When There Was No Money begins in a place where survival depended less on cash than on kinship. Set in Kiribati and shaped by decades of return, this book traces how people live within systems grounded in reciprocity, shared responsibility, and deep connection to land and ocean.

​

 

As global markets, colonial legacies, and climate disruption press inward, these relationships are reworked rather than erased. Climate change is not an abstraction but a daily reality—felt in rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freshwater scarcity, intensifying storms, and the difficult choices that lead people to migrate to sustain their families and communities.

 

 

Moving beyond the familiar arc of service memoir, this is a work of relational ethnography and moral witness that also engages the policy landscape shaping these lives. The book examines how climate adaptation, migration governance, and international development frameworks often lag behind lived experience.

 

 

Refusing nostalgia and easy resolution, When There Was No Money asks what is lost when economic value replaces social responsibility—and what other ways of living together still endure. Rooted in long-term relationships rather than short-term solutions, the book invites readers to reconsider how care, obligation, and belonging might guide responses to a world already shaped by climate change and movement.