Human rights lawyer explores loss and impact of climate crisis in Pacific islands in new book

Julian Aguon hopes his new book helps spread understanding — through the lens of grief and loss — of the injustices in America’s territories.

“The colonies should be brought front and center in the conversation about what needs to change in this country,” said Aguon, a human rights lawyer in Guam and author of “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.”

Aguon’s book is a memoir-manifesto that publishes Tuesday. It’s a collection of essays, poems, commencement speeches and eulogies — among other writings — about resistance, resilience and collective power in the midst of the climate crisis.

In the first chapter, he writes: “How obscene is it that communities with the smallest carbon footprint—like low-lying islands and atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—are paying the steepest price for a crisis we had almost no hand in creating?”