By Mike Roman (Kiribati 00-02)
Twenty-six years ago, I stepped off a plane in Kiribati with a backpack, a notebook, and no real understanding of how deeply a place could shape a life. I believed I was there to serve. What I did not understand was that I was entering into a relationship, one that would stretch across decades, following me into classrooms, city halls, courtrooms, and conversations about what it means to move, to belong, and to survive in a changing world.
In Kiribati, I learned how to live without money. It was also where I learned how people live together as an extended family, bound by care. Land was not owned so much as held in trust. The ocean was not a boundary, but a relative. Survival was collective, identity was relational, and you were never alone, because being alone was never the point.
It followed me through hospital wards at Tungaru National Hospital, through graduate school, through stories told over shared meals in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, and the United States. It followed me as seawalls rose, freshwater lenses failed, and families quietly prepared for futures that required leaving home. It followed me into policy rooms and planning meetings where climate migration was discussed in abstract terms, stripped of names, faces, and histories.
And it followed me as I drove home from Washington, D.C., after last year’s Peace Corps Connect Conference, listening, mile after mile, without interruption, to the International Court of Justice deliver its advisory opinion on climate change. The conference had been a reflection on service, past, present, and future. The ruling was something else entirely. As the highway unfolded beneath me, the court named what frontline communities like Kiribati had long known: that environmental responsibility does not end with promises, that harm demands repair, and that delay is not neutral. The ruling did not feel like a victory. It felt like recognition.
I thought of Kiribati, of islands rising only inches above the sea, of king tides arriving with the full moon, of people saying clearly that they do not want to become stateless people. They want to remain at home. They want self-determination. They want their relationships with the land, ocean, and family to endure. Listening that day felt like an arc from a village maneaba to the world’s highest court, carried forward by those who refused to stop insisting that their worlds mattered.
By the time I crossed back into Ohio, the road familiar again, the question ahead felt closer to home: climate migration? Climate migration is no longer distant. It is already shaping where people move, how cities grow, how housing strains, how health systems respond, and how communities either widen or close their circles of belonging. Today, my work continues through climate incubator efforts and local planning in Cincinnati with New America, at the scale where global forces meet local responsibility. Where preparation can become protection, or neglect can become displacement all over again.
What Kiribati has taught me, over a quarter century, is that migration itself is not failure. But unmanaged, unjust migration is. Delay has consequences. Listening matters only if it leads to care, structure, and action. And so that is the nexus where I work. Lived experience with policy formation at the local level to lead in a new era of migration. In this era, we work toward a world shaped by warmth and acceptance. Not through isolation or competition. Not through individualism disguised as progress. But through relationship, through learning, again, to see one another as family, as I was taught in Kiribati, rather than as isolated beings chasing private riches.
The future demands something older and more enduring: collective care, shared responsibility, and the courage to belong to one another. Then, and only then, I am convinced, do we stand a chance of meeting what lies ahead, together.