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Vice President delivers keynote address to scientific symposium

POHNPEI, Palikir (FSM Information Service): June 2000 - Vice President Redley Killion delivered the keynote address to the Mayor's Pacific Islands Environmental Symposium on May 8, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris hosted the event.

The three-day symposium focused on how to make Pacific communities a better place to live and to share ideas and information on environmental technology. The symposium was held jointly with the Hawaii Environmental Science & Technology Symposium, and was attended by scientists, engineers, and others directly engaged in environmental issues directly affecting the Pacific region.

Using a quote from the American humorist Mark Twain, the vice president pointed out that while in Twain's time, no one could do anything about the weather, we today know that much of what we do is weather connected in regard to environmental concerns; therefore there are things we can do about the weather.

The Vice President traced how small-island-nations, after 1990, learned to marshal their political forces to form a political bloc in the global arena at the Rio Summit and other conferences to effect changes in how the industrialized nations conduct their environmental policies.

The Vice President said that while the principal of teamwork is not new and has been applied to tasks of all kinds on individual islands, it hasn't been until relatively recently that Pacific Island nations have "[...] found the will to band together on the larger issues in which we all have a common stake. Almost without exception, when we have done so it has been a great success."

The Mayor's Pacific Islands Environmental Symposium is the interim year conference of the Mayors' Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit, which will be held in May 2001 in Honolulu.

The first Summit was held in January 1999 and was attended by more than 400 international delegates representing 118 cities from 29 countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and the Pacific Islands.