The Politics of Climate Change: A Talanoa from Oceania

This article is an invitation to talanoa (story, telling, conversation) around the politics of climate change. I seek not to debate whether climate change is natural or caused and accelerated by human conducts and our carbon civilization, nor to suggest excuses or cures for the ecological crises that devastate and drown people daily, the world over. Rather, my concern circles around two overlapping questions, under the shadow of which lurk the politics of climate change: whose interests benefit from climate change and whose interests benefit from talking about climate change? I invite talanoa around those questions, with the lot of the islands and islanders in Oceania as my starting point. I am of course guilty of that which I will critique, for I too talk herein about climate change, thus I am contributing to the politics of climate change.