island conversations
podcast series

You're very kind and it's certainly what we try to do and it's very supportive of you to give that sort of endorsement and to say it's working, which is an encouragement to do more, and all I can do is say I’ve been inspired, helped and supported by so many who do it, and continue to do it much better than me. Anything that we can do to help guide people to do exactly as you're saying, don't be afraid to enjoy what you're doing, don't be afraid to pursue what you want, always keep it in perspective, always take constructive critique and ensure that no matter what career stage that you are at, you must inspire, support, work with others, while ensuring that you're being guided and being inspired by others. We all have so much to learn, we can all always improve, but we also have so much to give and no matter whether your early career, still doing a degree, coming from the UN, coming from a local non-governmental organization, you have so much to offer, so please don't hesitate, I hope this is how we can go forward together, exchanging and teaching and learning from each other.

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Yes, so I think that's very true and I think that nicely takes us to the field of island studies, do we even want to call it field of ‘island studies’ … Islands work, where various networks have developed over the last few years. I mean one thing that I found, I don't know how you feel about this, is island studies tend to be a very open field of research, and I think having moved around various academic disciplines myself, I think it is particularly encouraging to younger scholars, but maybe you'd like to just kind of comment on where you think island studies, as a field of research, is at the moment, or even if you like to frame it in those terms.

No, I think Jon you're absolutely right that we try and be open and welcoming, we hope that we succeed, if not, then just let us know. The strength is bringing together different disciplines, people who are non-disciplinary, people who are all disciplinary. And what is so amazing, what is so wonderful about many of these island related conferences, is ensuring that we do not hold a conference, unless the organizers are involving the local people directly; the islanders. And I’ve sat on academic panels at academic island conferences in the same way, entirely equitable with people from the local community who may have limited academic background. This is the exchange, this is saying that theory is important, concepts are important, but we have to know what people are doing in their day to day lives and their decade to decade lives. Even the fact that you challenge the whole notion of island studies - it's not just about studying, it's not putting islands out there as saying oh you're a nice little object, let's study you and write it up. It's actually island work or, more to the point, working with islanders. Islands are not just the physical entity it's also the people, the culture, the process of being part of the globe and fundamentally can we even separate an islander from an island? 

Where the broader field of island studies or islands-related work or islander interaction is going, is so introspective, really questioning itself and saying, are we doing it the right way. As you said, is it really a field, do we want to call it a field, is it a discipline, do we want to call a discipline and the answer can be yes or no. The answer can be today, yes, tomorrow, no. They said it depends on the context. Certainly for me another really powerful and really appropriate approach, which is so embodied within islands-related work is that it comes down to the people. Even if we're talking about island geomorphology or island biogeography or island evolution over eons, so much is really about the islanders. Learning from islanders, being directed by islanders, not separating islanders from non-islanders but looking at the overlaps, interactions and the connections. 

And again, in the same way that the island conferences have to bring in non-academics, nonscientists, particularly from the Islands where we travel. It’s saying everyone has so much to contribute. Different knowledges; different forms of knowledge, different approach to knowledge, even querying what is an island? Even querying, why do we ask that question, and always saying, are we looking at islands, looking at islanders, looking at the combination, why do we do it? How do we frame it in a respectful manner, how do we bring everyone in so that they're contributing while learning? Ultimately, we can then combine people, combine their skills, combine their knowledges or our peoples, our skills, our knowledges, to generate a wider wisdom which will/should contribute to islands and islanders with all the challenges and opportunities present. 

But also go well beyond that, to give back so much to the world, which they already have, but also to ensure that we're not leaving any location, any person, any knowledge behind. In order to integrate islands and islanders with the world, not being this separate isolated marginalized group, but actually trying to contribute constructively and overcome the challenges which all of us face today.

Silhouette Island, Seychelles.
(Copyright Ilan Kelman 2013)

Excellent points Ilan. […] I think I like the way in which you frame this tension between a kind of broader work on islands and a kind of field of island study scholars, shall we say. I mean there are a group of us that do identify with island studies as a field, but at the same time, there is a huge amount of work, particularly today, on islands, and there always has been, you know, in my opinion … Darwin was a great island scholar, Margaret Mead, you know, it goes back, but they wouldn't call themselves ‘island studies’ scholars. They do work on islands and with islands. But I think you're right because, in a sense, this tension is really useful, particularly today where the island becomes so important for so many wider debates that there are a group of people who are identified with ‘island studies’ and they can bring that tension to these debates, and islanders as well, as you were saying.

