Recently, in 2022, I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Northwest Arkansas. Surprisingly, the 2nd most commonly spoken language among employees was Marshallese, not Spanish. Many of my co-workers wore shirts with the Marshall Islands flag and other symbols and phrases associated with that country. Apparently, starting in the 1980s, Marshallese people started moving to Northwest Arkansas and now it, and the city of Springdale in particular, have one of the largest (if not the largest) communities of Marshallese people outside of the Marshall Islands themselves. A bit unexpected, considering how vastly different the Ozark Highlands (they are way too low to be called Mountains) are from their flat tropical island homes.
@@RareEarthSeries Wow, no wonder the Republic of the Marshall Islands has a consulate there! And some businesses will have "Kemij kajin Majol!" written somewhere (which I assume means "we speak Marshallese" since it is usually written next to "Hablamos Espanol!" which means "we speak Spanish").
Or a similarly spirited one that goes like "A system that does not need the right people to run it for it to work, but incentivizes the wrong people to do things right."
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
@@B3Band you know thats bullshit right? The amount of scientists who travel there, activists who stay there and people who visit and or live there pretty much show that a fair number of people actually do care about the islands.
Now I feel the sudden urge to drop everything in my current life, go there and set up a bike shop...an urge so strong that I probably will have forgotten it by tomorrow morning. Maybe I should change that knowing it will be like that...
If I had to guess, 'not using a car' = 'shows your status as being poor', even if it looks comical to an outsider. The residents there might need a few decades to get sick of traffic jams.
@@thearpox7873 ez, just hire a bunch of attractive looking people and let them ride a bike everywhere and show the gullible citizens of the town that bike riders are chads
I had a similar experience in remote rural Indonesia. I had some food wrappings left over from eating while travelling. Arrived at a sea gypsy village (stilts a go-go) and asked one of the locals where I could put my rubbish. He said "laut", Bahasa for "the sea". What can you do?
fyi not to be nitpicky but the language is Indonesian, not Bahasa. Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Jawa, etc all exist in Indonesia. Bahasa just means "language" in Indonesian.
If you brought plastic garbage to a place that wasn't prepared to deal with it, then you should've packed it out. People without any land also don't have a landfill. It probably seems obvious in hindsight, I know.
OMG! I’m a guy whose blood pressure goes up at the mere thought of sitting in traffic. The thought of riding my bike past cars stuck in traffic during my daily commute would fill me with ecstatic joy. (Yes - I’m petty that way.) This is absolutely amazing to me.
The biggest issue with climate change is that it's a group project where everyone needs to contribute to pass. Members see others not doing their part, and decide putting in the work themselves is a waste of time if they are going to fail anyway, only for others to see them and decide the same in a feedback loop.
1. It is not all or nothing. However small, you are still contributing, and, even if we can't limit the warming to 1 degree centigrade, 1.5 or 1.6 is still better than nothing. 2. Believe it or not, some countries (namely Canada, Denmark, and especially Russia) actually *benefit* greatly from climate change. So climate change is not universally bad.
The biggest conflict within the climate change population compliance project comes from the fact the high priests of the cult, without exception, live their lives as if they are absolutely certain that the thing is a hoax. The Obama's and Algore's and Greta's of the church buy sea level mansions. These priests casually burn more carbon jetting their third mistress to dinner in Europe on a whim than the average working American does in their lifetime wallowing in climate sin. They attend debauched conferences where decadent dunces swill champagne flown in from France and chomp embargoed tins of Czar brand Russian caviar while proudly plotting how they will force feed the little people a diet of cockroaches and sawdust laced with sterilizing birth control chemicals. Yeah, it is quite impossible to get on board that boxcar train as it heads to the climate change concentration camp.
You always get to the point, I loved this one, as I did with all the previous episodes. I still remember watching you take over this channel, not knowing what it would hold. Now, years later, this is probably in the top 3 of the hundreds of channels I follow on youtube. Thanks for keeping up with the quality content. An eloquent tale of a decadent time.
Thank you for what you pointed out at the end. A report was published in my country of Switzerland analyzing the per capita emissions of various parts of the population. It showed that city folks emit more than rural folks (reason: wealth). It showed that being informed about climate did not change your emission (reason: wealth). The most interesting: members of the green party emitted just as much as the rest of the population (reason: wealth). Poor people, like the people from the town I grew up in might drive cars, but many of them have never taken a plane in their life, they do not waste food, they never buy new clothes. The city folk, while they may take buses also go on 2-3 international trips a year, they buy junk off of shien, ... So yeah, we're all hypocrites.
"F" all these climate activists. We were told we had 12 years till we all will die 15 years ago. George Sorros, Klause Schwab, Bill Gayes, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Get your bus pass, move into a 3 bedroom ranch house, stop flying everywhere, strop eating meat and be BUGtarians, drive dagerouse electric cars first. Then I still wont follow the GRIFT.
been watching this channel for many years and my favorite part has always been the ending card. cracks me up every single time without fail! Thank you!!
One point that you only touched on - locals are not choosing driving simply to get from point to point. They are choosing driving because they don't want to arrive hot and sweaty at their destination. I know plenty of people in my own country that use that same rationale to drive.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
"Nobody cares about the Marshall Islands. Least of all the Marshallese". Spot on, I would argue everywhere is the same, you could apply it to every nation. We are all the same.
Wrong. Florida doesn't have oil rigs off our coast. It would produce lots of economic opportunities, however, we care. We set aside taxes to clean our beaches every morning. We care. How you feel, think, or act doesn't represent the population as a whole.
I'm pretty sure that's the point that Evan's trying to make - the Marshalese are a metaphor for all humanity and the atoll's fate is a metaphor for the Earth's.
Why should they when they know the usa is going to take care of them because of their special status. That was given in exchange for using there islands for army bases.
@@dr.floridaman4805Florida does it so it can continue its tourism and attract the retirees to get their property taxes. You know the coast properties are valued very high. And those rich people want a clear view of the sea
Eh, I somewhat disagree. I know plenty of countries that are quite nice, even far away from the touristy areas because the locals put in a little effort to keep them that way for their own sake. Hell, even where I live I remember spring used to be pretty smelly due to all the dog shit thawing out of the snow at the same time. Not so much anymore though, as it became standard for dog owners to clean up after themselves. It's really just an extension of how the streets aren't floating with garbage, because the vast majority of people will put in the effort to dispose of garbage appropriately. I also know a bunch of obscure little hiking trails far too mundane for tourists. They're maintained by local enthusiasts and kept clean by the people who use them. There's no system that keeps people from littering out in the forest, no organization to pay for cleaning, and no garbage cans to be found either. You could easily throw candy wrappers and empty bottles on the ground and nobody would be able to hold you accountable. Yet you'll hardly find any trash out there because the locals do care. It's all the little things that add up and create nice places to live. People care when it looks like everyone else also cares at least a little bit. The hard part is escaping a state of paralyzing general apathy.
You're right about "has to work for everyone" I commuted to my college with bus for all 4 years. It took 40 minutes to walk to my bus stop, and then 1.5 hour ride to arrive at the destination. When I finally got a car after college, I decided to drive to my college for fun. It only took 15 minutes.
