News stories by James Alix Michel

VICTORIA, Seychelles, November 3 (IPS) - This autumn I have found myself watching the evening news from Europe with a growing sense of recognition. Not of the tear gas or the burning barricades, which I deplore, but of the faces. Teenagers holding hand-painted signs. University students sleeping in tents in city squares. Young people who look, more than anything, tired of waiting.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, October 28 (IPS) - On 21 September 1976, less than three months after independence, Seychelles took its seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations. We became the 145th member of the Organisation. For a young nation of scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, with a small population and no army to speak of, it was far more than a ceremony. It was a promise that, in the family of nations, size would not decide whose voice was heard.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, October 21 (IPS) - When you grow up on a small island, the ocean is not scenery. It is your neighbour, your livelihood, and the measure of time itself. For decades, as I walked the beaches of Seychelles, I watched the subtle shifts that scientists were warning the world about. The tide crept a little higher up the sand each year. After a warm season, vibrant coral gardens turned ghost-white. Storms that once belonged to rare memory began arriving with unsettling regularity.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, October 6 (IPS) - One night, many years ago now, on a remote beach in the outer islands of Seychelles, I sat in the darkness and watched a green turtle come ashore. She had waited for the heat of the day to leave the sand. Under a sky crowded with stars, she hauled herself slowly above the tideline, dug with a patience no human hand could match, and laid her eggs. Then, in the small hours, she turned back toward the water. She did not hurry. She paused once, as though listening, and then made her slow, unhesitating way down the sand, back to a home older than any I could imagine.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, October 1 (IPS) - From a distance, an island nation can appear to possess everything: pristine waters, a thriving tourism industry and a strong cultural identity. Its income figures may suggest prosperity.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, September 24 (IPS) - After decades in which the high seas were too often treated as a distant frontier—vast, ownerless and beyond meaningful protection—the High Seas Treaty entered into force on 17 January 2026.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, September 4 (IPS) - There is an older wisdom, quieter than the noise of our times, that whispers a simple truth: we are not the architects of nature, only its guests. Long before there were nations, economies, or even language, there was the pulse of the tide, the patience of coral, the breath of forests exchanging air with the sky. Into that ancient conversation we arrived — late, curious, and forgetful — mistaking our cleverness for sovereignty and our tools for wings.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, August 26 (IPS) - Across this vast ocean, the latest monitoring by Mercator Ocean International shows marine heatwave conditions ranging from moderate to severe. At the same time, the World Meteorological Organization expects a strong El Niño to intensify through August to October, with a positive Indian Ocean Dipole also likely to develop. These are not distant scientific signals. They are an urgent warning that the ocean system on which millions depend is under mounting stress.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, August 10 (IPS) - I have spent my life on an island. From the granite hills of Mahé, one can watch the sun rise over an ocean that has fed, protected and defined the Seychellois people for centuries.

VICTORIA, Seychelles, August 3 (IPS) - Earlier this year, I called publicly for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, arguing that it is not a rejection of progress, but a commitment to sound science.