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A healthy and sustainable environment is the foundation of an equitable, functioning society and the basis for prosperity, well-being, security, and stability of human and animal life. We must implement global, national and subnational policies on the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems, landscapes, and seascapes, including building cities with nature, through locally adapted, resource-efficient, and just systemic interventions. These must be based on the precautionary principle and follow a global mitigation hierarchy for nature conservation.

In this context we are urging governments to fully utilise the opportunity presented by the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of our ecosystems and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework in order to build a clear pathway to achieve a world in harmony with nature.

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Our Future With Nature | GYBN - Our Future With Nature | GYBN

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A healthy and sustainable environment is the foundation of an equitable, functioning society and the basis for prosperity, well-being, security, and stability of human and animal life. We must implement global, national and subnational policies on the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems, landscapes, and seascapes, including building cities with nature, through locally adapted, resource-efficient, and just systemic interventions.

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share your thoughts on this list of demands for international action!

Directly empower young people through training and funding to communicate about environmental issues through creative mediums, fostering support for both artists and climate action.

Embed youth into all stages of decision-making to better cultivate, identify, and utilise creative solutions for climate action and environmental policy.

Preserve Indigenous Peoples’ crafts, foods, traditional natural medicines, customs, and mythologies that communicate how humanity can live in harmony with nature. Create a culture of equitable knowledge exchange to transfer ideas within and across national and cultural borders.

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I believe everyone has a story to share. What is your green story?

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A podcast episode on demilitarizing the Pacific by two Pasifika Youths 

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A podcast episode on demilitarizing the Pacific by two Pasifika Youths 

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A podcast I created on canceling the International RIMPAC War Games in 2020 in light of COVID19 and demilitarizing the Pacific

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Bonus Ep#1 - RIMPAC in the Hawaiian Kingdom

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Bonus EP#1] How does RIMPAC affect the Kingdom of Hawai'i? Kawena, a kanaka maoli activist with the Cancel RIMPAC Coalition shares his view on RIMPAC and militarization of the Pacific. Kalani then discusses militarization in the CNMI, specifically regardi

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"Fighting for our Survival" Video Series

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"Fighting for our Survival" Video Series

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350.org produced this series alongside three Indigenous Pacific islander climate change activists. Peoples of the Pacific are on the frontlines of climate change vulnerability, and this was produced to challenge countries to deliver on the Paris obligations they signed.

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Midnight on 31 December is a survival deadline for the climate - and for some 1.2 billion vulnerable people living at the frontlines of a worsening global climate crisis.

Please join the Climate Vulnerable Forum (as known by our acronym, the CVF), in the Midnight Survival Deadline for the Climate initiative, an online and social media challenge to all countries to deliver on the Paris obligations they signed to protect our climate and our rights.
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About the Artists

Ropate Kama

Ropate is the Co-Owner of www.kamacatchme.com a Photography / Videography collective based in Fiji that specialises in capturing Destination Weddings, specifically in 'Adventure / Off The Beaten Path' elopements and Cultural weddings both in Fiji and internationally.

Kama Catch Me has accrued multiple Awards over the years since its inception in 2012, the most prestigious being the 'Rangefinder 30 rising stars of 2018' www.rangefinderonline.com

Ropate is an i-taukei (indigenous Fijian) who was born in the United Kingdom (where his dad served in the British Army) and was raised in Fiji from the age of 6.

His life experiences coupled with a deep longing to be home in Fiji whenever he was abroad, have been the inspiration behind his ability to not only tell relevant stories but more importantly, to connect his own emotions to these images and portray the essence of Fiji and her Mana to the Diaspora who feel physically disconnected and yet so fully connected at the same time.

1angrynative | Frances C Koya Vaka'uta

Associate Professor Frances C. Koya Vaka'uta is Director of the Oceania Center for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at The University of the South Pacific in Suva. A curriculum design, development and evaluation specialist she has taught, developed courses and supervised graduate research in the areas of curriculum studies, curriculum development, practice and research, theories and ideas in education, education in small island states, culture and education, education for sustainable development and Pacific studies. Her research interests focus on Sustainability and Education for Sustainability with particular emphasis on Indigenous Research, Pacific Arts and Arts Education, Pacific epistemologies and methodologies, cultural competency and community and policy development. An advocate for locally driven solutions informed by meaningful engagement with Pacific indigenous peoples and local communities, she has also engaged in national and regional community and policy development, curriculum skills development, research and policy engagement. A poet and artist, her creative practice explores Pacific island heritage and contemporary issues in the islands. Beyond the page, she performs under the spoken word pseudonym 1angrynative.

