Navigating to the Island of Hope - a Pacific response to globalisation, environmental degradation and climate change

Abstract

Navigating to the Island of Hope - A Pacific Response to Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Economic Globalisation in Oceania explores and seeks to understand indigenous responses to the powerful forces of globalisation and climate change through ethnographic research and cultural analysis spanning more than eight years in totality, and the Pacific renaissance concept of the Island of Hope. The Island of Hope serves as a lens, and is of interest both from a scholarly perspective and a praxis perspective, as the Island of Hope is a complex amalgamation and synthesis of Pacific ethics elements, economic justice, communal interconnectedness, cosmology and the Christian idea of heaven on Earth. This dissertation, just as the Island of Hope itself does, aims to critique and offer a unique perspective on a motivating and unifying principle in Oceania, which extends from the personal to international in scope, and explores the political and economic, the religious and spiritual, the local and global, as well as nature conservation and climate change activism. Global connections dictate global obligations.