This post is the first of a set of articles focusing on a song on Eliot Hester’s The Beauty Lost album, which launched this past Earth Day. You can get it on iTunes or wherever you go for digital music.
Eliot Hester, composer and performer, on his song, “Waves (The Beaches of Kiribati):”
“The sound you hear in the background is actually waves on a beach in Kiribati. I watched a video of that beach. You could see visibly the effect on the area, houses about to be immersed and stuff. The visuals looked rather rough and dire, but if you closed your eyes it sounded very peaceful. It was an odd juxtaposition. That’s what I think is really interesting about this song. Most people think that it’s very peaceful and relaxing, but if you see what’s going on, it seems more urgent. Interestingly, in this song I was trying to evoke the relaxation. The way I structured the album, I wanted to make the early songs relaxing, but build urgency in the later pieces.”
About Kiribati and climate change:
Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas) is a Pacific nation comprising 33 atolls and islands and a population of about 110,000. When it gained its independence from the U.K. in 1979, it became the world’s only nation with residents in all four hemispheres. The atolls and islands of Kiribati have had permanent residents since they were settled by sea-going Micronesian explorers in canoes between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.
The lands of Kiribati rise only 3-6 feet above a sea level that has been relatively stable for the last few thousand years, but less stable recently. The residents are now engaged in an ongoing battle with a rising sea that their president has already conceded they are destined to lose.
High tides flood and salinate farmland. Families erect sandbag walls in an effort to protect their homes.
Kiribati is expected to be largely submerged sometime in the second half of this century, a fate that has already been set by the CO2 emissions of industrialized nations between 1850 and now. It will become the first nation to be destroyed by climate change.
While individual families erect sandbag barriers around their homes, the government of Kiribati is actively planning for its own demise. It has purchased a 5,460-acre estate on Fiji’s second largest island of Vanua Levu, where the government intends to re-settle much of its population in a staged migration. Its schools have integrated into their curricula content intended to prepare young schoolchildren for the move.
(As I have written about, Fiji faces its own challenges from climate change.)
“To plan for the day when you no longer have a country is indeed painful but I think we have to do that.”
–Anote Tong, President of Kiribati, 2008
The fact that the people of Kiribati are in the midst of being dispossessed of their home of thousands of years by climate change, while we engage in a false and cynical, corporately funded “debate” about the actually well documented reality of the problem is, of course, deeply immoral. Any of our great religious, humanist, or philosophical traditions would agree.
Read more about other pieces on The Beauty Lost album.
Visit Eliot’s The Beauty Lost Project web page.
See more changes happening Before Our Eyes.