WEAVING WATER

As a species we live with a potential of two outcomes regarding the climate crisis: either we will collectively work our way through the issues, or we may make a planet unsuitable for human habitation. There are many well known issues to face – reducing carbon emissions, moving to sustainable solutions, and ending reliance on plastics to name a few.

Quite clearly, science and technology – the data and the fixes – are not working to undermine these issues and this is a pointer to larger work that needs to be done. The climate crisis rather than an issue of data is actually one of culture. If knowledge fed by data was enough to change the climate crisis, it would have happened by now.

All of us living within the modern world, live in a culture that undermines the environment. This is why it doesn’t matter whether you are living in the USA, Russia, China, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or the Pacific Ocean. We are all partaking in a culture of environmental degradation, and fortunately there are groups and individuals within these societies that have a culture of environmental affirmation.

To progress as a worldwide collective group of societies, it is important to listen to those groups and individuals who are environmentally affirmative. Obviously there are lessons to be learned but there is a problem of perception. Precisely those groups who have solutions to the crisis, are those who have been subjected to colonisation. That is to say they were looked upon as an inferior race and subjected, with Papal authority in 1493 to enslavement and the taking of lands. This was followed by war, rape, murder and Western diseases. The ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ as it was called has now been formally rejected by the Pope Francis.

Following is a chart of population losses among Polynesian communities, and there is a warning to sensitive viewers: the statistics are horrible. These are staggering losses and the point of writing about them is to give a charge to the need to decolonise as a first step out of the climate crisis.

Chart of Population Losses by Island

Row	Moana Motu (Island)	Population Loss After Colonisation
A	Rapa Nui (Easter Island)	95%+
B	Marquesas	95%
C	Rapa Iti	94%
D	Tahiti	93%
E	Rurutu	90%
F	Tubuai	90%
G	Hawai’ian Islands	83%
H	Tongareva	76%
I	Rarotonga	70%
J	Aotearoa New Zealand	60%

These figures are current estimates based on recent archaeological data according to New Zealand author Andrew Crowe, who spent fifteen years researching Polynesian voyaging history.¹ The levels of population loss are not only restricted to the Moana peoples of the Pacific. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd in 2017, wrote a paper where they referred to the facts that “in 1492 there were between 54 to 61 million peoples in the Americas and by 1650 there were 6 million.” They pointed out that “the drop in carbon dioxide levels that can be found in the geologic layer that corresponds to the genocide of the peoples of the Americas and the subsequent re-growth of forests and other plants.” In their article, they argue for a date of 1610 for the commencement of the Anthropocene, following the work of geographers Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin.²

Acknowledging the horrendous impacts of Colonisation on Indigenous Peoples is the first piece of a jigsaw, and provides a basis for a renewed interest in environmentally affirmative belief systems. As a step in the process of building a positive vision for humans on Earth, it is a small but essential component: it changes the way we see ourselves and that is exactly what the environmental crisis needs.

About the author
Pasha Clothier lives in Aotearoa New Zealand is an eighth generation descendant of Pitcairn Island, known traditionally on Tahiti as Hitiaurevareva. An artist writer, Pasha has exhibited one hundred and eighteen times in seventeen countries, and has twenty five publication credits. Pasha is a nickname given as a child, and is short for ‘passionate.’

Footnotes

The aim of this collection of blog posts is to place in the hands of a wide group of people, information that assists creating a renewed vision for an environmentally affirmative culture. Therefore links are provided where possible in the text, and information sourced from books is given in the list below.

1. Crowe, A. (2018). Pathway of the Birds: the voyaging achievements of Māori and their Polynesian ancestors. Auckland: Bateman. See page 230.

2. Davis, H. & Todd, Z (2017). On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene in ACME an International Journal for Critical Geographies January 2017 p 761 – 780. See pages 761 and 766 for the quotes.