Pacific Climate Justice TREK

Basil Keck (Saturday, June 13, 2026)

What a week! We didn’t have any scheduled academic programs, so ten of us went river tubing on the Nabua river.

We took a bus ride from the hotel at around 8:00 AM to a gateway to the river. We put our stuff away in a locker and got onto ~9 person motorboats. From here we boated all the way down the river to a Fijian village. The journey was sort of insane. We were traveling through the forest, and I couldn’t help but look around and think about how many hundreds of thousands of species I was looking at. I spoke with my classmates about how it felt sort of strange visiting the village; these were people and this was their home, and we were just traipsing in and taking photos. Michael put the feeling well, asking how we would feel if people just showed up in your neighborhood and looked around your home like it was some museum. I asked one of our guides about it and he said the locals actually enjoyed having visitors, which I couldn’t tell if it was just something to soothe our anxieties or a genuine response. The village was gorgeous, surrounded by mountains covered in trees. Chickens and dogs were running free, and we learned about how the dogs were trained for hunting the wild pigs. Our guide told me when they complete a hunt, they cook half the pig and give the other half to the dogs as a reward.

From the village we took boats down to a beautiful waterfall and some of us swam in the pool. I wasn’t going to swim originally, and Charlotte wasn’t either, but we convinced each other to go in and I definitely don’t regret it. After that, we took the boats back partway down the river and had lunch. It was delicious and we learned from our cameraman about the history of modesty in the village. We had to wear sarongs in the village which (hopefully you know) are a sort of skirt situation in order to maintain modesty; but we were taught about how that idea was brought by the colonizers, and how before the colonizers the culture was one quite opposite from modesty. It’s interesting to learn about how deeply the introduced cultures have ingrained themselves within the indigenous traditions.

It was cold and rainy, and I was a little nervous about tubing, but as soon as we loaded in and headed off it was all fine. We slowly made our way down the river and partway through our journey the guides stopped us and sang some Fijian worship songs. If you saw my vlog you know how much I appreciate singing of that nature; it was seriously very incredible. It was a very small group of people singing, but they all had different parts, and listening to the different harmonies was enthralling. Brian got a fantastic video which I will attach.

Eventually we got to the end and I got to reflect on how amazing the experience is. Every day it’s crazy how much there is to be grateful for.

I’m going to take the rest of this blog to talk about my most major takeaway from the trip so far. On the tenth we spoke to a reporter called Netani Reki. I generally tend towards the ‘climate doomer’ side of things. I have a hard time finding hope and determination when things seem so dire, and it seems like the people who have the power to make real change will never do so. Netani in his lecture spoke about his gripe with certain Fijians who ‘wait around’ for the government to help them, and then the government waits for other governments. He complained about how unproductive this was, and said something along the lines of ‘are you just going to wait around and do nothing?’ He talked about how every little action is better than no action, which really made me think. Would it be better to consider the insurmountable battle we’re facing and lose hope, or look at the small actions you can do right in front of you and take those actions first. Am I going to just sit around and wait for others to do something, or do everything I can do? Brian Webb put it well: “I wouldn’t call it hope, I’d call it determination”. I’m determined not to spend money that will support people contributing to this issue, I’m determined to make the little tiny choices like not wasting food and buying less, and I’m determined to not lose my determination.

Every story we’ve heard has reinforced this idea for me. I struggle finding hope, but in the end the lectures we’ve heard have given me a lot of determination.

I’m sorry if I rambled, I have a lot of thoughts and a hard time streamlining these thoughts into words that make sense. For kicks you should visit @woosustainability on instagram and take a look at some of the pictures that have been posted. Be grateful for your environment, whatever it is, and think about how your choices affect it.