‘The Island President’: Former Maldives Leader Takes On Climate Change
April 2, 2012
If the islands that you grew up on were, inch by inch, being swallowed up by a rising ocean, what would you do? If you’re anything like former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, you’d do everything to draw attention to the issue, from underwater cabinet meetings to cut carbon emissions to becoming the unexpected superstar of the 2009 UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen.
It’s a race against time for residents of the string of islands. With 2,000 tiny islands that stretch for over 500 miles in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Maldives are particularly vulnerable to climate change and rising ocean waters, with an average elevations of just two to eight feet above sea level. Here’s his segment from the show:
In early Feburary, the mission of saving the Maldives got much tougher for President Nasheed. Under pressure from the island’s former dictator, he was forced to resign. Despite being ousted, he refuses to give up his fight against the forces of climate change that threaten to destroy his island nation.
We were joined by director Jon Shenk, who documented President Nasheed’s journey to shine a light on the “real world” effects of global warming.
The Island President is playing in select cities across the country. You can watch the trailer here:
LEARN MORE:
‘Dictatorship is coming back to the Maldives and democracy is slipping away’ (The Guardian)
‘The Island President’: Mohamed Nasheed, Former Maldives Leader, Battles Climate Change (Huffington Post)
The Island President: Film Review (Slant Magazine)
- Meg Robertson is a digital producer for DylanRatigan.com.
The idea that the Maldives are being submerged because of global waming is an outright lie because geologic evidence proves that the island are actually rising, not being submerged. Excerpts of a paper on the Maldives published in 2011 by Dr. Nils Morner, a world expert on sea levels follow in the next comment.
From "The Maldives: A Measure of Sea Level Changes" "In 2009, the new President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, stated that his nation was soon to be drowned, and posing in a submarine cabinet-meeting supposed to illustrate the flooding to come. I tried to communicate the observational fact that sea is not at all in an alarming rising mode in the Maldives, and I sent an open letter to the President but no reply. The reason behind the president’s fixation on the rising sea level concept is economical, and certainly not scientific. When we saw a 60-year old tree at sea level that it had stood there for 60 years without being killed by rising sea level, We found clear evidence of a significant and rapid drop in sea level on island after island. Maps drawn in 1922 show a higher sea level than present. From local fishermen, we were informed that sea fell in the 1970s, because a previous sailing route became too shallow in the 1970s. Nowhere, do we see any trace of a tendency of a rise in sea level over the past 30 years. Wherever we look we find nothing but clear indications of a post-1970 stability in shoreline position and sea level.
Good job, D.J.E. Of course, the trolls will be on attack soon, because it is media heresy to stand up against the media darling subjects such as sea level changes. Of course, at the end of the day this guy is a liberal politician.