Pala Molisa on accelerating collapse of ecosystem in the Pacific

Comments from Kevin Hester:

Fantastic interview from my mate ‪Pala Molisa who I met at the " Eye of the Storm Climate change conference recently at the ‪Victoria University of Wellington.

Pala will be hosting a public discussion with myself and Professor ‪Guy McPherson on his impending NZ speaking tour in November this year.

Climate change and capitalism lead inextricably to collapse of the economic and bio-systems of this planet.

Stand by for imminent collapse.

Capitalism accelerating eco-collapse says Pacific academic

A Wellington-based academic from Vanuatu says that left unchecked, capitalism will continue to accelerate ecological collapse.

Pala Molisa photgraphed with Kevin Hester at the recent climate change conference in Wellingon, NZ.

Radio NZ,

26 February, 2015

       
A Wellington-based academic from Vanuatu says that left unchecked, capitalism will continue to accelerate ecological collapse.

Pala Molisa from the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at Victoria Business School has urged people to look closely at the roots of climate change, which he links to the prevalent economic system.

Mr Molisa told Johnny Blades that climate discourse tends to be clouded by an assumption that perpetual growth is possible.

PALA MOLISA: We are really a culture - I'm talking about Western culture that we all live within. It's a culture that really fears death. You know it's a really childish culture. All other indigenous culture, you recognise whether it be individuals or communities or natural systems, everything goes through this natural process of birth, development and death. We try to avoid death, and because of that we are destroying everything else to keep this insane system of growth going.

JOHNNY BLADES: So with Paris and all this ongoing discussion about whatever element you want to choose about the climate change debate, do you have any hope that the impacts in the Pacific Islands region can be mitigated in the near future?

PM: I think to answer that question, we've really got to look at the nature of political power today. And I think a realistic assessment of countries like NZ, Australia, US and UK, most of our western democracies, we have all gone through three or four decades of neoliberal reforms, I put reforms in scare quotes, because really they are revolutionary transformations where most of the liberal institutions in our liberal democracies that make piecemeal increments and reform possible, they've been coopted and taken over, and rendered more and more beholden to corporate and political power. You know, our universities, the liberal arts and the humanities, where students can go to learn critically, to question the underlying assumptions that their disciplines, their fields are based on, to be able to question the types, the systems of power that we live in. All of that has been marginalised. You know again most of the mainstream discourse talks about balancing the economy and the environment. But what that presumes is that the current economy can be reconciled to ecological well-being and it can't. Because it's based on perpetual growth. The Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi, who wrote The Great Transformation, one of the points he makes is once a community loses a sense of the sacred, one it commodifies everything so that nothing has an intrinsic value, it then opens up the ability to exploit everything, both human beings and the natural world, until it actually collapses. And that's the situation we are in. Capitalism is a commodification machine. It's a system based on commodity production, it commodifies everything. Human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity, and it just exploits it until collapse.

This is a report from the recent climate change conference in Wellington

The Eye of the Storm climate change conference