INTRODUCTION
Science has universalised and materialised climate change; we must now particularise and spiritualise it. (Hulme, , p. 330)
Taking Mike Hulme's words as an opening provocation, this article proposes how as geographers we might heed this call. Globally, the spiritualisation of climate change is already afoot. From the commitment of the Church of England and the Methodist Church to fossil fuel divestment (Mooney, ), to the explicitly spiritual People's Pilgrimage from Rome to Paris in advance of the 2015 climate negotiations (Scammell, ) – in response to the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si, which directly addresses the calamities of climate change – the greater engagement of religious institutions with climate change is apparent. Yet the relationship between climate change and religious faith remains contentious. There is repeated evidence of the associations between climate scepticism and evangelical Christianity (Zaleha & Szasz, ; Eckberg & Blocker, ), as well as limited environmental concern generally found among US Christians compared with non‐Christians (Arbuckle & Konisky, ), with little proof that Christianity in the US has greened since the 1990s (Clements et al., ). Sheldon and Oreskes attribute this tendency to a historically contingent “intertwining of evangelical identity, conservative politics, and climate change skepticism” (, p. 349), one that reiterates a scientific mistrust found among debates over Creation‐Science and Intelligent Design. Yet crucially, they contend that climate denial is not inherent to evangelism or Christianity. Thus, while religious faith is often considered a roadblock to environmental engagement, alternative understandings of the relationship between Christianity and climate change are both possible and necessary.
These alternative understandings, particularly those geographically situated beyond the global North, also speak to the broader geographical project of “making human sense of climate change” (Hulme, , p. 6). Geographer Mike Hulme elaborates upon this as the process of re‐contextualising, particularising and localising climate change through exploring the different spatially contingent meanings and understandings that connect climate change and culture in a place. Correspondingly, geographers have called for climate change to be understood in relation to the local landscapes of everyday life (Brace & Geoghegan, ), for climate change governance to be geographically situated, critically considering questions of place and scale (Bailey, ) and have explored the objects and communication strategies employed to “bring climate change home,” making it locally resonant (Slocum, ). This work intersects with anthropological endeavours to comprehend culturally situated responses to climate change (Crate & Nuttall, ). It also resonates with the need to attend to multiple narratives or stories of climate change (Hulme, ). As Stenmark contends, story‐telling is imperative in the face of climate change as a “wicked problem,” as it works to “increase the plurality of perspectives and open our minds to alternatives” and thereby “help us judge and act in the midst of uncertainty” (, p. 935). Following the work of geographers and anthropologists of bringing in knowledge from diverse places in order to broaden these conversations, in this article I situate these questions of the different spiritual stories told in relation to climate change in the Pacific Island region (Figure ). Pacific Island nations are notable for their vocal demands for more ambitious mitigation targets (Farbotko & McGregor, ) and the discrepancy between their minimal collective responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions (Barnett & Campbell, , p. 10) and the extensive climate impacts they face (Nurse et al., ).
Enlarge this image.The Pacific Island region. Image produced by Kahuroa for Wikimedia Commons, based on Howe (), p. 57.
Consequently, this paper will address three main concerns. First, it responds to the shortage of social science research exploring religious understandings of climate change (Haluza‐DeLay, ), a gap in the literature that stands in stark contrast to the demand for ethical and spiritual re‐framings of climate change (Hulme, ), particularly in the Pacific Island region (Nunn, ). Second, it challenges the reductive approach common to academic accounts of religious responses to climate change in Oceania, which tend to homogenise and marginalise religious understandings, treating them as a barrier to climate adaptation (Kempf, ), as opposed to as a resource (Hulme, ). Third, it offers an alternative approach to religious perspectives on climate change in Oceania, and potentially more broadly, through developing an epistemologically pluralist approach I dub tufala save, which explores the possible convergences and tensions between different knowledges of climate change. I experiment with the tufala save approach through focusing on one Biblical narrative – the story of Noah and the flood – and explore the implications of the different articulations of this tale, investigating the nuanced relationship between the beliefs articulated and the responses to climate change deemed appropriate and possible.
I begin by making a case for spiritualising climate change, outlining the importance of bringing religious understandings into climate change responses and consequently the need for further research that investigates this. I then identify one of the major obstacles to this spiritualisation, the treatment of religious thought as a barrier to climate change action by much of the existing social science research in Oceania. Introducing Christianity in Vanuatu as a case study, I propose an alternative approach, tufala save, and apply this conceptual framework, tracing three discursive manifestations of the Noah story within the Pacific Islands: rainbow covenant as denial, Noah as preparation, and Islanders as unjustly outside of the ark.
THE CASE FOR SPIRITUALISING CLIMATE CHANGE
Religious organisations in the Pacific Island region have been called on to play a greater role in climate advocacy (Nunn et al., ; Dasgupta & Ramanathan, ), partly due to their significant financial, political and institutional power (Hulme, , p. 15; Edwards, ), particularly in the context of what Douglas and others have identified as Melanesia's “weak states” and consequential “official institutional vacuum” (Douglas, , p. 165). Reale's work in Solomon Islands highlights the importance of churches’ roles in filling this “governance void” (, p. 94), as churches alone among agencies have influence stretching from an international to village level, and can build resilience to climate change through its existing development work (Thornton et al., ).
