1,001 Voices on Climate Change

Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought, and Displacement from Around the World

Devi Lockwood

• Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982146726
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

Join journalist Devi Lockwood on this "monumental achievement" (Richard Moor, bestselling author of On Trails ) as she bikes around the world collecting personal stories about how flood, fire, drought, and rising seas are changing communities. It's official: apocalyptic climate predictions finally came true. Catastrophic wildfires, relentless hurricanes, melting permafrost, and coastal flooding have given us a taste of what some communities have already been living with for far too long. Yet, we don't often hear the voices of the people most affected. Journalist Devi Lockwood set out to change that.In 1, 001 Voices on Climate Change, Lockwood travels the world, often by bicycle, collecting first-person accounts of climate change. She frequently carried with her a simple carboard sign reading, "Tell me a story about climate change."Over five years, covering twenty countries across six continents, Lockwood hears from indigenous elders and youth in Fiji and Tuvalu about drought and disappearing coastlines, attends the UN climate conference in Morocco, and bikes the length of New Zealand and Australia, interviewing the people she meets about retreating glaciers, contaminated rivers, and wildfires. She rides through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia to listen to marionette puppeteers and novice Buddhist monks.From Denmark and Sweden to China, Turkey, the Canadian Artic, and the Peruvian Amazon, she finds that ordinary people sharing their stories foes far more to advance understanding and empathy than even the most alarming statistics and studies. This "luminous book" (Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad and The Poisoner's Handbook ) is a hopeful global listening tour for climate change, channeling the urgency of those who have already glimpsed the future to help us avoid the worst.

1 TUVALU

FUN

The plane started its descent with only the ocean in sight. I pressed my nose to the oval window, trying to spot land.

“Is this your first time?” the woman next to me asked. I nodded, fidgeting with the clasp on my tray table.

“You’re going to be uncomfortable,” she said, placing her hands on top of her flower-printed sulu, a skirt-like piece of fabric that many Pacific Islanders wrap around their waist. She told me that she is Tuvaluan—that this is her home.

I closed my eyes as the nose of the plane angled closer to the waves. I could almost taste their lips, the orderly rows of arrival and salt. I bit down on the inside of my cheek. Approaching Tuvalu is an exercise in trust.

At the last possible moment, a strip of land appeared beneath us. The wheels rolled to a loud stop. We taxied past palm trees, a fence, many pens full of pigs, and concrete homes with tin roofs: gray-green rainwater collection tanks attached to each. I followed my row-mate off the plane, squinting in the sunshine, toward a one-room, open-air airport. The airport code: FUN. Three people on motorcycles idled, one foot balanced on the road, waiting for the plane to depart. A volleyball net billowed slightly in the wind. There is no fence between the runway and the country: seen from the air, the strip of runway is arguably the main geographic feature of Funafuti, a coral atoll and Tuvalu’s capital, which sits 585 miles south of the equator.

A little more than ten thousand people live in Tuvalu. Generations ago, Polynesians navigated here by the stars, calling the sprinkles of land in the vast blue of the South Pacific home. With ten square miles of total area, less than five miles of roads, and only one hospital on the main island, Tuvalu is the fourth smallest country in the world. Disney World is four times larger in area. Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands, became independent from the British Commonwealth in 1978; the flag still bears the Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner. The other three-quarters of Tuvalu’s flag is an aqua blue, symbolic of the Pacific Ocean. The flag is dotted with nine stars, one for each island: Nanumea, Niutao, Nanumanga, Nui, Vaitupu, Fongafale, Nukulaelae, Niulakita, and Nukufetau. The vowels in this language taste as delicious in my mouth as the sunsets are bright.

Funafuti, the capital, houses about half of Tuvalu’s total population. It has the feel of a small town—after a few days, people start recognizing a foreigner. Tuvalu receives some 150 visitors per year.

By some estimates, Tuvaluans will be forced, by water scarcity and rising sea levels, to migrate elsewhere in the next fifty years. This mass exodus is already happening. Large Tuvaluan outposts exist in Suva, Fiji; and Auckland, New Zealand.

I came to Tuvalu with a question: What does it mean for a whole nation to be on track to become uninhabitable in my lifetime? If there’s no place like home—how does that definition of home change when home becomes unlivable for an entire country? How am I, as a white US American of part-British descent, complicit in Tuvalu’s destruction?

