In his short essay ‘Desert Islands’, philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2004: no page) writes that islands are the ‘consciousness of earth and ocean’ and that ‘humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained.’ Here, a Deleuzian logic mediates that islands are existentially a space of contention between earth and water, where survival is depended on the victory of land over sea. Thus, as the archipelagos that make up the nation of Kiribati begin to sink beneath the sea, this logic rings true, threatening its inhabitants with the very reality of possible extinction.

Made up of 33 islands, Kiribati has been called a ‘Nation of Water’ (Chappell 2016: 8) and is one of the first countries in the Pacific that is slowly disappearing because of sea-level rise due to anthropogenic climate change. The catch-all term to describe these forms of environmental crises and degradation is being referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’, a new geological epoch in which humans are the biggest driving force behind the planetary crisis we are facing today. The Anthropocene has placed the ecological crisis on a planetary scale, posing new challenges to temporalities, geographical imaginaries and survival on Earth. Yet the planetary thinking in the Anthropocene tends to obscure the inherent geographical inequalities that define where environmental catastrophes are occurring and who eventually pays for its consequences.

Since 1999, two of the inhabited islands in the archipelagos, Tebula and Abannuea, have disappeared underwater (Kwa 2008). Dispossession due to disappearing land is not simply a hypothetical future for this island nation, but rather, a very tangible one. Dispossession of course, is no stranger to Kiribati. Though now mainly inhabited by Samoan descendants, the islands have been occupied from as early as the 16th century by Spanish seamen, followed by British settlements in the 18th century and a brief Japanese seizure during World War II. Even after independence from British colonisation in 1979, political autonomy did not mean freedom from the structures and obstacles inherited from the colonial period. Decolonisation still relied on formulating constitutions that complied with a prefabricated version of the nation state which endorsed the ‘European-derived model as universal’ (Chappell 2016: 15-16). The leaders of newly formed Kiribati had to ‘syncretise those alien frameworks with indigenous values and customs.’ (ibid: 15). The implicit coloniality in adhering to global bureaucracy became that indigenous ways of living and knowing were slowly dispossessed by a hegemonic world system that valued economic development over environmental sustainability, leaving Kiribati to now pay the price for the ‘ecological limits to capitalism’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 200).

Dispossession, therefore, has had ‘many unhappy returns’ (Abourahme 2018:109) for these islands, and the Anthropocene poses its latest eviction notice. Like many countries in the South Pacific, Kiribati has begun to take policy and legislative measures to mitigate the ongoing effects of sea level rise. Citizens from Kiribati have already claimed climate refugee status and migrated to New Zealand and in anticipation of a larger exodus, the government has also bought land from Fiji in hopes to give its people ‘migration with dignity’ (Chappell 2016:15) when the time comes.

Moreover, as Kiribati’s impending disappearance captures the fascination of the global community, other, more ambitious, technocentric solutions to the issue also emerges. A Japanese engineering firm, ‘Shimizu’ has designed a hypothetical underwater ‘floating island’ that has the potential to house half the inhabitants of Kiribati (Rytz 2018). Shimizu argues that developing the deep sea like space would be a solution to the disasters that plague the Anthropocene because it would minimise the risk from weather phenomena such as typhoons and create a new space for human existence (ibid). Yet at a cost of $450 billion per floating island, Shimziu’s project is an example of the ways in which the Anthropocene is being used to ‘revive fantasies about humans’ ability to control nature’ (Hecht 2018: 111). It is also a reminder that survival in this new epoch comes with a hefty price tag. As former president of Kiribati Anote Tong puts it ‘…we don’t think in those terms [in Kiribati]. We keep thinking that we can continue to destroy this planet because we believe we can fix it with our technology, in our arrogance to believe we have control over everything’ (Rytz 2018).