Island poet marshals youth against climate change

MARRAKESH: To help protect her low-lying island home from climate change, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is building an unusual army.

The poet, performance artist and teacher at the College of the Marshall Islands, working in her spare time, is seeking out promising young people in the Pacific nation’s villages, and training them to apply for grant money that can help families cope with worsening extreme weather and rising seas, and find innovative ways to protect their communities and threatened culture.

“Our big concern is the loss of culture. We’re so rooted in our land. We could point at a reef and know the story behind it, the fish there. If we lose the reef, we lose all the stories, all the knowledge. This programme is about safeguarding that knowledge and preserving it for the future.”

Jetnil-Kijiner, who is part of her country’s delegation to the United Nations climate talks here this week, came to prominence in 2014, when she performed one of her poems, a heartfelt letter to her baby daughter, Matafele Peinem, at a climate change summit hosted by the UN chief in New York.

Now, the 28-year-old, who will publish her first poetry book in February, and whose mother, Hilda Heine, became the nation’s first woman president this year, hopes the experiences of other islanders could be a driving force to spur more rapid international action to curb climate change and prevent countries like hers being eaten up one day by rising seas.

Most of her students didn’t dwell much on climate change, she said. But for them, and for her family, it’s becoming harder to ignore.

The country, a nation of 53,000 people and more than 1,000 atolls and islands, has just emerged from one of the worst droughts she can remember. And, two years ago, one of her cousins lost her house to flooding, she said.

For many people, “it’s something you’re waiting to see happen. When there’s a high-tide warning, everybody’s worried about the sea wall.”

The result of these growing pressures, she said, was that the government, which had always focused on developing the country, was slipping into a different kind of mindset.

“It’s not development anymore. It’s more like preservation. It’s changing how we think of our country, how we prepare for its future.” Reuters