My passport stamped, I wandered in the direction of the Filamona Moonlight Lodge, one of two places offering accommodation on the island. The other, the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel (now the Funafuti Lagoon Hotel), was far more expensive. I knew that Tuvalu is a cash-only economy, and operates using Australian banknotes, though there are octagonal fifty-cent pieces adorned with an octopus on one side and Queen Elizabeth’s face on the reverse. There were no ATMs. I took out what I thought would be a suitable amount of Australian dollars before finally leaving Fiji for Tuvalu. I had planned to stay at Filamona, but the prices listed on the website were years out of date; I hadn’t withdrawn enough Australian dollars to cover the price hike. This would only cover accommodation and leave me with nothing for food.

I pondered this predicament, sitting in the lodge’s open-air dining room after dinner, watching a replay of a rugby tournament on Sky Pacific. The owner’s daughter, Luma, a high school student, wrote some basic Tuvaluan words in my notebook: wai (water); talofa (hello); fafetai (thank you); koe fano kifea (where are you going?).

Three planes a week arrived, and one big ship each month from Suva. On my plane and also staying at Filamona was an eighty-one-year-old Japanese man who had retired twenty years earlier from Exxon in Tokyo. Tuvalu was his one-hundred-forty-second country. He spoke loudly and traveled with a camera, taking pictures that he would paint later in his apartment in Tokyo. Before I could object, he snapped a photo of me eating rice.

Funafuti is a skinny crescent of an island lined with hammocks, fishing nets, and kids. Before dusk, Luma took me around the whole island on the back of a blue moped. I sat on the back, holding her waist for stability as we rode out to the edges and then back again. At this time of evening, the runway was an all-out playground. People spiked volleyballs, played soccer and rugby, and jogged around the airstrip’s perimeter. The airplane runway—a backbone of cement—was built in the 1940s by the US Navy during the Pacific theater of World War II. While dismounting from the moped, I burned the inside of my right calf on the exhaust pipe.

In the morning, I sprinted to the southern tip of the island to get away from construction and the whirr of the bandsaw; the lodge, I learned, was under renovation. The December day was already hot with the sun still low in the sky. The end of the road felt like a different world. I could see the sea on both sides and—at the apex—ocean everywhere. Puffy ice cream clouds floated on the horizon. I crunched over coral and rocks underfoot: loose and extraterrestrial. This could be the surface of the moon. Even at low tide, the water felt almost too close, the waves many hands, calling; an ever-present wind. This was one ending: flattened cans of V8 and beer scattered among the white pieces of coral, edges smoothed by the churning of the waves. I splashed a little sea water on the splotch of my exhaust-pipe burn.

Back at Filamona, I struck up a conversation with Makelita, who cleans rooms at the lodge. She paused sweeping and we whispered at length about her employer. She was paid AUD$25 a week.

Two days later, another plane landed. A piercing siren announced its arrival, warning both people and animals to clear the runway. I adopted the gestures of those around me, turning and looking to see who was coming and going. My Japanese neighbor waved goodbye as the incoming passengers emptied onto the tarmac. Later he disappeared in a speck, a contrail. After the siren diminished and it was safe to occupy the runway, I crossed to the other side to visit the meteorological station.

INTRUSION

Tauala Katea, acting chief meteorological officer, sat in his office surrounded by reams of paper and the pieces of various instruments that document the weather and the tides. He tilted one monitor to show me an image of a recent flood, when water bubbled up under the field by the runway. “This is what climate change looks like,” he said. The first signs of change had emerged a decade and a half before.

“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he told me. “The root crops seemed rotten and the size was getting smaller and smaller.”

Taro and pulaka, two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in pits dug underground. This crop failure was the first indication that something was wrong.

Tauala and his team traveled to the outer islands to take samples of the soil. After a period of research, the culprit was found to be saltwater intrusion linked to sea level rise.

Since 1993, a tide gauge at the main wharf has taken regular measurements. The seas have been rising at four millimeters per year since the Australian government started monitoring in the early 1990s. While that might sound like a small amount, this change has dramatic impacts on Tuvaluans’ access to drinking water. The highest point in the islands is only thirteen feet above sea level.

The last twenty years have marked a period of dramatic change in the Tuvaluan way of life. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are a thing of the past. The wells have become salty, so they are repurposed as trash heaps. All the water for washing, cooking, and drinking comes from the rain. The freshwater lens underneath the island, a layer of groundwater that floats above denser seawater, has become both salty and contaminated. Each home has a water tank attached to a corrugated iron roof by a gutter. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and also used to wash clothes and dishes, and for bathing.

