Surving Paradise, Interview with Peter Rudiak-Gould

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Just before leaving for India, we were given the opportunity to read Peter Rudiak Gould’s fantastic book Surviving Paradise, One Year on a Disappearing Island about his time in the Marshall Islands.  He spent a year teaching in one of the most remote islands on the planet.  You can read our review of his book for more information at our post One Year on a Disappearing Island/Review

I enjoyed the book so much, that I contacted Peter to ask him for some more insight into his writing and time spent on the island.
He was kind enough to take the time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions.
Hope you enjoy our first interview here at ThePlanetD

D&D: Your book is called Surviving Paradise. It seems to have a double meaning. Is it named for your time on the islands or for the Marshallese surviving in a harsh environment? Do you think the Marshallese live a rich life or are they just merely surviving?

Peter: The title definitely has the double meaning you point out – maybe even a triple meaning if climate change is taken into account. It refers to the fact that Ujae was something other than paradise both for me and for the people who live there.

The Amazon has been called a “counterfeit paradise”; the same could be said of coral atolls, which are some of the most difficult and marginal environments that humans have managed to colonize. That doesn’t mean that people only survive there, though.

No culture just gets by: every society finds time and resources for games, stories, rituals, art, and music. But it would be wrong to imagine that Marshall Islanders exist in a state of childlike innocence, in a place that easily supplies their every need, or that all of their waking hours are devoted to spiritual reverie or communing with the cosmos. (That may sound like a straw man argument, but it is pretty close to the romantic descriptions of indigenous life that we sometimes hear.) That’s not really a letdown, and certainly not an insult. The people are far more interesting and human than that.

D&D: The Marshall Islands will be one of the first places to be destroyed by global warming. Why do you think that the world is giving Vanuatu and Tuvalu attention as disappearing islands when the Marshall Islands will clearly be the first to disappear under the sea?

Peter: The amount of media attention devoted to a country seems to have less to do with how vulnerable it is and more to do with other factors. One of them is how energetic and clever the populace is at publicizing its plight.

For instance, the government of the Maldives—a low-lying island nation in the same vulnerable position as the Marshall Islands—staged an underwater cabinet meeting to get media attention. And it worked. Tuvalu, also threatened with uninhabitability, negotiated migration rights to New Zealand.

Although this had nothing specifically to do with global warming, and almost no one in that country is leaving because of climate change fears, nonetheless the migration plan was picked up by the media as an example of a country that was “already fleeing”. (You can probably tell that I have mixed feelings about this spin, but at least it gets the country some much deserved attention.)

Also, a flood like the one the Maldives experienced in the 2004 tsunami, while having nothing to with climate change per se, put the country on the map as a low-lying nation vulnerable to sea level rise. The Marshall Islands, in contrast, hasn’t performed any publicity stunts, hasn’t made evacuation plans, and hasn’t had any major floods, so it gets little notice despite its high vulnerability.

D&D: Very interesting, that leads me to my next question…You say that the Marshallese need to do more to help themselves with the impending crisis of global warming and rising oceans. In what ways, if any, can the people of the Marshall Islands help themselves? Is all hope lost?

Peter: Of course, the blame isn’t on them, but the problem is there whether they caused it or not. There are a few things—important things—that they can do in response. I can think of four:?

1) They can protest the lack of international action on climate change. Although the fate of the Marshallese matters no more (and no less) than any other group of 60,000 people, the fact that they are a country has enormous psychological pull – climate change activists prefer to say that “a whole country will have to be evacuated” rather than “60,000 people will have to be evacuated”. The Marshallese can use this rhetorical tool to their advantage. They have no clout on the international stage, but they can make headlines for their plight. They have started to do this, but could do much more in this category.?

2) They can plan for migration. Note that planning for migration is not the same as planning to migrate. It is merely making a plan for the possible eventuality in which life is no longer sustainable on these islands – not resigning oneself to inevitable exodus. This distinction is incredibly important and often missed. There is a debate in the Marshall Islands, and abroad, about whether people should leave their country because of climate change.

The pro-migration people say “Migration is inevitable, so we’d better face up to it”, while the anti-migration people say “Migration is not a solution – it would destroy our culture and is an utterly unacceptable option”. To me, this seems to be an unnecessary debate. Surely both sides can agree (so long as both sides realize the reality of climate change) that a) total migration is a terrible prospect and is to be avoided at all costs, and b) it may nonetheless become necessary to do so for very survival. This means that both sides should be for planning for migration but not for planning to migrate.