"The reality is that any true solution to this problem has to work for everyone, not just those who care." This statement makes me think of some climate deniers wish to make ONE solution scale up to everyone, which makes no sense given diverse needs and situations. I think we need to think of multiple solutions that fit for a given area and population - the combined efforts of small groups.
I'm not really sure what this is supposed to mean. I don't understand what these "one size fits all solutions" are supposed to be, can anyone give an example? And frankly it seems that there is no solution which everyone will be on board for. The simple fact is that some products and energy sources contribute to global climate change. Oftentimes these are very convenient products/energy sources (otherwise we wouldn't be using them in the first place) and there just may not necessarily be a more convenient alternative. But you know what's really inconvenient? The collapse of global climate patterns and ecosystems, historic droughts and resulting mass migrations, rising sea levels eating away at coastal cities and towns... So yeah, sorry to break it to y'all, but if we want to solve this problem the solutions are not necessarily going to be personally convenient to you.
Well I think there are several factors for that: 1. The Marshall Islanders are already thinking about leaving. Even if they cease emissions completely, China, India, and the United states make enough CO2 to drown the island anyway. 2. If the fatalistic view has taken hold, there is very little to stop it. Why should the Islanders brave sweltering heat at a bus stop when they can be comfortable in a (very expensively imported) car?
They could build bus stops with AC every few hundred meters and would probably still emit less carbon dioxide than with all those cars. The fact that they have no public busses (which would have AC, too ..) is insane. Those busses don't even need to serve a network of spread out neighborhoods, they just have to drive around a single loop in both directions.
@@sriharip316 It's not about 'saving us'. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions on the Marshall Islands probably won't have much effect on the world climate. But it would strenghten their arguments for global change if they did more locally, too. And even if that may not be reason enough, busses are just cheaper, there are less traffic jams, and less local air pollution. It's just wasteful in so many ways to not use them if you can.
@@AV-we6wo what I am trying to say is, if I'm pretty sure I have no future, I'll just have a blast in the present atleast. Most probably you will also do the same. One really has to be a moral hero not to do that. I don't think they are arguing for global change at all. Maybe, they just want to spend their last days happily, and they will do it with or without foreign funds. People who have nothing to lose will always be a problem, and our society seems to be creating more and more of such people. You/I could fall in that category some day.
@@sriharip316 OK, I can somehow understand that. I never was that desperate, and I hope I (and many other people) would still care for others, even if we individually don't have a future. I don't think you have to be some kind of 'hero' to act that way.
I was there and some other marshall islands in 2001 to 2003 and the people throw all their garbage in the ocean. I saw old car batteries in the water by a boat dock and the biggest source of food is fish from the ocean. So a very sad situation. The us gov built a power plant on one island so the people could have electricity but it was a rusted pile of junk in a few years because no one took care of it.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
I mean, to address that closing statement, I'd love to ride the bus, but the infrastructure just isn't present in this city (US). I need to drive my housemate to and from work because public transport just isn't an option. This isn't suburbs or a small town either, it's a college city. A car is the only option where the stroads are king and pedestrians are second-class commuters. I don't often think about the Marshall Islands, but now I'm going to think about them a lot when I'm in traffic. The drone shots look super surreal, with those thin atolls covered shore to shore in buildings and streets. It doesn't look like a real place, almost. Thanks for the video!
Right, the takeaway is more like "either ride the bus or vote for politicians who don't promote a car-centric agenda centered around bigger roads, bigger cities, and no public transport infrastructure".
@@Olivman7that’s what you tell yourself to avoid waking the walk… ‘I don’t use public transport but I vote for people who want it, so I did my part and i can keep preaching (while keep driving my car)’ just take a place like California, where everyone is worried about climate change and still everyone drives. California is the Promise Land of NYMBYsm, where nothing gets built, hence no density, hence no physical way to create public transport, hence cars… but hey, I voted for the ones who don’t want climate change, so I’m fine now! 😂
I can think of another place in which a bus system would be laughingly easy to implement, but there isn't any interest in one. The Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
Even the marshallese dont care about the island, seeing all the unmaintained roadsides and overgrown weeds in the b-roll footage. It feels like everyone just gave up there lol
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
@@B3BandI'm sorry if this came acros as moaning about their problems. I just wanted to add my observation onto the discourse that Rare Earth did really hit the nail on the head with his thoughts bc its also reflected on the overgrowth we saw.
Why Evan, why must you remind us of the tragedy of the commons. As a train and bus guy, this one really hit the ouchies. :( Also, as a bus guy, I have the obligation (that nobody asked for) of pointing out the Mitsubishi Fuso Rosa at 1:37, the Hyundai County at 1:42, and the Blue Bird CS at 6:53.
@@franciscoacevedo3036 And, I'd argue, a perfect example of why humans in general do not have the capacity to govern themselves. They will inevitably make at least one monumentally stupid life decision that could easily be avoided. Not just these islanders whose island is sinking. I mean everyone in the world. And education paired with a strong, progressive government is the solution
I was in majuro in 2003 and i dont recall a bus then either but people would def load up in the back of pickup trucks and anyone could get a ride. I wonder if part of wanting to buy a car if you can is that you can offer someone else a ride. The problem is it sort of stops making sense if everyone has a car. In other news, i know you probably cant go to kwajalien but i hope you at least go to ebye. Theres some crazy stories there for sure.
I live in a perpetual state of confusion because as far as I'm concerned driving is an awful thing nobody would want to do without getting paid for it.
i mean when you live outside of a city it's actually pretty fun to do! it's also empowering because you know you can go pretty much everywhere. In a big city its very annoying to do.
@@ezforsaken I live just outside a town of 320 people an hour north of the state's capital; you still get a bunch of asshats out here (cops are rarely watching because no population). It can be nice depending on the time of year. In the summer it's awful since the sky it's just blue with no clouds and the ground is a mixture of yellow and brown (and it's 40C+ outside). In the winter you get deep greens, nice sunsets and no sun beating down on you no matter how you contort your body to try and get shade while driving.
This reminded me a bit of my visit to the Telašćica national park in Croatia. They have a little electric bus that ferries tourists from the parking lot to the entrance. And because the place is a bit isolated they make their own electricity using a diesel generator :)
crazy how it looks so much like a small island in the Philippines. But most Filipinos outside of the cities don't have cars and walk or take some form of public transportation (tricycles, jeepneys, busses) everywhere
When I visited the Seychelles Island of La Digue I was fascinated by the fact that it's a bycicle island only. There are cars but maybe 20 in total in the whole island. I can strongly recommend to visit this paradise.
Thanks for this. I was in Majuro for a couple of weeks in the early 90's. I had a great time and only saw a handful of vehicles. FYI - Bikini Atoll is in the Marshall Islands. That's where the US tested nuclear weapons.
A bunch of these Pacific Island nations have spent the past decades almost entirely dependent on foreign aid. The rise of Chinese influence in the region has helped the islanders create an environment of "East vs West"... with each trying to buy influence (And votes in the UN).
It really depends from nation to nation, a remarkably large chunk of the Pacific is still just de facto colonies of either the US, France, or New Zealand (at least NZ tends to treat theirs quite well) so they don't exactly have foreign aid, more like money from their colonizers as an excuse to keep colonizing. Plenty of the rest already have quite strong ties to previous colonizers. But for those few nations who really are playing the east vs west game for money, what else do you want them to do? They're poor, small islands with essentially no resources which nobody will care about otherwise, just trying to survive in an increasingly desperate and hostile world.
