Real people from across the Pacific reflect on climate change in Our Ancestors Speak - a nine-minute video currently screening at the UN Climate Conference.
The video is part of Mana Moana - Pacific Voices; a collection of video works created to support the Pacific in driving global action against climate change.
The curator of Mana Moana - Pacific Voices, Tongan-Pākehā poet Dr Karlo Mila, talks to Bryan Crump.
Karlo Mila Photo: supplied
Dr Mila was en route to a climate crisis conference in Jamaica a few years ago when she first became aware of the seriousness of the problem.
During the three-flight journey to Jamaica, she read David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, a New Zealand 'State of the Environment' report and another scientific report provided by the conference organisers.
"Essentially I got to Jamaica and almost had a breakdown. I was massively jetlagged and just cried in the shower because I actually had no idea. I was just living life like everybody else was but once you know it you kind of can't unknow it."
As an academic, Dr Mila was really aware that the scientific report was "incredibly dry and insanely dense".
While on the plane, she rewrote the information in "plain, simple, powerful language" as the poem 'Global Line Up'.
In Jamaica, Dr Mila read the poem and later the Commonwealth Foundation made a video of young people around the world reading lines from it.
Dr Mila says that in her poems she tries to grab people either by the heart or the jugular.
"If you're trying to be opaque and show off, [poetry is] not very resonant. But when you're using the power of poetry to cut through to the bones of very, very complicated messages then it reaches people.
"It's quite a potent medium for getting across things that are really important and we need to hear in powerful ways."
The existential threat of climate change is looming over every country but Dr Mila sees the Pacific Islands as the "canaries in the coal mine".
She isn't interested in pointing fingers at any other specific countries, though.
"It's not a particular nation or a particular ethnicity [harming the planet]. It's become global, it's extractive at all costs. ANd it's really self-harming, actually, self-sabotage. And the vast majority of people living right now are not really responsible for that, they're sort of stuck in that machine."
"Yes, as an individual you've got to take some level of responsibility, and I do… but as a collective, we've got to get better at protecting things… if you look at what we've done as a collective to Aotearoa it's pretty hard to see that as leadership on any level. So what can we do to mobilise ourselves as an effective collective to look after everything else so that we won't go extinct?
"If you just float through our current system and make default choices then you're going to be a big part of the problem."
Dr Mila says she went through three weeks of "household hell" solo-parenting three kids during lockdown to get the ten Mana Moana - Pacific Voices films made.
"That was a bit of a nightmare but that's because I think this is a really important message to get out there."
The COP26 audience already knows the science of climate change so in the videos Dr Mila focused on showcasing Pasifika ancestral knowledge.
"It's kind of almost gross, us Pacific people turning up in all our beauty and making it all creative and kind of sexy back to them when they know [about the threat of climate change]. That's a ridiculous waste of time. So I rerouted to 'What is our ancestral knowledge of this region?' We've been here for 3000 years. We've lived sustainably on these islands and we've got some idea about what wisdom is, relating to this issue."
Related: Pacific plea to the world: Act now to reduce global warming
