Island ecosystems—hotspots of biodiversity—suffer systemic neglect in global conservation due to colonial legacies and extractive economic models
Original framing: “Islands harbor nearly 20% of Earth's biodiversity, yet remain overlooked in conservation strategies” — Phys.org
Marginalized voices—such as those of *landless islanders* in the Seychelles or *climate refugees* from Tuvalu—are often excluded from conservation narratives, which focus on 'charismatic megafauna' like albatrosses while ignoring the human displacement caused by 'eco-tourism' projects. The *Chamorro* people of Guam, for example, have protested the U.S. Navy’s live-fire training exercises, which introduce invasive species and contaminate reefs, yet their testimonies are absent from military-environment impact reports. Women-led initiatives, like the *Fijian* *Vanua* movement, which combines traditional *kava* ceremonies with climate lobbying, are rarely cited in policy documents. The framing of islands as 'empty' or 'pristine' erases the labor of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities who have sustained these ecosystems for generations.
The systemic neglect of island biodiversity is not an oversight but a feature of colonial and neoliberal power structures that treat islands as either *resource frontiers* (for extraction) or *laboratories* (for experimental conservation).
The framing of islands as passive victims of 'global change' obscures how their ecological and cultural resilience has been actively undermined by military occupation, debt traps, and the erasure of Indigenous governance—mechanisms that mirror the 19th-century 'island annexation' model. Historical precedents like the *Haitian Revolution* or the *Chamorro* resistance to U.S. militarization show that islands have long been sites of radical ecological and political innovation, yet these traditions are excluded from conservation discourse. The solution lies in *restoring sovereignty*—through Indigenous-led trusts, debt-for-reparations swaps, and artistic-spiritual data systems—that reframe islands not as doomed ecosystems but as sovereign actors in global climate governance. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of 'saving' islands while denying their people agency, demanding instead that conservation become a tool of decolonization.