Thank you very much for sharing this video, sir. I am planning to show this video to my class. Hopefully, this would be something that would strike some inspiration in their hearts. You speak the truth of many things about this small country. As a local man, I have seen evidence that points towards many bad things here in Majuro. So much that I have often thought that we don't deserve the money given to us by our great friend, the U.S. Thank you, sir, for this lesson. Iokwe im jerammon!
A large group of humans can do something bad even if literally no individual human is doing anything bad, just as a human can do something bad even if no single cell of their body is to blame. Emergence is a fascinating thing, but ethically, very difficult for me to parse.
@@tomriddle8933 No INDIVIDUAL brain cell is by itself, even though you could argue a group of them is. Or, you could argue "blame" is completely arbitrary because free will isn't real. Those brain cells didn't chose to be born, or shaped by their childhood, after all. The only difference between you making a "decision" and a small rolling rock causing a rock slide is the physics of the former is way way way more complicated, but its still physics.
The benefits of getting rid of all the cars on that island would be huge. Imagine all the health benefits from walking and space they could have without the parking spaces.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because YOU tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
Being an atol in the ocean with absolutely everything imported. It is very likely extremely expensive to build roads, buy fuel, or most anything that isn't domestically available.
What a peculiar country. I just read more about them too. It looks like they are essentially a satellite state of the US, being heavily reliant on American aid to sustain its economy, and also hosting an American missile defense site.
I think the idea that your personal emissions don't matter is important to stop people from focusing on individual solutions and spiraling into despair and guilt, but I wish more people understood that your lifestyle will have to change. The biggest polluters aren't just burning oil for no reason. It's to fuel your lifestyle. Just changing your own lifestyle won't fix climate change, but climate change can't be fixed without your (and everyone else's) lifestyle changing. It's a weird conundrum. Also, I didn't know you were on Nebula! Neat!
Oh yeah, I'm going to save the planet by going vegan. Meanwhile Lufthansa is flying empty planes around so they can keep their reservations at airports. Real hard to convince people that a steak a week is what's going to prevent sea level rise when that corporate waste is going on.
Individual solutions do not fix systemic problems. The government set us up to live in the car centric world, and only they can change it, which they are clearly unwilling to do.
Yeah, watching the flyovers of Lahaina after the Maui fires, I was amazed at the amount of area given over to surface parking in a small town, and it will only get worse because of minimum parking limits mean much of the historic business district that burned will be replaced with mandatory parking spaces when they rebuild.
@@taznz1Well, for Lahaina in particular it's a bit more complex. Most of the tourists don't actually stay in Lahaina proper but in resorts that could be a fair way down the coast. These luxury resorts are often in otherwise mostly empty areas (how else are they going to fit an attached golf course, after all?), so to get to anywhere to go sightseeing, a car is pretty much required. So all the parking in Lahaina is taken up by tourists driving in from the resorts, parking in one of the many lots, and then walking the main street. It's less a problem of locals driving everywhere and more an issue of how the tourism industry is set up there.
Hawaii, at least O'ahu, is actively solving the problem though. Back in 2023 they opened the first portion of their new elevated rail line, which when complete will run from Pearl City to Downtown/Waikiki.
@@schalitz1Yeah, the rail system. Quite heavily criticized down here for the shady political shenanigans involved in railroading it through and the fact it doesn’t connect the major population areas, as well as the sheer cost compared to relatively viable alternatives and the constant delays in getting a much reduced system running. You’d be hard pressed to find someone on this island think it was worth it.
Seems like a good example of how we might just have to adapt to whatever consequences we suffer for the conveniences we're not willing sacrifice. I'm hoping I'll repay the damage I've done but I still had to cut down trees to build my home, and I wouldn't have even tried if i didn't have my machinery to do the hard work for me.
I'm surprised you didn't mention anything whatsoever about the atomic bomb being tested in that region. Or any of the politics that brought Majuro or the surrounding islands to this point. Unless you've mentioned it in another video, that's a monumental point to skip over.
A true work of art. Let people get angry... that means that they did not listen to what you said or how you said it. You are just stating some facts. Having lived in hot+humid parts of Asia I can understand the desire for mobile AC machines. I suggest a that they switch to a circulating minibuses like the Sherut's in Tel Aviv. It can hold 20 people, but they pick up and stop at any point. This eliminates the need for bus stops in less populated stretches. Bus stops in more high population areas can instal intelligent bus stops with passive cooling to make the wait more comfortable.
I understand the point. but it is not these cars that are pushing the water to their necks, it is the massive industries (khm china) and the powerplants that we have not killed with nuclear energy, the millionaires taking jets for their daily commute.
One of the very few things I'm proud of in my rather pointless hedonistic little life is this: I can boast of doing my share for the environment, even if I never really meant to: I'll never have kids (old spinster), I don't own a car (never learned to drive), I travel long distance by train (aerophobia) and short distance by public bus and metro (live in Madrid); heck even my garden is just cobblestone and two desert oaks (too lazy to care for a real garden). This is how you do it folk! LOL😎
@@Ludix147 and even if you don’t want to give up meat, simply lowering the amount you consume or occasionally eating chicken instead of beef, things like that help dramatically. It’s ok to not go full vegetarian, you can still make an impact
@@Ludix147 Ludix, are you vegan or just trolling? I don't eat meats that come from mammals except for very occasional holidays (like Xmas or my birthday). Pork, beef, mutton etc have a gene called Neu5Gc which causes cancer in humans.
@@bananamath bananamath, I eat red meat about once every two months. The rest of the time it's eggs, tuna and chicken. I'm very far from a gourmet and have very simple tastes.
In a small way I can understand the Mashallese. Even if they all did a 180 and went carless tomorrow, they would still lose their island within the next 20 years. And even if the world decided to take climate change seriously, their island is already lost. If a man is dying of liver cancer, I'm not going to deny him is last sip of whiskey before he passes away, and likewise I'm not going to judge the Marshallese their indulgences before they lose everything. The point is we did this to them, and by we I mean rich men in rich countries. They won't be the first to go nor the last, and yet even when the chickens come to roost on our coasts and our territories, the people responsible will never face justice, and the people in charge will never do enough. We are all living the world's longest funeral. The joke is the murderer stands amongst the attendees, we all know who it is, and yet nobody's willing to jump him.
I mean also people in rich western countries like the US or many places in europe don't really care that much about climate change either. Most people do take a car to work even if other options are available. So why would a doomed nation care?
I’m Marshallese and I love this message they want to go preach about climate change in other place but won’t do it home and how to be better for the environment. If we want to make change we start home!
The same problems exists in Hawaii, especially Oahu. But they built suburbs on an island and wonder why housing is so expensive and their traffic is some of the worst in the nation.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
I've been to Majuro, and a few other small Pacific islands besides. For me the main takeaway was that their biggest problem was not global warming but waste management. Lagoons too dirty to swim in, rusted wrecks, and just generally a lot of trash around the place. The second thing was the costly dependence on oil. Not much could be done about that a decade ago when I was there, but these days solar and wind would work. If there is a will. I'm somewhat surprised that you made clear statements that Majuro _will_ sink, when it is an atoll, a type of living landmass that adjusts its height to whatever the current sea level is. Of course if the sea rises very quickly then the humans can't wait around on fully salted earth for a century for the coral to build back up. But even so there are some islands that are actually getting bigger, not shrinking.
