RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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heroic fisherman Achille both arrive at a strong sense of belonging with the Lesser
Antilles through their post-shipwreck perception of a living sea. No one arrives to save
Snyder and Walcott from their islands. Instead, they use their poetic resources to
represent island culture as a survivable and desirable practice. They do not bring poetry
to their chosen places; they uncover the poetry inherent to their chosen places.
Like most post-war modern poets, 3 Snyder and Walcott develop a transnational
sense of self and place. This transnationalism and incipient globalism is crucial for
solving today‘s environmental problems. The serpentine contours of water run-off and
irrigation look quite different from the geometric, albeit occasionally river-bound, lines
of national boundaries. Like rivers and oceans, the atmosphere is a natural resource
shared by all of the world‘s nations. Peter Singer argues that national communities need
to think of the atmosphere as a global sink, which needs a world that can decide how to
fix it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states in its ―Fourth
Assessment Report‖ (2007) that as a direct result of human activity greenhouse gases
have clogged the global sink. 4 Developed nations, because of their consumption levels
and infrastructure, are the major contributors to this environmental problem. If oceans
continue to rise, as they have been since at least 1961, 5 low-lying islands and atolls will
3 Ramazani, Jahan. ―A Transnational Poetics.‖
4 ―Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of
increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and
ice and rising global average sea level. . . . Most of the observed increase in global
average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed
increase in anthropogenic GHG [green house gas] concentrations‖ (Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change 2-5).
5 ―Global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3]
mm/yr and since 1993 at 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm/yr, with contributions from thermal
expansion, melting glaciers and ice caps, and the polar ice sheets‖ (Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change 2)