“We are no longer dependent on underground water,” Tauala said, gesturing to the island around us. “The common areas where people depend on and fetch their fresh water out of it have become salty. So they just fill it up with rubbish.”

Water shortages and intensified storms have become a normal part of life over the past twenty years. But this wasn’t always the case. In the past, Tuvalu had a freshwater lens; Tuvaluans could dig a shallow well and have access to potable water.

Imported food is now commonplace, even in times when there isn’t drought. During my month in Tuvalu (December 2014 to January 2015), I learned what climate change tastes like: imported rice, tinned corned beef, a handful of imported carrots and apples, the occasional local papaya, bananas, and many creative uses for custard powder. Cooking happens on gas stoves in outdoor kitchens or, when a pig is prepared for a special occasion, on coals underground.

“We mostly depend on imported foods,” Tauala said. “It is hard.” In recent years, he told me, king tides have become stronger, another cause for concern. A king tide occurs when the Earth, moon, and sun align in their orbit, combining gravitational forces to create the highest tide of the year.¹ During the king tide in Tuvalu, water bubbles out of the ground.

“People experience a swell of currents of the king tide. It’s spreading more inland and further toward households,” Tauala explained. “Here in the Meteorological Office, our surroundings, during king tide, will cover with seawater.”

The Tuvalu Meteorological Service website once featured a picture, since removed, of seven Tuvaluans standing in ankle-deep water in front of the white box on stilts that houses surface weather monitoring instruments.

“The water has spread up and inundated most of the low-lying areas. Year by year you can see that there is an increase in a trend. It covers further inland. This is a new experience for us,” Tauala said.

He also worries about storms that coincide with a king tide. Any cyclone, “when there is a direct hit,” he continued, “it will be devastating.”

Tauala told me that climate change “shifts the pattern of everything, even our rainy season.” In the past, the wet and dry seasons were predictable, with above-average monthly rainfall from November to April, and less rain from May to October.² “Nowadays there seems to be a change in the rain pattern,” he mused. “We seem to have frequent heavy rain. The total rainfall for each month during the dry season is above normal or below normal.”

There is no normal anymore.

“We can try to adapt to climate change, all these changes,” Tauala said, “or migrate.”

For a low-lying nation like Tuvalu, the impacts of sea level rise can be devastating. Relying exclusively on crops planted in the ground is a thing of the past. Things that are imported run out. Rice? Stock up. Apples and carrots? Enjoy them for the two weeks while they last.

Farther down the runway from the meteorological office, the Taiwanese-funded Fatoaga Fiafia Garden plants salt-resistant seeds in raised beds; the produce sells out quickly on the two mornings a week they open for sale.³ You had to know someone who works there in order for them to set aside a share. Family kinship is king.

STAYING PUT

From the meteorological office, I walked next door to the public works department, my cardboard sign flapping slightly in the wind, and made friends with Ila, age thirty. A new church was being built near the northern tip of the island, and her job was to oversee the installment of new rainwater collection chambers. On the roof, “there’s lots of surface area,” she told me, “so there will be lots of water.”

I asked her if she had ever thought of leaving—of making home somewhere new.

“I go with the flow. If and when the time comes to leave Tuvalu, I will go with my family,” she told me. “While it’s a good idea to have a plan, for now I am staying put.”

Ila thinks the elders who want to “live in Tuvalu and die in Tuvalu are foolish. Some hide behind the Bible, saying that a second flood will not come. And the only response to that is to smile and nod, right?” she said. “You can’t really argue with a religion, or a religious conviction.”

Ila was born in Suva and spent her early childhood there—her father was the head ambassador at the Tuvaluan embassy. She lives with her husband, a sailor who signs nine- or eleven-month contracts at a time. When he returns, he brings her back red or black clothes, her favorite. They have three kids: twin boys age five and a three-year-old girl. Ila had her first children at twenty-five. She dropped out of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji after two years because school wasn’t for her, and has been working nonstop since age twenty. On slow afternoons in the office she plays offline games: solitaire or minesweeper. There were only three computers with office internet, and hers was not one of them.

When the workday was over, she invited me to her house on the other side of the airstrip so that I could use her Wi-Fi to let my family know that I was alive. Ila took a nap on a woven mat on the floor while I caught up with the other side of the world. Later that evening, as the sun faded to the west, her husband took the k...