The Persistence Paradox: Q&A with Julian Aguon, Global Climate Advocate and Author

Earlier this fall, I had the honor of hosting a conversation with an author, an Indigenous climate activist and an international human rights lawyer. Julien Aguon during a stop on his recent book tour, promoting the release of his latest book, No country for 8 point butterflies.

Our work at UCS and Julian’s lifelong work overlap, intersect and complement each other in many ways. We are engaged in similar battles: fending off the climate crisis and all its dimensions, the specter of annihilation by nuclear war, and attacks on democracy, dignity and self-determination. Julian’s law firm seeks to hold polluters accountable for the destruction they have caused on the Pacific Islands, literally taking away people’s homelands. UCS strives to provide the scientific record to enforce this responsibility.

But above all, Julian’s other work – as a poet and author – supports me, lifts my spirits and strengthens my sense of solidarity in these difficult and long-term fights. I am happy to share an edited transcript of our interview in the hope that his words will motivate us all to keep fighting.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: Can you provide some context for the title of the book No country for eight-point butterflies? Why did you specifically choose the reference to eight-point butterflies?

JULIAN AGUON: The eight-spotted Mariana butterfly is one of our Guam endemic butterflies. She is found nowhere else on earth and her home is a limestone forest on the north coast of the island, an incredibly beautiful limestone forest that is being bulldozed as we speak, by the American army. My company sued US Fish and Wildlife for failing to designate critical habitats for 23 species. We just got that victory, so that was good, but despite our best legal efforts, the U.S. military received waiver after waiver from [US federal agencies] Fish and Wildlife at NOAA [to damage these natural areas] and much of the limestone forests have been bulldozed.

This is what we are up against.

The reason we titled the book is because we realized that the United States, as a country, consistently prefers power to force and live rather than let live. And maybe a country like that is not a country for eight-point butterflies.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: I loved the part of your book where you describe how, during your legal training, you learned that you have to fight not only the fights that you can win, but also the fights that have to be fought.

You say, “Part of our job as people who dare to believe that we can save the world is to prepare our will to withstand certain defeats, so that we can lose and come back anyway. This quote really stuck with me because in the area of ​​climate change, there are so many battles that we are losing. Can you tell us a bit more about the lost battles?

JULIAN AGUON: Sometimes we sue the US military even though we understand that certain prudential doctrines are at stake in federal courts. Sometimes we know that a case we file may have a very high probability of being dismissed on this kind of doctrinal basis and we always file it, in part, because we understand that the law only succeeds when it is associated with a larger political movement.

One thing about the future that is absolutely clear is that it is unclear. It is uncertain. Cynicism and defeatism allow escape. You are allowed to escape responsibility and do your part if you think everything is hopeless. Put a fork in it and go. But if the future is uncertain, you can always fight for it. We sometimes fight losing battles because we try to change the law.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: You write in your books about the evil and predatory aspects of capitalism, which is fundamentally extractive – and that we need to replace it with a different philosophy in order to achieve a livable earth. You mentioned that in your culture it might be a philosophy of reciprocity. What does this mean to you? And what does life look like under an ethic of reciprocity?

JULIAN AGUON: That’s a great question. I simply cannot imagine being a lawyer and not using these skills in the service of maximizing legal protection for Indigenous communities. I believe that Indigenous communities, mine included, have different imaginations, or longer imaginations, and we have part of the answer to the question of how to get out of the mess we find ourselves in. That’s why I’ve dedicated the lion’s share of my career to trying to provide so much protection for Indigenous peoples to thrive in their ancestral spaces.

I would say for my people, the Chamorro people, our cultural value par excellence is reciprocity. We have more words for reciprocity than any other word. We have so many words for reciprocity that crop up in various different social contexts. We have reciprocity within nuclear families. We have words for reciprocity at weddings, at funerals, at the birth of a child. It is so ! It reproduces. And that is clearly the foundation of my people’s intellectual architecture and our worldview. [Reciprocity] is just a different worldview. It offers humanity an alternative. He says there are people who have different imaginations and we need to find ways to cast nets around them and protect them.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: About colonization, you write that it is possible that a dam exists in the heart of each colonized. What did colonization mean to you?

JULIAN AGUON: My people have suffered so much at the hands of the American war machine. We have lost so much land. But it’s not just a loss of land, but a loss of language, a loss of culture, a loss of resources. The US military inadvertently brought a brown tree snake to the island. And we have now lost 10 of our 12 native songbirds. We have lost the birdsong. Every time we lose a species, we get poorer.

All of these decisions are being made by people we cannot vote for, because right now, firmly entrenched in US constitutional law, are a set of cases that have crystallized a legal doctrine known as the Doctrine of Incorporation. territorial. And what these cases essentially do is they allow Congress to govern the territories [such as Guam] in a colonial way from afar, never actually extending the full protections of the US Constitution. Additionally, the U.S. Congress can at any time decide which parts of the U.S. Constitution do or do not apply in the territories, including revocation of citizenship. This is a scandalous situation! What century are we living in? It’s old-fashioned colonization.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: You write compellingly about the slashing of former President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un when they threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in 2017, essentially endangering hundreds of thousands of people in the Pacific. About nuclear weapons, you wrote: “The truth is that nuclear weapons don’t have to be used to be lethal. Can you expand on this truth?

JULIAN AGUON: It was originally an idea that was bequeathed to us by Arundhati Roy.

The United States has dropped several atomic and thermonuclear weapons on our communities in Guam and on our fellow islanders in the Marshall Islands. My own father – who I talk about in the book about dying of pancreatic cancer – worked in a ship repair shop as a pipefitter. This is exactly the same port where, just after a gigantic thermonuclear weapon was detonated on the people of the Marshall Islands, all the ships that passed through the radioactive plumes to measure this radioactivity were then immediately moved to Guam and evacuated to this same port. And it’s not just my father. I have at least three dear friends whose parents were all pipe fitters or even secretaries who worked at the same station – we all lost our parents to cancer, all of us. And so, I was trying to operationalize Audre Lorde’s feminist view that the personal is political.

JOHANNA CHAO KREILICK: Speaking of Audre Lorde, she writes: “Poetry is not a luxury, it is a vital necessity of our existence… At the forefront of our movement towards change, there is only our poetry to make hint at possibility made real. I think she means here that we don’t know how to create a better world until we can imagine a better world. Without diminishing the importance of science or law, which are tools for creating a better world, what do you think of the importance of the human sciences as a means of giving us the means to dream, of putting a language in our dreams and lead people into our big, bold visions?

JULIAN AGUON: If climate change is indeed the fight of our lives, we may not win this fight by facts, but we may win it by stories. We don’t need another IPCC report to tell us what we already know: that the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning. So now, what is our job?

There’s the outer work, the big outward-facing work like my law firm, and then there’s the inner work. And this job is trying to find a way to keep your heart from breaking. We are all connected in this way through our broken hearts. And we have to find a way to move on with a broken heart. We must write, advocate and work as if everything we love is at stake. Because it is.