Well the issue is that a lot of that rising with the seas comes with wave action washing over the atoll, so it will destroy people's homes and crops in the process of growing the atoll. Additionally, a lot of these small atolls have small seawalls to defend against rising seas, which work in the short term but long term encourage beach erosion rather than the growth needed to prevent sinking. Long story short, yes if nature had its way things would be fine and the atolls would grow with the seas, but with humans interfering unfortunately many will sink; Kiribati has already dealt with some of their islands beginning to sink or erode away.
Weren't the Maldives supposed to be underwater a decade ago? My point is, out of all the projected problems of climate change, sea level change seems to be the least of our concerns at the moment.
@@dirremoire I guess you just haven't seen the already active flooding that is now occurring on a now yearly basis in many places. Or the houses and yards that are washing out to sea that are closest to the oceans. Least of your concern probably because you're likely far enough inland it doesn't matter to you.
@@johnjingleheimersmith9259 No. I haven't. More to the point,none of the islands predicted to be flooded under, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, are showing any signs of doing so. I'm not saying climate change isn't a problem, but we're not looking at huge drastic changes in sea level in our lifetimes.
Hearts and minds can be changed. I live in a little town on an island called Alert Bay in British Columbia, Canada. We may still be in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most taxis and companies per mile of road. Back in the day, I remember calling a taxi to take a patron From the bar that I was working at to another establishment, 50 meters further down the road. Now we have a public charger and several electric vehicles. There is hope.
People are the worst. If I ran this place. I would outlaw cars for anyone who could not justify it to me personally. I would not be a dictator, just a little more authoritative where I needed to be. They need a better President. The don't care about heir own Islands... What a terrible attitude. Truly the worst kind of behavior.
Could you imagine just how idyllic this atoll could've been. A rare halycon of a community thriving; happiness in every footstep and still, yet, this system we've built has infected everybody, everywhere, and our own human fallacies refuse to let us drop our pride and prejudice to behave as our Earth beckons us to do so. It's so disappointing.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to. Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
My dad was stationed on Kwajalein after the war. That's how I came to be born there. no nostalgia: I was two weeks old when we left the Marshalls. Thanks for the look at Majuro!
Lots of small islands are choking with cars go to somewhere like Bermuda and you can't move for cars.Japan might have donated buses but they are, along with Germany, churning out cars like there's no tomorrow and there won't be if they don't stop churning out cars.
Lived there in early 80s. Wall to wall taxi - $0.10 to go just about anywhere. Cars, the banks would only lend for 1 1/2 year loan. Main reason, and NOT MENTIONED, is the life of a car was about 2 years. Rust major problem. Park your car, and within 15 minutes the windshield needed cleaning as it would be coated with salt. Ocean spray across that narrow an island is major. I watched a pick up truck (bed aleady rusted away), break right behind the driver. The two I-beams gave way, and split the truck in half while driving right in front of me. My pick up one time, when I hit a bump, the back window just fell out, due to rust. The floor was already gone. The muffler eaten away. The same salt would eat air conditioners. Attack metal anywhere. Only 1/2 mile across the island, not many places to hide. Ride a bike, I use to be a bike shop owner, had a bike. Roads are very narrow, and I didn't feel safe enough to use the bike. Step outside, start sweating. Walking or riding, be dripping sweat walking the length of a football field. Loved the people.
Get your bus pass:
www.patreon.com/rareearth
ko-fi.com/rareearth
@njb we summon you Jason of Fake london
Let them live their own ways, atleast someone is free!! If world don't personally care for their issues why should they??
Don't forget about shipping companies registered there
don't 4get to talk about internet/cellular activity, electricity, and city development also heats up the atmosphere....
Recently, in 2022, I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Northwest Arkansas. Surprisingly, the 2nd most commonly spoken language among employees was Marshallese, not Spanish. Many of my co-workers wore shirts with the Marshall Islands flag and other symbols and phrases associated with that country. Apparently, starting in the 1980s, Marshallese people started moving to Northwest Arkansas and now it, and the city of Springdale in particular, have one of the largest (if not the largest) communities of Marshallese people outside of the Marshall Islands themselves. A bit unexpected, considering how vastly different the Ozark Highlands (they are way too low to be called Mountains) are from their flat tropical island homes.
1/4 of all Marshallese alive today live in Springdale, in fact!
@@RareEarthSeries Wow, no wonder the Republic of the Marshall Islands has a consulate there! And some businesses will have "Kemij kajin Majol!" written somewhere (which I assume means "we speak Marshallese" since it is usually written next to "Hablamos Espanol!" which means "we speak Spanish").
@@bobdollaz3391 You should look for a voyage back "home" to (insert your ancestral connection in Europe) first before suggesting something like that.
@@bobdollaz3391 Yes.
@@izza6998 It's what King Solomon would've wanted. And this time I doubt anyone would object.
NotJustBikes would have a heart attack at all these cars
I remember he made a video feat foreignmaninaforeingland about another small island grand Andros
Land size is not an excuse for terrible land use
Should share this video to him.
NotJustBikes in a JustNoBikes place
The irony about NotJustBikes is that he flies around the world, and owns multiple vehicles.
"it has to work for those who don't care" I'm taking that with me.
when someone coins a phrase like that, you know that they're actually using their god given brain !
Or a similarly spirited one that goes like "A system that does not need the right people to run it for it to work, but incentivizes the wrong people to do things right."
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
@@B3Band you know thats bullshit right? The amount of scientists who travel there, activists who stay there and people who visit and or live there pretty much show that a fair number of people actually do care about the islands.
@@tutumazibuko2510probably not nearly enough though. Really
Now I feel the sudden urge to drop everything in my current life, go there and set up a bike shop...an urge so strong that I probably will have forgotten it by tomorrow morning. Maybe I should change that knowing it will be like that...
do you have ADHD by chance?
If I had to guess, 'not using a car' = 'shows your status as being poor', even if it looks comical to an outsider. The residents there might need a few decades to get sick of traffic jams.
You would go out of business in the first month. Cars are likely status symbols there.
He forgot to mention the obesity epidemic there. Nobody is going to ride your bikes.
@@thearpox7873 ez, just hire a bunch of attractive looking people and let them ride a bike everywhere and show the gullible citizens of the town that bike riders are chads
I had a similar experience in remote rural Indonesia. I had some food wrappings left over from eating while travelling. Arrived at a sea gypsy village (stilts a go-go) and asked one of the locals where I could put my rubbish. He said "laut", Bahasa for "the sea". What can you do?
I've been to Indonesia and Malaysia many times and it's sad but it's true. People are just ignorant.
@@officialshivertrip education is so needed in waste management is so many parts of the world.
fyi not to be nitpicky but the language is Indonesian, not Bahasa. Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Jawa, etc all exist in Indonesia. Bahasa just means "language" in Indonesian.
I think we should treat the pollution problem differently than the CO2 problem
If you brought plastic garbage to a place that wasn't prepared to deal with it, then you should've packed it out. People without any land also don't have a landfill. It probably seems obvious in hindsight, I know.
