Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter looks back to the lessons previously discussed and offers some further insights on the war's impacts and implications on the Pacific islands and beyond. It shows the tensions and the potentials for cooperation between conflicting colonial and indigenous visions of Pacific environments and resources, moving further to examine the changes now wrought within these environments and in their indigenous populations. The years of the Pacific War repeated, in an intensified manner, all the environmental processes and related resource contests that the southern Pacific had experienced previously. In addition, politically and strategically, the islands of the southern Pacific were, and still are, pawns of the powers on their periphery. Despite this, since independence, peoples and their small nations think creatively and beyond their beaches.