{"id":12194,"date":"2018-06-12t20:41:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-12t20:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dpetrov.2create.studio\/planet\/wordpress\/pelican-island-a-story-of-sand-and-water\/"},"modified":"2023-03-07t19:39:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07t19:39:36","slug":"sand-water-pelican-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.getitdoneaz.com\/story\/sand-water-pelican-island\/","title":{"rendered":"pelican island: a story of sand and water"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>story and photos by&nbsp;alex schwartz | animation courtesy of next media<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>abelardo \u201ctito\u201d nu\u00f1ez davies first came to pelican island 15 years ago. it was much&nbsp;larger then.<\/p>\n<p>the small hut he and his mother share started out in the middle of this tiny oasis of sand. now, the structure sits at the edge of the waves on the island\u2019s eastern shore, amid a cluster of palm trees. the ocean laps at their doorstep. but the building never moved; the island shrank.<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/pelican gif.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>over the past decade or so, storms have slowly been washing the sand away. davies has seen parts of the island flood and the beach begin to disappear. the storms, he said, are getting stronger and stronger.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>last year\u2019s particularly fierce hurricane season didn\u2019t directly impact the area, but pelican island still endured the effects. \u201cthe storm was soft,\u201d davies said. \u201cbut it was still very scary. the whole house was flooded and it destroyed the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cwhat can i say? we\u2019re here because of the grace of god,\u201d davies said. despite the increasing threat of storms, he said he and his mother have no plans to relocate. they make money for their family by welcoming tourists, who visit the picturesque stretch of sand for a few hours at a time to sunbathe and drink out of coconuts. pelican island receives boats of them daily.<\/p>\n<p>to combat the flooding, davies and his mother are attempting to build a sea wall off the island\u2019s western shore, which may destroy the encircling coral reef in the process. but they don\u2019t want to risk losing their island, which provides them with significant income.<\/p>\n<p>does he think the storms will get less intense as time goes on? davies replied with a spanish tenet: \u201cojala\u201d \u2014 <em>god willing<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>rising tides<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>pelican island is just one of more than 350 islands in the san blas archipelago, part of the caribbean province of guna yala (pronounced <em>\u201ckoona yahlah\u201d<\/em>) along the northern coast of panama. widely regarded as some of the most beautiful and pristine in the world, some 50 of these islands are home to the guna people, an indigenous group that has won the rights to self-govern this area and a strip of the mainland coast.<\/p>\n<p>the guna arrived to panama and these islands in canoes from the northern coast of colombia after the arrival of the spanish in the 1500s, fleeing colonization. since then, they have developed a relationship with the islands as well as their territory on land.<\/p>\n<p>\u201ci grew up in an environment of socialism,\u201d said diwigdi valiente, a guna environmental advocate who grew up on these islands. \u201cwithin my community, everything was shared. there were people that used to go fishing, there were people that used to go hunting, there were people that used to go farming, and then at the end of the day they would all come back and share everything they had with the people on the island.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>valiente has been visiting pelican island for years, and he said it\u2019s shrunk to half its original size over his lifetime.<\/p>\n<p>the san blas are on the front lines of climate change. scientists at the smithsonian tropical research institute in panama estimate that sea levels are rising <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2014\/03\/27\/world\/climate-rising-seas.html\">three quarters of an inch<\/a> every year, accelerating from the conservative 3 millimeter estimate first released by the u.n.\u2019s intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc). at this rate, most of the islands could be underwater in less than 30 years. it\u2019s a similar story in island countries and coastal cities around the world, from kiribati to dhaka.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cif there is a storm here, there could be islands that will completely vanish,\u201d valiente said. \u201cthere are months when the islands get completely flooded. you have water up to your ankles. imagine living for a month like that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>heating up<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>pelican island\u2019s peril begins thousands of miles away, in the industrialized areas of the world. here, greenhouse gases \u2014 emitted mainly from fossil fuels \u2014 spread like a blanket across the globe and trap heat. scientists tout the \u201cgreenhouse effect\u201d as the cause for global warming: it caused the warming of the earth following the last ice age, which supported life on the planet as we know it, but massive fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution have accelerated greenhouse gas levels to a dangerous peak.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/scene 1.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>when light energy from the sun travels to the earth, it passes through greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (namely carbon dioxide and methane), originally derived from natural processes like decomposition and respiration in organisms. some of this light energy is reflected back into space, while some is contained by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. this trapped light energy contains heat that creates a warming effect that raises the temperature of the planet. without this layer of gases, earth would be far too cold for life to sustain itself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/scene 2.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>but once humans began burning fossil fuels \u2014 coal, oil and natural gas made from previously decomposed organic material&nbsp;\u2014 during the industrial revolution, the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere dramatically increased. these emissions collected in the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide. the atmosphere, in turn, trapped more light energy and radiated more heat back onto the earth\u2019s surface. this has caused the average global temperature to increase at a rapid pace \u2014 something never before encountered during the existence of humans on this planet.<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/scene 3.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>as the planet warms, ice sheets in places like greenland and antarctica and sea ice in the polar regions, begin to melt. massive chunks of glaciers break off into the sea at alarming rates, melting and causing sea levels to rise.<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" height=\"388\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/scene 4.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>additionally, atmospheric heat and absorbed carbon dioxide cause thermal expansion in the oceans. water particles become energized and take up more space, again accelerating sea level rise.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"align-center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/scene 5.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>moreover, a warming ocean sustains more intense storm systems such as hurricanes (as we\u2019ve recently seen with increasingly brutal hurricane seasons). tiny islands like the san blas are ravaged by these storms, which uproot trees with strong winds and flood beaches with storm surge.<\/p>\n<p><strong>climate refugees<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>some guna people don\u2019t appreciate the severity of the situation, said valiente, particularly older generations, like davies and his mother, who don\u2019t have access to information about climate change and rising sea levels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cyou try to explain (to)&nbsp;people climate change, and they don\u2019t understand it because they are not causing it,\u201d valiente said. \u201cthe worst thing about climate change is that people in need \u2014 people that are not making the problem \u2014 are the ones that are going to suffer the most. everywhere. not only in panama, not only with the gunas \u2014&nbsp;everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>but valiente is doing work to combat that lack of knowledge with a project called burwigan, leading art projects for guna children about environmental issues that affect them directly.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cwe would make fish sculptures. we are putting the fish at different levels around the houses to show them where the sea level will be in the next couple of years,\u201d he said. \u201ci\u2019m working with the kids because what they see now, it\u2019s normal to them. to me, it\u2019s not normal at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>valiente said that while moving is inevitable, plans for a mass relocation to the guna mainland territory several years ago never materialized due to a change in government.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cwe have (one of)&nbsp;the first documented cases of an indigenous group forced to move because of climate change,\u201d valiente said, in \u201ca country that did not contribute to climate change at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>abelardo \u201ctito\u201d nu\u00f1ez davies first came to pelican island 15 years ago. it was much&nbsp;larger then.&nbsp;the small hut he and his mother share started out in the middle of this tiny oasis of sand. now, the ocean laps at their doorstep.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4916],"tags":[144,4001,3786,4026,665,3893],"storyfest_categories":[],"class_list":["post-12194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-guna-yala","tag-kalu-yala","tag-medill","tag-oceans","tag-tides"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- this site is optimized with the yoast seo plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>pelican island: a story of sand and water - planet forward<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"\/\/www.getitdoneaz.com\/story\/pelican-island-a-story-of-sand-and-water\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_us\" \/>\n<meta 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