Maybe it's not so much tension, but just synergy and connection. There's nothing wrong with disagreement, as long as it's constructive. There's nothing wrong with divergence, as long as we're moving forward together and, hopefully, we do have the same fundamental goals, but we do need to thrash that out and continue questioning ourselves and continue being questioned.

Absolutely. I think that's right and, as I said, I think it just couldn't be more important. You know, as islands and islanders just seem to become so much more prevalent in so many debates about the kinds of things, we can talk about. You know, sustainability, resilience, disasters and so forth. In fact, maybe we could turn to those now then, I mean I don't know what you want to do here, would you like to take these key terms in turn or maybe approach them together? I think the things we can talk about that are very relevant to your work are concepts like sustainability, resilience, participatory research, disasters and health. Maybe we could start off with the kind of more sustainability, resilience kind of debates and where your work fits into that and in particularly regard to debates on islands.

And this is exactly where I learned so much because as you're intuiting, they're all connected, it really is hard to separate them. We have a number of challenges, from the academic perspective it's definitions, it’s translation and interpretation across languages and cultures. What islanders and island studies have taught me is really to try to make it relevant to what people are doing. And again, this is where's your food coming from today? But it's also where are we going to site infrastructure for the next hundred years, how are we going to deal with the next millennium of environmental and social changes. Islands have brought so much to me in making it practical and pragmatic, so if we're talking about some of these words like sustainability, like resilience, what does it really mean on the ground, do we want everything to be static and robust for the next millennium, or even the next day. Are we talking about ensuring that people have what I have, being challenged, being fulfilled having the potential to pursue my interests and contributing constructively? Or are they simply eking out an existence day to day, hoping the fish will be in the sea tomorrow, hoping that they're not going to have thugs come and take some of their money today. 

We need to connect topics, we need to connect issues and a lot of the buzzwords which have come out like resilience, like social-ecological systems, like planetary boundaries. When we start delving into them, we find two key lessons. Number one, as you're saying, the people from decades and centuries ago actually said very similar aspects and give a lot of information. Number two, the complicated phrases don't add anything. So if we take social-ecological, social is people, ecological is natural environment. You bring together a system that's a collection of parts, so it’s simply saying that it's a collection of parts, of people and the natural environment. Which to me is reality. So rather than using a complicated phrase, I prefer to use a simple phrase, and any work which I’ve done on a whole variety of islands from the high Arctic to the equator show that people live within the reality, which sounds like a truism, which makes me scratch my head and say, well then, how come so many academics have forgotten it? Even to the extent that they then just say, well, we have to look at what climate change is doing to social-ecological systems. And yes, we are changing the climate rapidly and substantively it's not the only rapid substantive change, we are doing. It's not the only major concern affecting people on islands and in other places. Whether it's human trafficking, whether it's drugs, whether it's weapons, whether it's microplastics or wider plastic waste and pollution, people have to deal with this day to day. And we're being affected by it day to day, as well as millennium to millennial. 

Let's not get distracted by these big terms and big words, let's not get distracted by trying to sound much more clever when we're not adding any substance. And let's not take a concept like planetary boundaries and assume that it gives us all we need, when it's threshold based, even though people and environment don't typically work on thresholds, it does not take into account past science, including extensive work from islands and from islanders. And it also tends to leave a lot of human influence out of the equations, rather than saying, people are tilling their front garden, and they're being inhibited from tilling their front garden, not just by environmental changes, but by social forces. 

Looking at sustainability and resilience, people often take them as synonymous, when they can be contrary. Because some conceptualizations of resilience say let's keep everything the same, and the more robust it is, the less it changes, or the more it comes back to the way it was before, the more resilient it is. If we are taking today as being resilient, we're going to destroy ourselves because it's not sustainable. We absolutely do not want resilience in our use of fossil fuels. We obviously do not want resilience in people being enslaved. We obviously do not want resilience in a huge inequities and inequalities which are prevalent across all countries, so we do not want to be sustaining in the same way. Thus, sustainability actually means the opposite of many approaches to resilience, particularly when it means cutting people out of what's being discussed and that's where the participatory aspects come in. If we're talking about modern anglophone science, so much participatory research was founded and defined in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly from work on islands. 