Preparing for the worst is not the same as predicting the worst.?

3) They can make steps to adapt to the more manageable aspects of climate change. Vulnerability to erosion and storms can be reduced by planting trees on the shoreline. Houses can be built a few feet above the ground. Disaster management can be improved. Water resources can be more effectively protected. These steps will not prevent the destruction of the country in a worst case scenario, but they might delay it, and they might, just might, be enough to prevent it if climate change is not quite so bad as we have feared.?

4) They can reduce their own carbon footprint. Again, the blame is not on them, but every little bit of emissions reduction helps the world, and it also demonstrates their commitment. Carbon-free energy sources also have side benefits in this country: the economy would no longer be at the mercy of oil price fluctuations.

Solar energy is one option that is already starting to catch on in the Marshalls.

Another more speculative option is OTEC, which would use the temperature difference between deep sea and shallow sea water to generate energy. Apparently the Marshall Islands is in an ideal location to do this. If it works, installing this technology in the Marshall Islands could change not only this country, but the whole world.

Excellent points, I hope that they start to work on your suggestions. You actually make me think that there is some hope out there.

D&D: After spending a year in the Marshall Islands, you became fluent in the Marshallese language.  What makes it unique and why have you continued to use it, even writing a language text book? Is it a dying language or does it have a chance to live on?

Peter: Marshallese has many interesting features.

Predictably, it has a huge variety of words for things that people pay close attention to in this society: for instance, 11 words for different stages of coconut ripeness and maturity, and 159 other coconut-related terms including a word that means “the sucking noise made in drinking green coconuts”, plus a plethora of extremely specific fishing terms, like apep, which means “using woven brown coconut fronds to catch sardines and minnows as they are chased ashore by bigger fish”.

It has a directional system based on the fact that every islet of a coral atoll has a lagoon side and an ocean side – to tell someone which way to turn a door knob, for instance, you’d be more likely to say “towards the lagoon” than “towards the right”.

It also has some unusual sounds: two different trilled r’s, two different varieties of m’s, n’s, and l’s (one ‘heavy’ and the other ‘light’). (Okay, so maybe this last fact is only of interest to linguistics nerds, but as one myself, I find it pretty thrilling.)

It’s been great to continue using the language.

I wrote a language textbook (definitely a niche market!) and acted as an interpreter for a scientific expedition in the Marshall Islands last summer. I’ve still never had the experience, though, of running into a Marshallese person in the US and shocking them with my knowledge of the language, which has always been a daydream of mine. I should hang out in Springdale, Arkansas, where there are 10,000 Marshallese people.
The Marshallese language isn’t endangered for the time being. It is still vigorous, although some words associated with discontinued traditional practices are being forgotten.

Marshallese children speaking better English than Marshallese is definitely not a problem, as I can attest from being an English teacher.

But if climate change forces everyone to leave the country, then the language could easily become endangered.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

D&D: I thoroughly enjoyed this book – you have a talent for writing.  Have you always had the desire to write or was it your experience on Ujae that prompted you to tell you story? Can we expect another book from Peter Rudiak-Gould? What is in store for you next?

Peter: I always wanted to write a book about something but didn’t have anything to write it about – that is, until I found Ujae. Actually, I should say: until I came back from Ujae, because while I was there I somehow failed to realize that these experiences might be interesting to others.

Even while in the Marshall Islands, surrounded with material that would eventually become a book, I fantasized about my next adventure, the one that would be truly book-worthy. My idea was to go on some sort of bushwhacking expedition in the remotest corners of Vanuatu – which might have been interesting, but it later occurred to me that staying in one tiny place (rather than intrepidly traveling across large distances) is also a kind of adventure.

As for new writing projects, I’ve got two.

One is my doctoral thesis on how Marshallese people are reacting to the threat of climate change. It is a kind of book, and might eventually be published as such. My first priority, for career purposes, has to be to publish it for an academic audience, but I do hope that I can also (or at the same time!) get it out to a wider audience. I’m also hoping to do some writing about the other exotic culture I’ve landed in: the culture of Oxford and of academia.

D&D: Now that would be an interesting read. You write with great humour and whit, I can only imagine what you will come up with about your time at Oxford.  Looking forward to your future projects.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!

For those of you that haven’t yet read Surviving Paradise, One Year on a Disappearing Island, go out and get your copy today, you won’t be disappointed.

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