The Green Pacific: Anticolonialism and Environmentalism in Oceania
Dr Emma Kluge (HaSS Cornwall, HASS)
In a 2021 speech, Tuvalu Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs, Simon Kofe addressed the leaders gathered at COP26 while standing knee-deep in the Pacific Ocean. ‘We are living with the realities of climate change and sea level rise,’ he proclaimed, ‘we must take bold action today to secure tomorrow.’ After the camera panned out to reveal him standing in the oceans off the coast of the island of Funafuti in Tuvalu, Kofe said: ‘We are sinking but so is everyone else, and no matter if we feel the impacts today, like in Tuvalu, or in a hundred years, we will all still feel the dire effects of this global crisis one day.’ (Guardian, 8 November 2021).
Pacific peoples are often depicted as the victims of climate change and their experiences narrated as evidence of environmental degradation – islands drowning and homes disappearing. However, this framework elides the extensive genealogies of environmental thinking and long histories of environmental activism and internationalism that have emerged from, and characterise, this region.
In Oceania this environmental activism was also deeply entwined with anticolonial protest. The historiography of decolonisation has traditionally focused on independence movements in Asia and Africa or the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Pacific has been noticeably absent. At the same time, historians have also called for more environmental perspectives on decolonisation and reconnecting histories of resource extraction and capitalism with histories of local resistance. Nowhere has this history had more profound relevance than in the Pacific. Across the twentieth century, anticolonial campaigns in the Pacific Islands were focused primarily on calls to environmental and resource sovereignty. Additionally, their calls for human rights were focused on being recognised as actors in their own region and on establishing conditions which restored ancestral connections between peoples, culture, and environment.
Funding from the SCI will support archival research into the history of anticolonial and environmental protest in Oceania. The first stage of research will focus on archival collections across Australia and Fiji as well as doing preliminary community consultations in both locations. The project will bring together case studies focused on protest against monoculture farming in colonial Samoa, resistance to forced relocation and phosphate mining in Nauru and Banaba, transnational activism against nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, central Australia, and French Polynesia, and mobilisation to stop climate change across the region. While following movements that emerged within these (former) colonies, it will also trace debates and ideas emerging from transnational forums such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement and the Pacific Islands Forum, and how resistance to environmental destruction galvanised region-wide resistance to colonialism. The overarching aim of this project is to recover the interconnected genealogies of anticolonial and environmental activism in Oceania and contribute to ongoing debates about decolonisation, environmental protection, and sustainability.
