O cei na Vulavula? Insights and Regrets of a Foreign Geoscientist in the Pacific Islands

From over three decades of close contact with Pacific Islands geoscience, the author reflects on key issues (what he wished had known earlier) about nature islands, their landscapes and peoples. Experience elsewhere in world rarely prepares you for Pacific, from its youthful often tectonically unstable to understandings inhabitants, which are sometimes time-consuming difficult access yet frequently illuminating. Mysteries abound places as they ever were, have potential inform global ideas earth-surface evolution. Geoscience research enterprise remain largely foreigner-driven Islands, is anathemic sustainability, privileging that uncritically assumed be shared by An opportunity exists peoples own geoscientific knowledge islands.