple perspectives”— are ripe for climate adaptation problem solving, which involve creative solutions to long-term problems that require decision making under a considerable deal of uncertainty and requiring many perspectives.
We hope that the training will empower us to more effectively tailor scenario planning practices for use by communities seeking resilience in light of future climate change.
Punishing Protest: Tune into Orion’s Live Web Event
How do we change the legal system when the legal system protects the status quo? Can we as lawyers create social change without a strong grassroots movement that insists on change, and if not, how can we best serve these movements? And when grassroots leaders, like Tim DeChristopher, are punished for acts of civil disobedience while the law legalizes the harmful actions of the powerful, how can we move justice forward? Tim’s lawyer said after the trial that “[i]t’s tragic that when we need our best and brightest to work on seemingly intractable problems like climate change and economic inequality we put them in prison.”(Painting credit Robert Shetterly, Americans Who Tell the Truth).
Join an online conversation hosted by Orion magazine on Tuesday, February 21, at 7 p.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. Pacific, with Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, and Patrick Shea, attorney for Tim DeChristopher. Orion published Terry Tempest Williams’s interview of Tim DeChristopher, “What Love Looks Like,” in its January/February 2012 issue. Three Degrees will be tuning into the webinar from Seattle.
Relating Climate Change and Migration in the Asia-Pacific and Alaska
The Carteret Islands in the Pacific and Alaska Native Villages in the Arctic share the very real challenge of permanent resettlement due—at least in part—to climate change. Last November, Dr. Jane McAdam, a climate change and refugee law scholar at the University of New South Wales in Australia, organized a conference on Climate Change and Migration in the Asia-Pacific: Legal and Policy Responses.
I’ve spent my snow day in Seattle watching a panel from the conference called, “The Nature of Movement: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?” Notably, Jon Barnett describes that mobility—or, the movement of people—is a normal social process for people in the Pacific. People in the Pacific move around a lot, he says, to receive an education, for work, training, and for money. He argues that mobility may help enable adaptation responses that enhance local livelihoods, but only if people control their movement and exert power and influence over essential planning processes that ensure better livelihoods, such as education, job training, healthcare, etc.. He describes migration as one-way movement, which isn’t an accurate portrayal of how people actually live their lives and respond to crisis in the Pacific. Then Dr. Maryanne Loughry described the history of resettlement in the Carteret Islands, which is undergoing its third attempt at resettlement in over 50 years.
After watching the recording of the panel, I am struck by the following thought. Generally speaking, according to evidence Jon Barnett provided, people in the Pacific Islands move all the time. But people in Alaska Native Villages don’t. They stay. Perhaps because these villages are very remote and travel to and from the villages is very difficult. I wonder if the mobility v. migration distinction is key for understanding the similarities and differences between resettlement in the Asia-Pacific and in Alaska Native Villages? In Alaska, mobility doesn’t seem to be as normal of a cultural force as it is in the Asia-Pacific Islands, at least if you examine trends over the last 100 years or so.
In Kivalina, for example, villagers traditionally lived nomadically, moving seasonally to different hunting grounds. They only settled permanently after the U.S. federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs built a school in Kivalina in 1905 after seeing people camped on the reef and mistaking the temporary hunting camp for a village. (According to the City of Kivalina’s website, the BIA told people they would be jailed if they didn’t send their children to school.) So the people were forced to stay in Kivalina and make it a permanent home after the school was built. As former tribal administrator of Kivalina Colleen Swan has put it, you cannot put a school on a sled and move it. So they stayed. Now, because of climate change, the village must move. And it’s very unlikely they will go back once they move, other than for use of traditional and customary uses of the land when the weather allows it.
So local infrastructure built by the BIA created a disincentive for mobility in Kivalina almost 100 years ago. For the people of Kivalina, I’m wondering if resettlement is not about mobility (something normal that happens all the time, as suggested applies to people in the Pacific) and more like migration, which is more of a one-way affair. Although a lot more research would be needed to support this idea, I see at least initially that the consequences of migration—as may be the case in Alaska—as opposed to mobility are much more profound.
I’d highly recommend listening to the presentations in the following video, which do much to clarify the distinction between migration and mobility. Speakers for the session are Professor Richard Bedford, Professor Jon Barnett, and Dr. Maryanne Loughry. Our sincere appreciation to Dr. Jane McAdam for her leadership on issues surrounding climate-induced displacement and for organizing such an important conference.