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is a poet of Marshallese ancestry, born in the Marshall Islands and raised in Hawaiʻi. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. The University of Arizona Press published her collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter in 2017. She has created art installations and performances with the Smithsonian and the Queensland Art Gallery, amongst others. In 2019, she was selected as an Obama Asia Pacific Leader Fellow and MIT Director's Media Lab Fellow. She received her Master's in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi, and is currently a PhD student at Australia National University. Kathy serves as Climate Envoy for the Republic of the Marshall Islands government and as Director for the Marshall Islands-based youth environmental nonprofit Jo-Jikum.

Mia Kami

Mia Kami is a Tongan singer/songwriter based in Suva, Fiji. She is passionate about gender equality, indigenous sovereignty, climate change & the Pacific region. She channels these passions into songwriting & uses her music to tell her stories as a young Pacific woman. She believes that art is the strongest form of storytelling that connects Pacific and indigenous people to their ancestors & their descendants.

MATA

MATA is a Hip Hop dance company based in Suva. Mata was created on the humble grounds to serve the development of a Hip Hop Dance culture in Fiji! They wanted to create, nurture and develop opportunities for all aspiring dancers who have a passion for the dance genre Hip Hop.

At Mata they aim to provide dancers with the necessary opportunities, training and experiences to assist them to fully discover their full potential as individual artists in Fiji.

The Density of Vā
1angrnative on climate change in the Pacific By Frances C Koya Vaka'uta
"In the space between the bleeding sky and dawn
voices wail in an unfamiliar tongue.

in the space between my pito and my mother's bones
A white owl watches two eel-gods
Dying
As a dog
Howls
Red earth into black Lua- two
and rock watersky lines pierce my throat
atua - god in my belly."

Read more

In the space between the bleeding sky and dawn
voices wail in an unfamiliar tongue.

in the space between my pito and my mother's bones
A white owl watches two eel-gods
Dying
As a dog
Howls
Red earth into black Lua- two
and rock watersky lines pierce my throat
atua - god in my belly.

in the space between place and breath
our gods are condemned to the wind
the dreams of fish
Discarded by strangers who do not love us
fishhooks in my belly pull me to shore.

in the space between I am and I will
We measure the density of va
In the pit of my belly
There is a seed
And it is sadness.

© Cresantia Frances Koya, 2010

Midnight
By Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
"For Tony, we'll say
For Tony

Corals are resilient I've been told
and so are we - we've survived worse. Just ask
your elders they'll lift their shirts, show you
bunker scars, typhoon tent towns, atomic nightmares
of lost irradiated islands. So this
is just another incoming tide to shore up against"

Read more

For Tony, we'll say
For Tony

are we so easily broken?

Maybe we need flags
to tell us how afraid we should be
We have flags for covid threat levels:
yellow for safe, yellow for prepare, yellow for
complacency, yellow worth celebrating. Covid free.

We reassemble ourselves
We gather the calcium carbonate to grow
our coral skeletons into sunlight

Look -
up ahead -
a lush marine garden awaits

For Tony, we'll say
For Tony

Mana
By Mia Kami
"Why do we accept definitions of how our people should be?
Based off of written accounts of a man who looks nothing like me
He could speak our language but not from his heart
When he wrote our history he set us apart
Abandoned and bruised
Left alone in the dark"

Read more

But i wont let that past define who i am
When i listen closely
I hear my ancestors chant

Tell our stories
Redefine a past that was written for us before
Add a chapter
Its time to write a little more
Recast the future
Its time to let our stories soar
This is my mana
My spirit
My soul
This is me

When did a textbook determine what makes me who i am
Pages that say nothing of the blood that was shed
Stolen resources and land
For there is still so much that we have yet to learn
Hidden in the archives that they couldn't burn
It is rooted within us
Look closely and you will see
You will see

Tell your stories
Redefine a past that was written for us before
Add a chapter
Its time to write a little more
Recast the future
Its time to let our stories soar
This is my mana
My spirit
My soul
This is me

She spoke to the oceans
She sang with the trees
She can be heard in the quiet whispers of the breeze
She is everything i aspire to be
She is mana
She lives in me
She spoke to the oceans
She sang with the trees
She can be heard in the quiet whispers of the breeze
She is everything i aspire to be
She is mana
She is me

Tell your stories
Redefine a past that was written for us before
Add a chapter
Its time to write a little more
Recast the future
Its time to let our stories soar
This is my mana
My spirit
My soul
This is me

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Midnight on 31 December is a survival deadline for the climate - and for some 1.2 billion vulnerable people living at the frontlines of a worsening global climate crisis.