OMG! I’m a guy whose blood pressure goes up at the mere thought of sitting in traffic. The thought of riding my bike past cars stuck in traffic during my daily commute would fill me with ecstatic joy. (Yes - I’m petty that way.) This is absolutely amazing to me.
it's called a status symbol and people really like em
@@phileas007 people are stupid lmao
Please refrain from using God's name in vain.
@@PunkDogCreations what's his name?
This is why everyone hates bicyclists.
Probably my favorite episode in a while.
Big agree.
The biggest issue with climate change is that it's a group project where everyone needs to contribute to pass. Members see others not doing their part, and decide putting in the work themselves is a waste of time if they are going to fail anyway, only for others to see them and decide the same in a feedback loop.
1. It is not all or nothing. However small, you are still contributing, and, even if we can't limit the warming to 1 degree centigrade, 1.5 or 1.6 is still better than nothing.
2. Believe it or not, some countries (namely Canada, Denmark, and especially Russia) actually *benefit* greatly from climate change. So climate change is not universally bad.
The biggest conflict within the climate change population compliance project comes from the fact the high priests of the cult, without exception, live their lives as if they are absolutely certain that the thing is a hoax. The Obama's and Algore's and Greta's of the church buy sea level mansions. These priests casually burn more carbon jetting their third mistress to dinner in Europe on a whim than the average working American does in their lifetime wallowing in climate sin. They attend debauched conferences where decadent dunces swill champagne flown in from France and chomp embargoed tins of Czar brand Russian caviar while proudly plotting how they will force feed the little people a diet of cockroaches and sawdust laced with sterilizing birth control chemicals. Yeah, it is quite impossible to get on board that boxcar train as it heads to the climate change concentration camp.
the biggest issue is capitalism
you're both right
@@RichTapestry *you're goddamn right*
You always get to the point, I loved this one, as I did with all the previous episodes. I still remember watching you take over this channel, not knowing what it would hold. Now, years later, this is probably in the top 3 of the hundreds of channels I follow on youtube. Thanks for keeping up with the quality content. An eloquent tale of a decadent time.
Thank you for what you pointed out at the end. A report was published in my country of Switzerland analyzing the per capita emissions of various parts of the population. It showed that city folks emit more than rural folks (reason: wealth). It showed that being informed about climate did not change your emission (reason: wealth). The most interesting: members of the green party emitted just as much as the rest of the population (reason: wealth). Poor people, like the people from the town I grew up in might drive cars, but many of them have never taken a plane in their life, they do not waste food, they never buy new clothes. The city folk, while they may take buses also go on 2-3 international trips a year, they buy junk off of shien, ...
So yeah, we're all hypocrites.
There is also poor people in the cities, infrastructures probably play a part as well.
"F" all these climate activists. We were told we had 12 years till we all will die 15 years ago. George Sorros, Klause Schwab, Bill Gayes, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Get your bus pass, move into a 3 bedroom ranch house, stop flying everywhere, strop eating meat and be BUGtarians, drive dagerouse electric cars first. Then I still wont follow the GRIFT.
been watching this channel for many years and my favorite part has always been the ending card. cracks me up every single time without fail! Thank you!!
One point that you only touched on - locals are not choosing driving simply to get from point to point. They are choosing driving because they don't want to arrive hot and sweaty at their destination. I know plenty of people in my own country that use that same rationale to drive.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
They mention that in the video.
"Nobody cares about the Marshall Islands. Least of all the Marshallese".
Spot on, I would argue everywhere is the same, you could apply it to every nation. We are all the same.
Wrong.
Florida doesn't have oil rigs off our coast. It would produce lots of economic opportunities, however, we care.
We set aside taxes to clean our beaches every morning. We care.
How you feel, think, or act doesn't represent the population as a whole.
I'm pretty sure that's the point that Evan's trying to make - the Marshalese are a metaphor for all humanity and the atoll's fate is a metaphor for the Earth's.
Why should they when they know the usa is going to take care of them because of their special status. That was given in exchange for using there islands for army bases.
@@dr.floridaman4805Florida does it so it can continue its tourism and attract the retirees to get their property taxes. You know the coast properties are valued very high. And those rich people want a clear view of the sea
Eh, I somewhat disagree. I know plenty of countries that are quite nice, even far away from the touristy areas because the locals put in a little effort to keep them that way for their own sake.
Hell, even where I live I remember spring used to be pretty smelly due to all the dog shit thawing out of the snow at the same time. Not so much anymore though, as it became standard for dog owners to clean up after themselves. It's really just an extension of how the streets aren't floating with garbage, because the vast majority of people will put in the effort to dispose of garbage appropriately.
I also know a bunch of obscure little hiking trails far too mundane for tourists. They're maintained by local enthusiasts and kept clean by the people who use them. There's no system that keeps people from littering out in the forest, no organization to pay for cleaning, and no garbage cans to be found either. You could easily throw candy wrappers and empty bottles on the ground and nobody would be able to hold you accountable. Yet you'll hardly find any trash out there because the locals do care.
It's all the little things that add up and create nice places to live. People care when it looks like everyone else also cares at least a little bit. The hard part is escaping a state of paralyzing general apathy.
You're right about "has to work for everyone"
I commuted to my college with bus for all 4 years. It took 40 minutes to walk to my bus stop, and then 1.5 hour ride to arrive at the destination. When I finally got a car after college, I decided to drive to my college for fun. It only took 15 minutes.
"The reality is that any true solution to this problem has to work for everyone, not just those who care." This statement makes me think of some climate deniers wish to make ONE solution scale up to everyone, which makes no sense given diverse needs and situations. I think we need to think of multiple solutions that fit for a given area and population - the combined efforts of small groups.
Hate to burst your bubble but it's not the "climate deniers" trying to force a one size fits all solution on everyone.
I'm not really sure what this is supposed to mean. I don't understand what these "one size fits all solutions" are supposed to be, can anyone give an example?
And frankly it seems that there is no solution which everyone will be on board for. The simple fact is that some products and energy sources contribute to global climate change. Oftentimes these are very convenient products/energy sources (otherwise we wouldn't be using them in the first place) and there just may not necessarily be a more convenient alternative. But you know what's really inconvenient? The collapse of global climate patterns and ecosystems, historic droughts and resulting mass migrations, rising sea levels eating away at coastal cities and towns... So yeah, sorry to break it to y'all, but if we want to solve this problem the solutions are not necessarily going to be personally convenient to you.
Well I think there are several factors for that:
1. The Marshall Islanders are already thinking about leaving. Even if they cease emissions completely, China, India, and the United states make enough CO2 to drown the island anyway.
2. If the fatalistic view has taken hold, there is very little to stop it. Why should the Islanders brave sweltering heat at a bus stop when they can be comfortable in a (very expensively imported) car?
They could build bus stops with AC every few hundred meters and would probably still emit less carbon dioxide than with all those cars. The fact that they have no public busses (which would have AC, too ..) is insane. Those busses don't even need to serve a network of spread out neighborhoods, they just have to drive around a single loop in both directions.
@@AV-we6wo but why should they take buses, they are most certainly going down, why should they save you and me!
