192
C. Pearson
environmental and economic integrity, sovereignty and security’. The ‘future of
the Blue Pacific could not be left to chance’. The present required ‘strong political leadership’ for the sake of a sustainability informed by science. (Paragraph 9)
According to the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, it might indeed be best
for a United States of the Pacific to be set up under the umbrella of the Forum:
such a move would allow Pacific Island countries (PIC) ‘to amplify their concerns
about climate change on the global stage’ without being compromised by the political
intervention and might of Australia (Tavola 2019). For these documents the affective
words of urgency and seeing first-hand implications were the equivalents of now
being a kairos moment.
Superwicked Problems and the Anthropocene
This emphasis on resilience and security is understandable. Whether it captures the
full force of the kairos moment is a moot point on two counts. From a geopolitical
perspective it is hard to imagine how inter-governmental and regional protocols—like
the Communiqué—can manage what is, in effect, a superwicked problem (Lazarus
2010; Levin et al. 2012; Pearson 2019). Such problems are in urgent need of resolution
but are extraordinarily complicated across multiple disciplines. The tendency is often
to privilege immediate vested interests and thus delay the longer-term good. The
‘redistributive implications are enormous’. (Lazarus 2010, pp. 10750–10751) The
urgency in which the Communiqué and the Kainaki Declaration are cast, furthermore,
makes no reference whatsoever to the present moment being one of transition from
the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. This paradigmatic change has been taken
up by Earth Systems scientists like Will Steffen who find this geological term helpful
for the way in which planet’s trajectory is towards a ‘hothouse Earth’ for which there
is no analogue (Steffen et al. 2018). Writing at the close of 2019 Timothy Lenton,
Steffen et al. inhabit a different theoretical space from the one expressed less than a
year before by Forum Secretariat: the grim prospect is one of nine out of fifteen tipping
points in the Earth’s System having now been exceeded (Lenton et al. 2019). In an
interview reported in July 2020 Steffen warned that ‘eternal growth is not possible’:
the most likely outcome is the collapse of civilization (Moses 2020). Mitigation and
adaptation are both at risk.
There is a world of epistemic difference between Timon’s coconut theology of
climate change and this talk of superwicked problems and the Anthropocene. The
respective discursive fields could hardly be more removed from one another; the same
is true for the songs of lament, resistance and providence with the Communiqué and
the Kainaki Declaration.
The hermeneutical problem that arises as a consequence becomes a variation on a
theme already addressed separately by Hannah Fair and Wolfgang Kempf. Each was
seeking to delineate the way in which islanders’ use of songs and biblical texts enable
a form of agency in the face of confusion and deepening crisis. The common practice
has been to dismiss such customs and how isolated biblical texts are used as a naïve
C. Pearson
environmental and economic integrity, sovereignty and security’. The ‘future of
the Blue Pacific could not be left to chance’. The present required ‘strong political leadership’ for the sake of a sustainability informed by science. (Paragraph 9)
According to the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, it might indeed be best
for a United States of the Pacific to be set up under the umbrella of the Forum:
such a move would allow Pacific Island countries (PIC) ‘to amplify their concerns
about climate change on the global stage’ without being compromised by the political
intervention and might of Australia (Tavola 2019). For these documents the affective
words of urgency and seeing first-hand implications were the equivalents of now
being a kairos moment.
Superwicked Problems and the Anthropocene
This emphasis on resilience and security is understandable. Whether it captures the
full force of the kairos moment is a moot point on two counts. From a geopolitical
perspective it is hard to imagine how inter-governmental and regional protocols—like
the Communiqué—can manage what is, in effect, a superwicked problem (Lazarus
2010; Levin et al. 2012; Pearson 2019). Such problems are in urgent need of resolution
but are extraordinarily complicated across multiple disciplines. The tendency is often
to privilege immediate vested interests and thus delay the longer-term good. The
‘redistributive implications are enormous’. (Lazarus 2010, pp. 10750–10751) The
urgency in which the Communiqué and the Kainaki Declaration are cast, furthermore,
makes no reference whatsoever to the present moment being one of transition from
the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. This paradigmatic change has been taken
up by Earth Systems scientists like Will Steffen who find this geological term helpful
for the way in which planet’s trajectory is towards a ‘hothouse Earth’ for which there
is no analogue (Steffen et al. 2018). Writing at the close of 2019 Timothy Lenton,
Steffen et al. inhabit a different theoretical space from the one expressed less than a
year before by Forum Secretariat: the grim prospect is one of nine out of fifteen tipping
points in the Earth’s System having now been exceeded (Lenton et al. 2019). In an
interview reported in July 2020 Steffen warned that ‘eternal growth is not possible’:
the most likely outcome is the collapse of civilization (Moses 2020). Mitigation and
adaptation are both at risk.
There is a world of epistemic difference between Timon’s coconut theology of
climate change and this talk of superwicked problems and the Anthropocene. The
respective discursive fields could hardly be more removed from one another; the same
is true for the songs of lament, resistance and providence with the Communiqué and
the Kainaki Declaration.
The hermeneutical problem that arises as a consequence becomes a variation on a
theme already addressed separately by Hannah Fair and Wolfgang Kempf. Each was
seeking to delineate the way in which islanders’ use of songs and biblical texts enable
a form of agency in the face of confusion and deepening crisis. The common practice
has been to dismiss such customs and how isolated biblical texts are used as a naïve