NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

A sobering article about the situation in the Marshall Islands, where rising tides and damage from nuclear testing is threatening to force people out of the Pacific and seek new homes elsewhere. Climate change is, as President Obama regularly notes, the number issue facing the world today. It is however the number one issue that people are content to do close to nothing about. For people in the Pacific, this importance is even more pronounced due to the fact that people in low and high islands are already being affected and will soon have their lives irrevocably affected. People in low islands are already beginning to respond, but those of us in high islands are enjoying our terrestrial privilege and for Guam, our connection to the United States to somehow imagine that we won't be affected as much. When will we in Guam learn to see and live where we are, not where we have been indoctrinated to wish we were? Also, how foolish is it that a sense of minor American exceptionalism som

The Militarized Pacific: An Anniversary Without End Wednesday, 14 May 2014 10:13 By Jon Letman , Truthout | Op-Ed Marshallese children swim and play amongst a junk heap on the shore of tiny Ebeye island, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Some 11-12,000 people are packed onto the 80 acre island. (Photo by Richard Ross)   March 1, the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo test - a nuclear detonation over a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima - has come and gone. Predictably, major decadal events, like a 15-megaton explosion over a Micronesian atoll, garner fleeting attention, but it's all the days between the anniversaries that tell the real story of those who live with the impacts. For the people of the Marshall Islands, where Enewetak, Bikini and neighboring atolls were irradiated and rendered uninhabitable by 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, the brief anniv

Pagan Island, the “Crown Jewel” of the Marianas, is again slated for certain environmental devastation, this time by a proposal from the U.S. Military to use it for “live-fire training” which includes everything from artillery to bombing. Pagan is a small island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). It is one of the most biologically and geologically diverse islands in the archipelago, and is home to many threatened and endangered species, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. Aside from its stunning beauty and rich ecological resources, Pagan is also one of the most habitable of the northern most islands in the CNMI. In fact, this island has supported the ancestors of Pagan islanders for over 3,000 years, as evidenced by Chamorro stone ruins found skirting its beautiful beaches. The U.S. Military plans to occupy ALL of Pagan Island for live-fire training and military exercises, ignoring the indigenous rights of Pagan Island

Since I came back from Japan last month while attending the 2010 World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, I've found myself constantly drawing and painting mushroom clouds. The conference, the stories and history I heard there, the images that were etched into my mind by speaker after speaker, were full of mushroom clouds, and not just those from Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but those from elsewhere as well. Although only two nuclear bombs have been used against populations as explicit acts of war, hundreds of nuclear tests, above and below ground have taken place in the Pacific, the Continental US, Siberia, China, India and Pakistan. For populations who live in those areas, such as the peoples from the Marshall Islands of Bikini and Rogelap, these "peaceful" testing of nuclear missiles may have well been acts of war. In Hadashi no Gen, or Barefoot Gen, a manga written and illustrated by Keiji Nakazawa who was a survivor of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, t