Is Fiji a Pacific Island

Tawake, a senior executive's boy in the Verata Fiji region, began asking for help from faculty at the local college in the mid-1990s while Tawake was a student at the South Pacific U.S. Department of Education. This has resulted in a dense ecosystem of over 400 marine areas throughout Fiji, now known as locally managed marine areas.

It has also extended the network's policy of combining conventional nature protection with the latest scientific knowledge in resources managment to a number of other Pacific isles. Today, municipalities taking part have developed managment maps that cover 1,000 sq km of Fiji's water, and the network's main emphasis has grown from ocean to ocean, with workshop on the impact of pesticides use, mangroves plantation and other land-based managment technologies.

"I was generally interested in combining conventional practice with contemporary science," he says. "Today Tawake is the country's adviser to Fiji's CMMAs. He is in his offices in a tranquil neighbourhood in Suva, where all the noises of the near town are overwhelmed by the relentless roar of the rains - a transitory room as they find a Suva facility large enough to house the expanding workforce of the Ludwig Maximilians Association (LMMA) net.

He' s wearing a classic sulphu, a light blue-black knit and an almost steady grin as he guides me through the long story of the game. The Pacific Islands have always had their own tradition of resource management. No one knew then what longer-term effects a taboo could have on maritime stocks.

It was only a ten years after their introduction that Tawake learned of them. "What distinguishes LMMA from these two taboo prohibitions, Tawake said, is a validation and extension of conventional methodologies with advanced research, including the fellowship that is based on natural resource at every stage.

"We say that good starts are made with conventional methods, but we can do it better with science," he says. In order to find out how efficient it was to recover overfished fish stocks, the scientists trained the members of the fellowship to observe a particular invertebrates populations - the Anadara Antiquat. Nearly every Fijian tribe has one, and you can often tell from what it is, whether it comes from the shore or further up-country.

It is another part of the traditions that we integrate into our resources mangement. "There was a shift after the first 100 days, Tawake remembers, but it was not significant. That'?s what the congregation did. "And then one thing leads to another," says Tawake. "Chieftains from the other fellowships became interested, so we came to the next fellowship and perfect the beginning.

One fellowship would ask and we would go and help. "AMMA is now using the local and regional networks to increase public understanding of what it is offering the churches, but the heads of the networks are still not addressing the churches that are inviting them to attend. "It' s been deliberately created to be accessible because we don't want to go into a fellowship, and our first task is to persuade them," he says.

It works here in Fiji and all over the Pacific. "There are other, more advanced farming techniques beyond taboos, such as mangrove cultivation or the education of communities as alternatives to fisheries. "Tawake says, "If you give them a lasting option away from the ocean, they can relax in the ocean.

Whilst the LIMMA-networking has started as a way of ensuring nutritional stability, the KP can also help strengthen the resistance of the fellowship to catastrophes and global warming - one of the biggest challenges to the Pacific and many parts of the globe today. However, the irony is that increasing consciousness and acceptability of global warming can erode community-based governance and resistance by moving the emphasis away from the small-scale connection between people and the planet.

Both in Fiji and around the world, depletion, over-fishing, urbanisation and other man-made activity often deteriorate over time. "As Hugh Govan, advisor to the local CMMA organization, says, "The key stone of community-based leadership was to make individuals understand the connection between their action and the results, good or not.

"It could be argued that one of the most serious effects of global warming is to move the focus of things that societies can manage from things to things that they cannot control," he says. "It is also shifting the resources that could go directly to local authorities, government and non-governmental organisations that focus on combating large scales of global warming," said Govan, "making local authorities less willing to adjust to anything from local issues such as the deterioration of resources to wider issues of war.

For example, on the island of Koro the island's hard to find fauna is not in good condition, as a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows. Akanisi Caganitoba, a co-ordinator for the community's commitment, told me on the night boat from Suva to Koro that they consider the use of insecticides to be the primary culprits.

"The majority of places say:'Climate changes, climatic changes, climatic changes. Not all of this is climatic change," she says. "She acknowledges that the issue of the global warming is important, and the increasing ocean is a big issue on Koro. While many municipalities are demanding walled construction capabilities to help keep settlements from the invading seas, Caganitoba says that the restoration of physical barrier such as mangrove trees would be a more sustainable one.

The WCS crew has a dozen of mangroves that they will be planting below on the island during this time. The Tawake Group acknowledges that the way the ecosystem works is changing as a result of global warming. In Fiji and the Pacific, as sea-level rises are becoming increasingly important, most of the natural resource and resource flows they are pursuing are being relocated.

About 80 per cent of Fiji municipalities are relatively inaccessible to public service, according to Govan. "A large part of the Pacific way of living is in the collective hands," he says. That is why the focus of the LMMA Group is on educating the local population. "It is the individuals who need to be administered and enabled to take charge of these[resources," Tawake says.

"I am grateful that we could affect so many men, so many fellowships, so many chieftains to be part of what they have done. We' ve only been planting the seeds and helping them to thrive, it's the churches that are actually doing it. That' is what I woke up in the mornings for the next congregation, the next chief."