@@sriharip316 It's not about 'saving us'. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions on the Marshall Islands probably won't have much effect on the world climate. But it would strenghten their arguments for global change if they did more locally, too.
And even if that may not be reason enough, busses are just cheaper, there are less traffic jams, and less local air pollution. It's just wasteful in so many ways to not use them if you can.
@@AV-we6wo what I am trying to say is, if I'm pretty sure I have no future, I'll just have a blast in the present atleast. Most probably you will also do the same. One really has to be a moral hero not to do that.
I don't think they are arguing for global change at all. Maybe, they just want to spend their last days happily, and they will do it with or without foreign funds.
People who have nothing to lose will always be a problem, and our society seems to be creating more and more of such people. You/I could fall in that category some day.
@@sriharip316 OK, I can somehow understand that. I never was that desperate, and I hope I (and many other people) would still care for others, even if we individually don't have a future. I don't think you have to be some kind of 'hero' to act that way.
I was there and some other marshall islands in 2001 to 2003 and the people throw all their garbage in the ocean. I saw old car batteries in the water by a boat dock and the biggest source of food is fish from the ocean. So a very sad situation. The us gov built a power plant on one island so the people could have electricity but it was a rusted pile of junk in a few years because no one took care of it.
"...least of all the Marshallese." A very different understanding the second time you said it.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
I mean, to address that closing statement, I'd love to ride the bus, but the infrastructure just isn't present in this city (US). I need to drive my housemate to and from work because public transport just isn't an option. This isn't suburbs or a small town either, it's a college city. A car is the only option where the stroads are king and pedestrians are second-class commuters.
I don't often think about the Marshall Islands, but now I'm going to think about them a lot when I'm in traffic. The drone shots look super surreal, with those thin atolls covered shore to shore in buildings and streets. It doesn't look like a real place, almost.
Thanks for the video!
Right, the takeaway is more like "either ride the bus or vote for politicians who don't promote a car-centric agenda centered around bigger roads, bigger cities, and no public transport infrastructure".
@@Olivman7that’s what you tell yourself to avoid waking the walk… ‘I don’t use public transport but I vote for people who want it, so I did my part and i can keep preaching (while keep driving my car)’ just take a place like California, where everyone is worried about climate change and still everyone drives. California is the Promise Land of NYMBYsm, where nothing gets built, hence no density, hence no physical way to create public transport, hence cars… but hey, I voted for the ones who don’t want climate change, so I’m fine now! 😂
I can think of another place in which a bus system would be laughingly easy to implement, but there isn't any interest in one. The Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Walking the plank with eyes wide open huh 😅
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
Even the marshallese dont care about the island, seeing all the unmaintained roadsides and overgrown weeds in the b-roll footage. It feels like everyone just gave up there lol
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
@@B3BandI'm sorry if this came acros as moaning about their problems. I just wanted to add my observation onto the discourse that Rare Earth did really hit the nail on the head with his thoughts bc its also reflected on the overgrowth we saw.
It’s not that the citizens don’t care it’s just that the government just keep pocketing the money 😢
There are literally countless small towns all across the US in the same dilapidated state if not worse…
Why Evan, why must you remind us of the tragedy of the commons. As a train and bus guy, this one really hit the ouchies. :(
Also, as a bus guy, I have the obligation (that nobody asked for) of pointing out the Mitsubishi Fuso Rosa at 1:37, the Hyundai County at 1:42, and the Blue Bird CS at 6:53.
And apparently whatever the 6 accidentally unfilmed university busses are.
The tragedy of the commons is a myth.
@@waltonsmith7210 "moo"
Thx guys for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.
Your content is inspiring. I like that you're clearly having fun by making these
The gross land misuse is nonsensical
@@franciscoacevedo3036
And, I'd argue, a perfect example of why humans in general do not have the capacity to govern themselves. They will inevitably make at least one monumentally stupid life decision that could easily be avoided.
Not just these islanders whose island is sinking. I mean everyone in the world. And education paired with a strong, progressive government is the solution
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi
I was in majuro in 2003 and i dont recall a bus then either but people would def load up in the back of pickup trucks and anyone could get a ride. I wonder if part of wanting to buy a car if you can is that you can offer someone else a ride. The problem is it sort of stops making sense if everyone has a car.
In other news, i know you probably cant go to kwajalien but i hope you at least go to ebye. Theres some crazy stories there for sure.
I live in a perpetual state of confusion because as far as I'm concerned driving is an awful thing nobody would want to do without getting paid for it.
i mean when you live outside of a city it's actually pretty fun to do! it's also empowering because you know you can go pretty much everywhere. In a big city its very annoying to do.
@@ezforsaken I live just outside a town of 320 people an hour north of the state's capital; you still get a bunch of asshats out here (cops are rarely watching because no population).
It can be nice depending on the time of year. In the summer it's awful since the sky it's just blue with no clouds and the ground is a mixture of yellow and brown (and it's 40C+ outside). In the winter you get deep greens, nice sunsets and no sun beating down on you no matter how you contort your body to try and get shade while driving.
It's a small island with few people. I doubt that there are ever any traffic jams.
@@Evemeister12 Did you actually watch the video?
This reminded me a bit of my visit to the Telašćica national park in Croatia. They have a little electric bus that ferries tourists from the parking lot to the entrance. And because the place is a bit isolated they make their own electricity using a diesel generator :)
I always end up around there when on google earth like gravity pulls me there.
Jason of Fake london would have a field trip with this gross misuse of land
crazy how it looks so much like a small island in the Philippines. But most Filipinos outside of the cities don't have cars and walk or take some form of public transportation (tricycles, jeepneys, busses) everywhere
When I visited the Seychelles Island of La Digue I was fascinated by the fact that it's a bycicle island only. There are cars but maybe 20 in total in the whole island. I can strongly recommend to visit this paradise.
Thanks for this. I was in Majuro for a couple of weeks in the early 90's. I had a great time and only saw a handful of vehicles. FYI - Bikini Atoll is in the Marshall Islands. That's where the US tested nuclear weapons.
"It has to work for those that don't care".
If they don't care, how will they ever know that it works for them?
The day I stumbled on this channel, a whole other Earth opened up to me.
A bunch of these Pacific Island nations have spent the past decades almost entirely dependent on foreign aid.
The rise of Chinese influence in the region has helped the islanders create an environment of "East vs West"... with each trying to buy influence (And votes in the UN).
One of the first acts by Australia's current PM was to regain trust with the Solomon Islands, as they had begun to move towards partnership with China
It really depends from nation to nation, a remarkably large chunk of the Pacific is still just de facto colonies of either the US, France, or New Zealand (at least NZ tends to treat theirs quite well) so they don't exactly have foreign aid, more like money from their colonizers as an excuse to keep colonizing. Plenty of the rest already have quite strong ties to previous colonizers.
But for those few nations who really are playing the east vs west game for money, what else do you want them to do? They're poor, small islands with essentially no resources which nobody will care about otherwise, just trying to survive in an increasingly desperate and hostile world.
Thank you very much for sharing this video, sir. I am planning to show this video to my class. Hopefully, this would be something that would strike some inspiration in their hearts. You speak the truth of many things about this small country. As a local man, I have seen evidence that points towards many bad things here in Majuro. So much that I have often thought that we don't deserve the money given to us by our great friend, the U.S. Thank you, sir, for this lesson. Iokwe im jerammon!
