(Summer courses online: Soc 205 and Soc 345)

Climate change is happening in every ecosystem around the planet. The nature of climate change suggests that heat from the equator circulates to the poles, creating warming conditions that are melting ice sheets, glaciers, and leading to accelerating rises in sea level. The populations on the front lines of changes include low-lying coastlines and islands. Because of the historical relationship between EOU and the ‘Freely Associated’ states—including FSM (Federated States of Micronesia, which are Pohnpei, Chuuk, Kosrae, and Yap), Palau, Marshall Islands, and the Northern Marianas (including Saipan and Tinian). The latter two Islands are US territories and their residents hold US citizenship, while the aforementioned are covered under a ’Compact of Free Association (COFA)’ that grants Islanders rights to live and work in the US, but not pursue a path of citizenship). My proposal is to create an integrated, interdisciplinary research center that focuses on these peoples, their cultures, and their experiences with climate change and mobility.

More specifically the center would seek to integrate interdisciplinary inquiry and build a knowledge base on what is inevitably going to be one of the most crucial and problematic processes of the 21st Century—climate change-driven migration on a global scale.

This process is not only inevitable, it is currently ongoing. The effects of climate change will drive millions from their homes via drought, wildfire, extreme weather events (think hurricanes and cyclones), drought, flooding, sweltering temperatures, species extinctions, as well as sea level rise. Currently about half of migrants in the world are moving, relocating, or being displaced, by climate change and its effects on peoples’ lives and livelihoods.

Union County already has likely upwards of 1000 Pacific Islanders living, studying, working, and participating in the life of the community, and have been a presence at EOU and in the community since at least the 1980s. Islanders will continue to move back and forth, family and friends might visit, attend school, seek employment, etc., and EOU could play a crucial role in helping the community and region understand and respond to these changes in the most informed, least disruptive, most productive and humane ways–help the community build resilience, that is, the capacity to respond to changes–such as climate change and its impacts on human movement–and yet strive to preserve culture, heritage and language.

In addition, such a center would actively recruit Islander students who may have professional interests in working on climate change, migration, and settlement from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, both at home and abroad.

And yet this is a worldwide process that will affect us all, hopefully interest extends beyond those paying the dearest prices–losing their homes–to all those with an eye toward the future stabilization of societies and habitability of the planet.  We will all have to do our parts. For those who don’t believe that . . . just wait, do nothing, and see how that works for you.