So why do we forget this, why do we underrate it, why do we pretend that everything coming, for example, from climate change or from social-ecological systems, social-ecological resilience coupled human and natural systems, why do we assume that everything coming from that, which is so recent, is so new when it completely misrepresents not just the history of modern anglophone science, but simply the history of knowledge and what islanders and others have contributed. What I try to do is, hopefully constructively, but perhaps I’m not entirely diplomatic all the time, as you might have heard. 

And this is where I could potentially improve. What I’m trying to do is recognize the people, recognize their history, recognize that cultures, again knowledges to wisdom. To say just speaking in English, with a lot of syllables, does not necessarily confer intellectualism or appropriateness. We need to learn what is coming from the people experiencing these difficulties and the changes. We need to learn from the people, creating their own opportunities, but who are quite rightly hungry for more and we can offer a lot and then do better for ourselves and our own places in our own ways of living. I mean, do you want to come back on anything like that while I go to disasters and health, what does all this mean to you Jon?

I think, yes, I can I completely agree and I was just thinking about what we share here. I think one thing, perhaps we share that we could tease out a bit is the way in which a lot of these debates were happening, a long time ago, you know, in the sense that a lot of the debates in critical theory or resilience or whatever, were actually developed through and with island and islanders a very long time ago. But also, the other thing […] we share is the way in which the figure of the island and the islanders and island cultures get kind of sucked up into these broader buzzwords and debates and how they get enrolled and put to use. Not necessarily for the purpose of the people on the ground, but with kind of developing these broader frameworks that then become operationalized. I don't know if you want to just talk about that. This tension between just the ordinary day to day life of people like, in Barbados, that we both know very well, versus the way in which islands and islanders and island cultures are being enrolled in bigger debates.

No and I think this is very apt to call it a tention. You know it's all very well, as you kindly did to promote my citation count and sure, maybe I have these metrics but, so what? Aside from the academic backlash against these artificial and completely constructed numbers, it does not help a single islander, how many thousands of citations I do or do not have. I’m not aware of anyone who is struggling to feed themselves and their family day to day, who fears crime and assault simply walking to work or walking to school every day, I’m not aware of anyone who really cares about H indices or I indices or whatnot. 

So again, it comes back to the fundament: How can our science support people, how can we be supported by people for our science, and this is where it's so important to talk to taxi drivers. So important to talk to the fishers or talk to the farmers. It is intriguing that when we do that, including you know through some of our research projects funded by research grants from Research Councils, when we talk to people, they say, well outsiders tell us that climate change is an issue, therefore, it is an issue. Or the number of environmental groups who say well yes okay look we have climate change in our mandate, but we're actually concerned about the turtles not being able to lay their eggs on the beach or actually concerned about the stray plastics, or the batteries, which are harming the reefs and the mangroves. We’re concerned about the number of tourists, not particularly the flying but the sunscreen, the suntan lotion which then comes off in the water and harms the ecosystems. 

So top-down discourses, and I mentioned three of them, like the SES social-ecological systems / CHANS coupled human and natural systems as one, planetary boundaries is another, climate change is the third. What I’m hearing so often and especially from islanders working on environmental issues on the ground, is that they are only using these phrases because they're told to. That is exceptionally harmful. As soon as our academic language is distracting from the day to day and failing to connect with the century to century and millennium to millennium, we are the problem, we are the ones making the mistakes. 

This is where island studies is exceptional and connecting. Island studies are so supportive and has really brought me forward in doing exactly what you're suggesting Jon. We have to listen to the people; this is not saying that local knowledge is a panacea, because some of the wider issues like human trafficking, like the arms trade, like the amount of government money that goes into fossil fuel subsidies, may not filter down to that local level. Which is why it's always a balance. It's always an exchange. The core, and this is what I’ve gained so much from islanders and from island studies, is listening, that everyone has knowledge to contribute and be so aware that in working in English and academic language, we often impose ideas and concepts which actually diverge, distract and become problematic for people just trying to do their day to day lives and day to day jobs with the local and global issues with the daily and century issues.