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“One Word“ is a participatory documentary about the impacts of Climate Change on the Republic of the Marshall Islands and its people.

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One Word | We are not drowning. We are fighting.

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We use cookies on our website. Some of them are essential for the functioning of this website, while others help us to improve this website. You can find our privacy policy in our imprint.

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We use cookies on our website. Some of them are essential for the functioning of this website, while others help us to improve this website. You can find our privacy policy in our imprint. Wir verwenden Cookies auf unserer Website.

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A spoken word poem on Climate Change recited by  Indigenous Queer Pacific Islander (Marshallese) poet and climate change activist Nenol Kaminaga

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An uplifting spoken word Climate Change poem by an Indigenous Pacific Marshallese poet 

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An uplifting spoken word Climate Change poem by an Indigenous Pacific Marshallese poet 

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CW: natural disasters

Marshallese poet, climate activist, and mother Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner recites her most famous poem on climate change in the Pacific at her statement to the U.N. Climate Summit in 2014.

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Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner speaks on the climate crisis and its threat to the fate of the Marshall Islands

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by Prince Ea

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by Solli Raphael

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Champion Slam Poet slams Greed, Capitalism and Apathy as cause of Climate Change

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by Amanda Gorman

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24 Hours of Reality: "Earthrise" by Amanda Gorman

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An online exhibition from The Chapter House for World Water Day

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A rallying cry of Indigenous Peoples, and a plain and simple fact. But what exactly does it mean to come from water? In her poem Atlas, where this exhibition draws its title from, Terisa Siagatonu ponders the realities of being from Sāmoa, an island in the South Pacific, very often overlooked on maps, and that is victim to colonization, tourism, and American military imperialism. For Siagatonu, water is the place she is from, in part because it threatens to overtake what little land makes up Sāmoa, but also because the ocean's vastness is easier to see than the island.

As water surrounds her homelands, how might water shape other places we are from? From the Navajo Nation to sub-Saharan Africa to California, water scarcity, the lack of running water, and drought make everyday tasks and health a challenge. On the other hand, abundance of water, like post-Hurricane Katrina or the Kiribati Islands threaten to swallow the very existence of a physical space. In both instances of too little or too much water, water structures our homes, physical and mental health, and lives.

In The Chapter House's inaugural online exhibition but when you come from water, artists contributed works that consider water as a material, medium, inspiration, and something to fight for. This exhibition is specifically inspired by the work of Emma Robbins, The Chapter House's Founder and Executive Director of the Navajo Water Project. In conjunction with World Water Dayand in collaboration with DigDeep, but when you come from water explores interpretations of water in artistic form from artists from across the world.

If you open up any
and take a look at a map of the world,
almost every single one of them
slices the Pacific Ocean in half.

To the human eye,
every map centers all the land masses on Earth
creating the illusion
that water can handle the butchering
and be pushed to the edges
of the world.
As if the Pacific Ocean isn't the largest body
living today, beating the loudest heart,
the reason why land has a pulse in the first place.

Colleen CooleyDigital photograph

Her journey begins,
From the San Juan mountains,
Taking you through canyons and washes,
Across the deserted landscape,
Carrying snow melt,
Making you shiver,
She is sacred to many,
Providing water to plenty,
She is full of silt and mud,
But, her journey continues,
As she flows into the Colorado River

The audacity one must have to create a visual so
violent as to assume that no one comes
from water so no one will care
what you do with it
and yet,
people came from land,
are still coming from land,
and look what was done to them.

When people ask me where I'm from,
they don't believe me when I say water.
So instead, I tell them that home is a machete
and that I belong to places
that don't belong to themselves anymore -

- broken and butchered places that have made me
a hyphen of a woman:
a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both
colonizer and colonized,
both blade and blood.

California stolen.
Samoa sliced in half stolen.
California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful
country on this planet.
Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it's no wonder
people doubt its existence.
California, a state of emergency away from having the drought
rid it of all its water.
Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery
if the sea level doesn't stop rising.

Three black and white images all individually photographed of ice on the ground. The images are abstract and look a bit like aerial photographs. Even though each photograph is a separate entity, there is a continuation of certain lines from one image to the next. In the last image, the ice has been broken and the illusion of land and sky disappears.

When people ask me where I'm from,
what they want is to hear me speak of land,
what they want is to know where I go once I leave here,
the privilege that comes with assuming that home
is just a destination, and not the panic.

-Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to.
What is it like? To know that home is something
that's waiting for you to return to it?

