But try and calculate this: What if your house, your county, your country is destroyed by weather, water, war, terrorist acts, nukes? What rights do you have?
What if the rest of the world did not want you? Where would you go? You are the new 'climate refugees'.
Introducing the Tuvalu islands:
International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
Shuuichi Endou is photographing every single citizen in a country. It may sound ludicrous but it is entirely plausible. After all, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu only has about 11,000 inhabitants, and the 41-year-old Japanese photographer has already captured the images of the 340 people who live on the Nukulaelae atoll. By the time next year's G-8 Summit in Japan rolls around, the other 10,500 portraits should be finished. Endou wants to use them to give the rich and powerful a jolt, so that they finally understand the need to reduce emissions and stop global warming.The photographs of the Tuvaluans are meant to give climate change a human face. They are a people whose country is doomed to disappear. The group of islands lies just 10 centimeters (roughly four inches) above sea level; if the average sea level continues to rise, in just 50 years there will be nothing here but waves.
Some of the islands are already uninhabitable; the ocean nibbles at the narrow landmass from all sides. Nine islands totaling just 26 square kilometers (10 square miles) in area make up the fourth-smallest country in the world. There's hardly any industry, no military, few cars and just eight kilometers of paved roads.
The majority of the people make their living from fishing and agriculture. The country is so small that there is only a rough division of labor, with people acting as cooks and captains, ice cream salesmen and politicians.
Environmentalists have long worried about the fate of this tiny Pacific state. Now, however, international legal experts have also taken up the topic of its imminent demise. A nation's "territorial integrity" is one of the paramount legal principles. It's unprecedented, however, for a country to completely lose its territory without the use of military force.
If we realized that all of us are on this planet together, that working together benefits all of us rather than killing each other for resources and space, it truly would be a wonderful world:
3 comments:
But what will happen to the .tv domain? Isn't that like half their economy at present?
I don't mean to take their plight lightly. It's a serious problem and probably unstoppable at this point, the sea levels cannot be stopped from rising, we can only hope to limit the rate at which they continue to rise.
We should give them inflatable islands that anchor to the underwater ones. Then, in the next ice age, when the oceans lower, they could claim them again....
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