ABSTRACT
President Anote Tong of Kiribati compared climate change to the transatlantic slave trade at the 2016 Pacific Climate Change conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Teresia Teaiwa, a scholar, poet, and activist who taught at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, was in the audience. She was initially caught off-guard by the President's words, then the full significance of their meaning struck her at a personal and a political level. Teresia's whakapapa was African American, I-Kiribati and Fijian. 1 The economic system that justified slavery and that fuels climate change had an intergenerational effect upon the formation of her own identity as a Pacific Island woman. The major corporations and industries which contribute to global warming, like the plantation owners before them, are in the business of making immense profits at the cost of lives, homelands, and natural habitats. Moral arguments alone, as the abolition of slavery shows, do not lead directly to freedom and justice but yield, ironically, to the demands of capital for a captive global market of workers and consumers which, in turn, has resulted in the worst-case scenario of the current climate crisis.