Hrm 🤔 Where do you teach & what grade ?
Wow what a great video! To the point and so insightful! Great job!
KX6DC, Roi Namur Radio Club was my first distant Morse radio contact when I got my ham radio license.
A large group of humans can do something bad even if literally no individual human is doing anything bad, just as a human can do something bad even if no single cell of their body is to blame. Emergence is a fascinating thing, but ethically, very difficult for me to parse.
Surely some brain cells are to blame.
@@tomriddle8933 No INDIVIDUAL brain cell is by itself, even though you could argue a group of them is. Or, you could argue "blame" is completely arbitrary because free will isn't real. Those brain cells didn't chose to be born, or shaped by their childhood, after all. The only difference between you making a "decision" and a small rolling rock causing a rock slide is the physics of the former is way way way more complicated, but its still physics.
Gem of a video...very thought provoking.
seems like the perfect place for electric golf carts
The benefits of getting rid of all the cars on that island would be huge. Imagine all the health benefits from walking and space they could have without the parking spaces.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because YOU tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
Being an atol in the ocean with absolutely everything imported. It is very likely extremely expensive to build roads, buy fuel, or most anything that isn't domestically available.
Another cracking video. Thumbs up, mate
I don't ride the bus, but as a shut-in, I'm doing my part.
There's a reason why I picked a career where I can stay at home
As an agoraphobic, so am I.
What a peculiar country. I just read more about them too. It looks like they are essentially a satellite state of the US, being heavily reliant on American aid to sustain its economy, and also hosting an American missile defense site.
bruh this is hellworld stuff
so darkly and sickly ironic
Also...I see many parking lots and no fields. Where do they get food?
I think the idea that your personal emissions don't matter is important to stop people from focusing on individual solutions and spiraling into despair and guilt, but I wish more people understood that your lifestyle will have to change. The biggest polluters aren't just burning oil for no reason. It's to fuel your lifestyle. Just changing your own lifestyle won't fix climate change, but climate change can't be fixed without your (and everyone else's) lifestyle changing. It's a weird conundrum.
Also, I didn't know you were on Nebula! Neat!
Oh yeah, I'm going to save the planet by going vegan. Meanwhile Lufthansa is flying empty planes around so they can keep their reservations at airports. Real hard to convince people that a steak a week is what's going to prevent sea level rise when that corporate waste is going on.
Individual solutions do not fix systemic problems. The government set us up to live in the car centric world, and only they can change it, which they are clearly unwilling to do.
Private car ownership is a hell of a drug. Climate controlled, isolated, durable, on demand, incredibly fast compared to manual movement.
Calculate the annually harvested forest needed for a nations toilet paper, and how long it takes that annual supply of wood to regrow.
I felt like this also applies to Hawaii.
Yeah, watching the flyovers of Lahaina after the Maui fires, I was amazed at the amount of area given over to surface parking in a small town, and it will only get worse because of minimum parking limits mean much of the historic business district that burned will be replaced with mandatory parking spaces when they rebuild.
@@taznz1Well, for Lahaina in particular it's a bit more complex. Most of the tourists don't actually stay in Lahaina proper but in resorts that could be a fair way down the coast. These luxury resorts are often in otherwise mostly empty areas (how else are they going to fit an attached golf course, after all?), so to get to anywhere to go sightseeing, a car is pretty much required. So all the parking in Lahaina is taken up by tourists driving in from the resorts, parking in one of the many lots, and then walking the main street. It's less a problem of locals driving everywhere and more an issue of how the tourism industry is set up there.
Hawaii, at least O'ahu, is actively solving the problem though. Back in 2023 they opened the first portion of their new elevated rail line, which when complete will run from Pearl City to Downtown/Waikiki.
@@schalitz1Yeah, the rail system. Quite heavily criticized down here for the shady political shenanigans involved in railroading it through and the fact it doesn’t connect the major population areas, as well as the sheer cost compared to relatively viable alternatives and the constant delays in getting a much reduced system running.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone on this island think it was worth it.
They should build an elevated highway through the middle of town so it doesn’t get flooded.
If it was me I'd build elevated houses first. Who cares if the road gets flooded once in a while...
"Any true solution to this problem has to work for everyone, not just those who care."
*applauds*
Wouldn't be surprised if the car dealer/importer in the island had a connection with local authorities
Seems like a good example of how we might just have to adapt to whatever consequences we suffer for the conveniences we're not willing sacrifice. I'm hoping I'll repay the damage I've done but I still had to cut down trees to build my home, and I wouldn't have even tried if i didn't have my machinery to do the hard work for me.
I too am looking for an excuse to promote myself in the comment section
I'm surprised you didn't mention anything whatsoever about the atomic bomb being tested in that region. Or any of the politics that brought Majuro or the surrounding islands to this point. Unless you've mentioned it in another video, that's a monumental point to skip over.
Yes.🎯
It will be its own entire video, this one is about a bus system as an analogy for how we act about problems we don't personalize
A true work of art. Let people get angry... that means that they did not listen to what you said or how you said it. You are just stating some facts. Having lived in hot+humid parts of Asia I can understand the desire for mobile AC machines.
I suggest a that they switch to a circulating minibuses like the Sherut's in Tel Aviv. It can hold 20 people, but they pick up and stop at any point. This eliminates the need for bus stops in less populated stretches. Bus stops in more high population areas can instal intelligent bus stops with passive cooling to make the wait more comfortable.
IDK why I imagined this guy just sailing around the south pacific.
I worked at an auto supply warehouse in Portland. I never knew there were do many people from Tuvalu living there
I'm so easily manipulated; I ordered the book about global trade even though I firmly believe globalization is dead
Incredible!
I completely agree with your statement at the end. Well said
I understand the point.
but it is not these cars that are pushing the water to their necks, it is the massive industries (khm china) and the powerplants that we have not killed with nuclear energy, the millionaires taking jets for their daily commute.
Evan isn't riding the bus. He's the bus driver, and he's taking us to school.
One of the very few things I'm proud of in my rather pointless hedonistic little life is this: I can boast of doing my share for the environment, even if I never really meant to: I'll never have kids (old spinster), I don't own a car (never learned to drive), I travel long distance by train (aerophobia) and short distance by public bus and metro (live in Madrid); heck even my garden is just cobblestone and two desert oaks (too lazy to care for a real garden). This is how you do it folk! LOL😎
Yeah but do you still eat meat? :D that's a large thing you can avoid
@@Ludix147 and even if you don’t want to give up meat, simply lowering the amount you consume or occasionally eating chicken instead of beef, things like that help dramatically. It’s ok to not go full vegetarian, you can still make an impact
You are probably the most complete environmentalist on the planet.
@@Ludix147 Ludix, are you vegan or just trolling? I don't eat meats that come from mammals except for very occasional holidays (like Xmas or my birthday). Pork, beef, mutton etc have a gene called Neu5Gc which causes cancer in humans.
@@bananamath bananamath, I eat red meat about once every two months. The rest of the time it's eggs, tuna and chicken. I'm very far from a gourmet and have very simple tastes.
flashbacks to that one Wendover video
Which one exactly?