"Aguas Negras" ("Black Waters" or "Sewage") is an experimental documentary about the Cuautitlán River that runs through the State of Mexico. The film examines the passage of time and the pollution of the river by focusing on conversations with multiple generations of women that have grown up on its banks.

What does it mean to belong to something that isn't sinking?
What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood?

So many of us come from water
but when you come from water
no one believes you.

Undark

Between 1922 and 1936, the Radium Dial Company & U.S. Radium Corporation hired thousands of young women in Ottawa, Illinois to paint the faces of watches, clocks and other instrument dials using a new glow-in-the-dark radioluminescent paint made of phosophorus and radium. The name of the paint was "Undark". Famously, the girls worked in an old high school building. They had been told the paint was safe. Picture them licking the paintbrush to make a perfect point for a particularly detailed job, even painting their teeth with the stuff when they got bored at work. Picture them painting their fingernails with it, looking at them under bedcovers at night. The women-- there were four thousand of them-- have been memorialized as the Radium Girls.

Colonization keeps laughing.
Global warming is grinning
at all your grief.
How you mourn the loss of a home
that isn't even gone yet.
That no one believes you're from.

How everyone is beginning
to hear more about your island
but only in the context of
vacations and honeymoons,
football and military life,
exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches
but never asks about the rest of its body.

Ciara KhanDigital photograph

"These photos are from a series I'm exploring called Recreation Reclamation, where I create imagery with people who have not had opportunities to deeply connect with the land around them. These photos feature my friend that has lived in Miami all her life. She has Bahamian lineage and often jokes about how she can't swim. In these photos I've captured her connecting with water in Big Cypress, 729,000 acres of a freshwater swamp ecosystem. 20+ years of being in Miami and she barely knew it existed. I thought about what it is to be a Black woman and access this space safely. Recreation in South Florida is dominated by White males (sometimes armed) that have access to gear, space and permission. We walked through a trail, submerged in freshwater and eventually found a spot to rest. We sat in silence for a while breathing fresh air and noticing all the wildflowers around us. Eventually my friend broke the silence, 'I know I can't swim but I told you, we're water people. I'm supposed to be here.'"

The water.
The islands breathing in it.
The reason why they're sinking.
No one visualizes islands in the Pacific
as actually being there.

Idle No More

"Water is Life. Idle No More diaries a 100 day canoe expedition where we learned what it feels like to embody this philosophy. The river was our home. The river was our teacher. The river and its people taught us things we cannot afford to forget. By exploring these river memories through art, I am both able to process an incredible journey and share some of the things we were taught along the way. For 100 days, the Mississippi River was where we ate, slept, gathered, and dreamed. Our bodies were nourished by her water; it flowed through our veins and our destinies became entwined. What does it mean to come from water in the time of the Colonial Capitalist Anthropocene? Idle No More attempts to revolve around this question in an ever-widening gyre."

You explain and explain and clarify
and correct their incorrect pronunciation
and explain
until they remember just how vast your ocean is,
how microscopic your islands look in it,
how easy it is to miss when looking
on a map of the world.

Excuses people make
for why they didn't see it
before.

A Song to the Water from a Loving Child

2018 - 2019
Lake Erie shoreline found objects, sand, rock, buckets, water textiles with video
A Song to the Water From a Loving Child arises from a sweet moment with the artist's child who, upon throwing stones, pebbles and what ever they could grab into the water, declared, "It's beautiful music! A song for the water!" This piece is the artist's response to this loving child. A moment of hard truth. A moment where we know gratitude is not enough. Water is the lifeline for Dó:so:wë:h, currently known as Buffalo, NY. Since time immemorial, before the arrival of Europeans, through ungrateful industrialization and into today the water, the Great Lakes, her rivers streams and creeks, have sustained this place currently known as Buffalo, NY and many communities along these fresh water lifelines. Through reservoirs of land theft and projects eagerly backed by the Niagara River Power Authority, to the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, we witnessed not only the loss of water we could touch, drink, eat from, but thousands of acres of land. Rivers turned to rivers of fire, so toxic they burned. These waters make life possible. And what do we have left to give her but our gratitude and apologies and songs?

All donations to The Chapter House help us curate shows like this one. Please donate today!

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A rallying cry of Indigenous Peoples, and a plain and simple fact. But what exactly does it mean to come from water? In her poem Atlas, where this exhibition draws its title from, Terisa Siagatonu ponders the realities of being from Sāmoa, an island in the South Pacific, very often overlooked on maps, and that is victim to colonization, tourism, and American military imperialism.