Yes, I mean that's spot on, and this leads us very nicely, I think, to your recent work on disasters in particular. And you know it's been highly successful, and ‘Disasters by Choice’ has really kind of been picked up very quickly; your recent work on disasters which, of course, obviously draws upon a longer career arc. But maybe you could talk a bit more about that, your recent work on disasters, which I find fascinating and so many people I work with do as well.

Yes, this concept of disaster by choice is really saying that the phrase ‘natural disaster’ does not make sense. Disasters do not come from nature. They come from forcing people to live in certain places, in certain ways, where they cannot deal with nature's just typical usual events and processes, you know, like a hurricane, like an earthquake, like a fire which is simply what happens. People are making choices to push people into realms where they are scared to evacuate because of assaults or loss of job. They cannot afford or do not have access to insurance and they may be living in dwellings, which they know cannot stand up to the hurricane or earthquake, but they have no choice to move. 

This is not my work, this is not my idea, the point of disasters not being natural, the concept of saying do not use the phrase 'natural disaster', the idea of pushing away from environmental determinism, like the incorrect science of 'climate change causes disasters'. This comes out of that early work, particularly from work on islands, again 1970s 1980s. What I hope I’m doing is bringing out, making it useful for across disciplines and also melding disciplines bring them together, but the core point comes from early disaster researchers, who did a lot of the work on islands with islanders. Saying we can deal with these issues if we have the choices, hence disaster by choice. We can deal with the weather; we can deal with the environment changing if we have the resources. And we see that in some recent hurricanes in the Caribbean. 

A big deal was made of the 2017 hurricane season, It was linked to climate change, at least the disasters were. And there's no doubt that human-caused climate change exacerbated the intensity of some of those hurricanes. There's equally no doubt that the hurricane disasters cannot be linked to climate change. Number one, in previous decades, the worst-hit islands had very similar hurricanes, and to some extent disasters, but number two, not always disasters, despite similar hurricanes. All the issues which island studies pushed to the forefront, cultural appropriation, colonialism, post colonialism, corruption, poor governance, inequity, injustice, inequality – those cause disasters, no matter what the environment does. This was well ingrained in academia and in development practice from islands and islanders in the 1970s, 1980s and to some extent before. This is what I’m trying to bring forward by saying disasters are by choice, hence, ‘disaster by choice’. We do not want to use the phrase ‘natural disaster’. 

And let's stop blaming the earthquake, or the windstorm or the tornado or the tsunami or the volcanic eruption or the storm for the disaster. When we have so much knowledge over decades and centuries, so much knowledge from people who have lived this on their farms and on their boats, so much knowledge which we could use, that people are failing to. And, unfortunately, a lot of a scientific misinformation is coming from scientists.  Even the fundamental question: are hurricanes increasing because of human-caused climate change, and the science, the scientific consensus currently is no. But so many scholars come out and say, of course storms are increasing in number, of course hurricanes are increasing in number and that's simply not supported by the science. Human-caused climate change is making hurricanes more intense, it is causing them to slow down in their tracks, which means more rainfall falls in the same place leading towards flooding but on the simple statement of number of hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, it is terrifying how much this misinformation is coming from scientists. 

All I can say is, again let's go back to the islanders, let's go back to the people on the ground, they don't care if three hurricanes or five hurricanes come through. If they can deal with it, they can deal with it, and if they can't, they're going to be wiped out by one hurricane never mind three or five. So let's stop getting distracted, let's learn from the scientific knowledge we have, and let us ensure that we're bringing the wider concepts like health, like sustainability, however we define it, like peace, to avoid conflict but peace is not just the absence of conflict, there's more to it, like the wider issues of how are people living their lives, what livelihoods do they have, and how can we support them to live it appropriately in their own way through exchange, which then comes back to the way I ought to be living and what I need being in a fairly nice flat in a world mega city with a wonderful job at a top university. It affects us all, and we all have so much to contribute.

Dealing with vulnerability on Anegada, BVI (British Virgin Islands).
(Copyright Ilan Kelman 2012.)