13 Influence of Spiritual Beliefs on Autonomous Climate-Change …
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islands (sand cays) may alternately form or vanish after storms, the idea that the
configuration of land and sea might change profoundly is generally unthinkable.
That this is a largely recent idea informed by Christian beliefs, to which the
overwhelming majority of Pacific Islanders today subscribe (Nunn et al. 2016), can
be demonstrated by the fact that most who live in coastal areas consider their right
to occupy these as God-given. This explains why there has traditionally been so
much resistance by coastal communities in the Pacific Islands region (and similar)
to the idea of inland (even off-island) relocation forced by climate change (Marino
2015; Farbotko 2019; Piggott-McKellar et al. 2019b). Justifications of this resistance
commonly invoke the idea that coastal lands are God-given and that he does not want
his people to abandon them; indeed to do so would be a betrayal of religious belief.
2
Relocation is almost unthinkable, “barely conceivable” (Kempf 2012, p. 250).
Yet when Pacific Islanders become more detached from their religious belief
systems, as invariably occurs when they discuss their (culturally-recalled) histories,
a contradiction often emerges. For instance, while claiming the present (vulnerable
coastal) sites of their villages to be God-given, many residents when asked about
where their distant ancestors used to live will point elsewhere. Indeed many oral
histories in the Pacific region corroborate the archaeological evidence of migration
within the last millennium. In the past 700 years this typically involved moving
from coasts to hilltops to coastal hinterlands to coasts, the latter move commonly
required when people and communities became Christianized more than a century
ago in most places (Nunn 2007). Yet some oral histories recall the latter move as illadvised. Examples appear widespread but few are documented, an exception being
the recent history of relocation in the Torres Islands of northern Vanuatu (Siméoni
and Ballu 2012). In January 2019, an elderly informant on Ono Island told the second
author that
My grandfather always used to say that his grandfather was forever saying it was a mistake
for our people to move to the coast. That was a time when we lived in the hills, safe from the
waves, but then you people [meaning Europeans] came along and forced us all down to the
water’s edge. The old ones, they knew this was a dangerous place, they said not to go, but we
had no choice. Here we are and dina saraga – too true – we now discover it is a dangerous
place! We should listen to the past.
There is a clear contradiction between acceptance of Christian views about the
entitlement to coastal land (where nineteenth-century missionaries told the community to settle) and the culturally-grounded acceptance of a history of (largely) preChristian mobility (Campbell 2011; Nunn and Campbell 2020). A similar contradiction often arises when Pacific Islanders talk about the cause of particular impactful
phenomena like climate change (see following section), simultaneously attributing it
to God and human-enhanced global warming. We return to this issue, which we characterize as ‘flexible attribution’, in the Discussion in section “Discussion: Spiritual
Beliefs and Climate Change”.
2 Note we use the words ‘he’ and ‘his’ in respect of God in the Pacific Islands, reflecting its exclusive
gender usage in the region.
253
islands (sand cays) may alternately form or vanish after storms, the idea that the
configuration of land and sea might change profoundly is generally unthinkable.
That this is a largely recent idea informed by Christian beliefs, to which the
overwhelming majority of Pacific Islanders today subscribe (Nunn et al. 2016), can
be demonstrated by the fact that most who live in coastal areas consider their right
to occupy these as God-given. This explains why there has traditionally been so
much resistance by coastal communities in the Pacific Islands region (and similar)
to the idea of inland (even off-island) relocation forced by climate change (Marino
2015; Farbotko 2019; Piggott-McKellar et al. 2019b). Justifications of this resistance
commonly invoke the idea that coastal lands are God-given and that he does not want
his people to abandon them; indeed to do so would be a betrayal of religious belief.
2
Relocation is almost unthinkable, “barely conceivable” (Kempf 2012, p. 250).
Yet when Pacific Islanders become more detached from their religious belief
systems, as invariably occurs when they discuss their (culturally-recalled) histories,
a contradiction often emerges. For instance, while claiming the present (vulnerable
coastal) sites of their villages to be God-given, many residents when asked about
where their distant ancestors used to live will point elsewhere. Indeed many oral
histories in the Pacific region corroborate the archaeological evidence of migration
within the last millennium. In the past 700 years this typically involved moving
from coasts to hilltops to coastal hinterlands to coasts, the latter move commonly
required when people and communities became Christianized more than a century
ago in most places (Nunn 2007). Yet some oral histories recall the latter move as illadvised. Examples appear widespread but few are documented, an exception being
the recent history of relocation in the Torres Islands of northern Vanuatu (Siméoni
and Ballu 2012). In January 2019, an elderly informant on Ono Island told the second
author that
My grandfather always used to say that his grandfather was forever saying it was a mistake
for our people to move to the coast. That was a time when we lived in the hills, safe from the
waves, but then you people [meaning Europeans] came along and forced us all down to the
water’s edge. The old ones, they knew this was a dangerous place, they said not to go, but we
had no choice. Here we are and dina saraga – too true – we now discover it is a dangerous
place! We should listen to the past.
There is a clear contradiction between acceptance of Christian views about the
entitlement to coastal land (where nineteenth-century missionaries told the community to settle) and the culturally-grounded acceptance of a history of (largely) preChristian mobility (Campbell 2011; Nunn and Campbell 2020). A similar contradiction often arises when Pacific Islanders talk about the cause of particular impactful
phenomena like climate change (see following section), simultaneously attributing it
to God and human-enhanced global warming. We return to this issue, which we characterize as ‘flexible attribution’, in the Discussion in section “Discussion: Spiritual
Beliefs and Climate Change”.
2 Note we use the words ‘he’ and ‘his’ in respect of God in the Pacific Islands, reflecting its exclusive
gender usage in the region.