@@zeroyuki92 the final years of majuro
Well, that was depressing. Very, very fitting for the subject, though.
Cars are probably the least-worst thing to spent foreign aid on, based on what other countries have done.
I drop everything when I see you upload new videos. Thank you once again.
Okay, I'm convinced. America isn't peak carbrain. This is peak carbrain.
In a small way I can understand the Mashallese. Even if they all did a 180 and went carless tomorrow, they would still lose their island within the next 20 years. And even if the world decided to take climate change seriously, their island is already lost. If a man is dying of liver cancer, I'm not going to deny him is last sip of whiskey before he passes away, and likewise I'm not going to judge the Marshallese their indulgences before they lose everything.
The point is we did this to them, and by we I mean rich men in rich countries. They won't be the first to go nor the last, and yet even when the chickens come to roost on our coasts and our territories, the people responsible will never face justice, and the people in charge will never do enough.
We are all living the world's longest funeral. The joke is the murderer stands amongst the attendees, we all know who it is, and yet nobody's willing to jump him.
I mean also people in rich western countries like the US or many places in europe don't really care that much about climate change either. Most people do take a car to work even if other options are available. So why would a doomed nation care?
Trade Winds, Christiaan De Beukelaer
Don't blame me, I walked and rode a trolley around my hometown today.
Heard Nauru also used to have so many cars in its heyday that they have traffic jams in that small island you can walk around within 30 minutes.
Great video👌👏
I’m Marshallese and I love this message they want to go preach about climate change in other place but won’t do it home and how to be better for the environment. If we want to make change we start home!
I will kick and scream as my friends call an uber from the bar *when both the bar and our houses are on a direct bus route.* Like fuck
you get absolutely mugged where I live if you try that lol
Ain’t no bus on Îles de la Madeleine either, and they’re in Canada with the same shape than the Marshall.
The same problems exists in Hawaii, especially Oahu. But they built suburbs on an island and wonder why housing is so expensive and their traffic is some of the worst in the nation.
And I thought I was lazy
Electric trolleys would be better than busses. In my opinion.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
Man, what a sad situation and shitty situation. Though I suppose if youre going down with the ship, you might as well enjoy yourself.
those end credits are pure GOLD 😂😂😂
I sure love car dependent economies (I also live in one)
I've been to Majuro, and a few other small Pacific islands besides. For me the main takeaway was that their biggest problem was not global warming but waste management. Lagoons too dirty to swim in, rusted wrecks, and just generally a lot of trash around the place.
The second thing was the costly dependence on oil. Not much could be done about that a decade ago when I was there, but these days solar and wind would work. If there is a will.
I'm somewhat surprised that you made clear statements that Majuro _will_ sink, when it is an atoll, a type of living landmass that adjusts its height to whatever the current sea level is. Of course if the sea rises very quickly then the humans can't wait around on fully salted earth for a century for the coral to build back up. But even so there are some islands that are actually getting bigger, not shrinking.
Well the issue is that a lot of that rising with the seas comes with wave action washing over the atoll, so it will destroy people's homes and crops in the process of growing the atoll. Additionally, a lot of these small atolls have small seawalls to defend against rising seas, which work in the short term but long term encourage beach erosion rather than the growth needed to prevent sinking. Long story short, yes if nature had its way things would be fine and the atolls would grow with the seas, but with humans interfering unfortunately many will sink; Kiribati has already dealt with some of their islands beginning to sink or erode away.
Weren't the Maldives supposed to be underwater a decade ago? My point is, out of all the projected problems of climate change, sea level change seems to be the least of our concerns at the moment.
@@dirremoire I guess you just haven't seen the already active flooding that is now occurring on a now yearly basis in many places. Or the houses and yards that are washing out to sea that are closest to the oceans. Least of your concern probably because you're likely far enough inland it doesn't matter to you.
@@johnjingleheimersmith9259 No. I haven't. More to the point,none of the islands predicted to be flooded under, such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, are showing any signs of doing so. I'm not saying climate change isn't a problem, but we're not looking at huge drastic changes in sea level in our lifetimes.
@@dirremoire the hilarious thing is that any plebe can google pretty much every bit of nonsense you've made up to debunk it in less than 5 seconds.
Hearts and minds can be changed. I live in a little town on an island called Alert Bay in British Columbia, Canada. We may still be in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most taxis and companies per mile of road. Back in the day, I remember calling a taxi to take a patron From the bar that I was working at to another establishment, 50 meters further down the road. Now we have a public charger and several electric vehicles. There is hope.
People are the worst. If I ran this place. I would outlaw cars for anyone who could not justify it to me personally. I would not be a dictator, just a little more authoritative where I needed to be. They need a better President. The don't care about heir own Islands... What a terrible attitude. Truly the worst kind of behavior.
Could you imagine just how idyllic this atoll could've been. A rare halycon of a community thriving; happiness in every footstep and still, yet, this system we've built has infected everybody, everywhere, and our own human fallacies refuse to let us drop our pride and prejudice to behave as our Earth beckons us to do so.
It's so disappointing.
Let's suppose as a hypothetical that the Marshall Islands banned personal vehicles and started up a free bus service for everyone. Will anyone else in the world actually do something to save them? Or they lose their home anyway? It's pretty self righteous to moan about the Marshalese when everyone else has already given up on them. Maybe they just want to enjoy themselves and not have to make every sacrifice because you tell them to.
Near the end of my father's life, while eating huge bowl of ice cream, he flat out told me "I'm gonna die anyway. Let me enjoy myself. I'm not gonna eat cardboard just get a couple extra years." Let the Marshalese enjoy what they have while they have it. Because not a single person reading this is going to do anything to save them no matter what they do.
My dad was stationed on Kwajalein after the war. That's how I came to be born there. no nostalgia: I was two weeks old when we left the Marshalls. Thanks for the look at Majuro!
Lots of small islands are choking with cars go to somewhere like Bermuda and you can't move for cars.Japan might have donated buses but they are, along with Germany, churning out cars like there's no tomorrow and there won't be if they don't stop churning out cars.
If they don't care about their Island sinking into the sea, why should anybody else?
In 2024, does Malta still have the most number of Rolls/Benz type luxury vehicles per capita?
great video, very eye opening.
Lived there in early 80s. Wall to wall taxi - $0.10 to go just about anywhere. Cars, the banks would only lend for 1 1/2 year loan. Main reason, and NOT MENTIONED, is the life of a car was about 2 years. Rust major problem. Park your car, and within 15 minutes the windshield needed cleaning as it would be coated with salt. Ocean spray across that narrow an island is major. I watched a pick up truck (bed aleady rusted away), break right behind the driver. The two I-beams gave way, and split the truck in half while driving right in front of me. My pick up one time, when I hit a bump, the back window just fell out, due to rust. The floor was already gone. The muffler eaten away. The same salt would eat air conditioners. Attack metal anywhere. Only 1/2 mile across the island, not many places to hide. Ride a bike, I use to be a bike shop owner, had a bike. Roads are very narrow, and I didn't feel safe enough to use the bike. Step outside, start sweating. Walking or riding, be dripping sweat walking the length of a football field. Loved the people.
I spent 18 years in the Marshall Islands on Kwajalein
This is how Not Just Bikes pictures hell