Admittedly, there are limitations to the Church as an institutional climate change actor in Oceania. While the Pacific Conference of Churches has made significant progress in the field of climate‐induced relocation (Edwards, ), Pacific Island churches often do not prioritise climate change due to budgetary restrictions, shortages of technical knowledge, or the lessened immediacy of climate impacts compared with other threats parishioners face (Rubow & Bird, ). During disaster recovery, communities often prioritise rebuilding churches, leading to a greater emphasis upon the needs of religious institutions compared with community members’ immediate material well‐being (Reale, ). Moreover, a village's religious composition can strongly impact the effectiveness of church‐based delivery of disaster recovery efforts (McDougall et al., , p. 29), with villages united by a single church found to recover faster due to increased organisation compared with those divided between multiple denominations, suggesting a practical limit to ecumenicalism.
Consequently, there is evidence that the Church has significant potential as a climate change actor (and the vast majority of my participants showed enthusiasm for greater Church engagement). However, I contend that in order for churches to be maximally engaged in climate communication, adaptation and advocacy, there is a need to look beyond churches merely as convenient institutional frameworks for information dissemination and community mobilisation, but also to consider the power and potency of religious ideas themselves.
This approach is evident in Rudiak‐Gould's () work, which found that a minority of Marshall Islanders combined scientific knowledge and religious faith as a springboard for action, positioning themselves as God's stewards who were responsible for defending the planet. Eco‐theological texts in Oceania are also explicitly incorporating ideas about responding to climate change in a Pacific context. Rubow and Bird note that these particular manifestations of contextual theology draw on “traditional natural‐cultural worldviews and practices, which include notions of interconnectedness, belonging, sharing and reciprocity, respect, and the sacredness of the land‐sea‐air domain” (, p. 153). They reference Janet Guyer's “evacuation of the near future,” the notion that the Western “public culture of temporality,” evident in macroeconomic theory and evangelical prophecy, is polarised by a focus on “fantasy futurism” and “enforced presentism” (, pp. 409–410). Rubow and Bird apply this concept to climate discourse, noting the emphasis on “urgent presentisms” (immediate mitigation and adaptation actions) and apocalyptic futures, leaving a temporal gap (p. 152). They argue for incorporating the notion of “time as waiting” (p. 153) to fill that gap, building upon Havea ()'s “coconut theology,” which emphasises living and being in the present with the movements of the natural world. However, while these are important contributions, this gap in the social science literature cannot be filled by theology alone (Kempf, ). Not enough research concerns what “the world's religions and their adherents are actually saying or doing about climate change” (Haluza‐DeLay, , p. 261).
This emphasis upon belief and practice rather than mere institutional capacity speaks to the wider relevance of religious understandings of climate change. While scientific and economic framings of climate change provide some insights, they do not explicitly envision what constitutes the “good life” that we should aspire to (Hulme, ): consequently, ethical and moral framings, including religious perspectives, have a crucial role to play in how we understand and navigate climate change. Yet, despite their significance, religious dimensions are largely absent from “modernist accounts of climate change and its multiple causes” (Hulme, , p. xii). According to Hulme, it is necessary to incorporate religious understandings because “effective climate policy needs to tap into intrinsic, deeply held values and motives” (p. xiii). This is due to the “‘thick’ accounts of moral reasoning” (, p. 15) religion provides, which are embedded in local norms and beliefs, giving them a motivational force not mirrored by economics or science and other secular messaging. Consequently, rather than as a barrier, religion can be embraced as a “cultural resource” (Hulme, , p. 15). Thus, Hulme advocates further research into “religious filters” through which scientific information is viewed and then transfigured into “perceptions of climate change both consistent and not consistent with the scientific narratives” (, p. xiv). The story of Noah can be seen as a crucial example of one of these filters.
This need for “thick” moral accounts rather than thin evocations of global values seems particularly pressing in the Pacific. Rubow (), in her study of the Cook Islands, strongly advocates addressing religious dimensions when investigating climate change and resilience in Oceania, as existing literature fails to heed the extent to which responses to it, and to extreme weather events, are shaped by myth and religion. She notes that divine relations to the environment, including the links between gods and storms, figure strongly across many Pacific mythologies. Geographer Nunn () contends that a reason for the limited success of many climate projects in the Pacific Islands is the secularity of the messaging, which fails to sufficiently engage communities. Instead he recommends that “the most influential messages are those that engage with people's spiritual beliefs,” and therefore more work is needed in this area, particularly through the use of messages that resonate with scriptural understandings. As Nunn et al. () highlight in a survey of University of the South Pacific students, those who attended church more regularly were more likely to feel connected to nature and to actively reflect upon their relationship to their environment, and also be most concerned about climate change.
Therefore, while there is the both the potential and prerogative for spiritualising climate change, it must be recognised that not all religious groups approach the morals and ethics of climate change in the same way. There is the potential for disagreements about the choice of response, allocation of responsibility, terms and timescales (Hulme, ). Hulme therefore urges further research into “the religious heterogeneity through which climate change is experienced” (, p. 17), an agenda I am contributing to through an examination of the multiple and conflictual spiritual narratives through which climate change is made meaningful in the Pacific Islands. In this I also recognise the need to navigate tensions not only between religious and scientific understandings, but also between scientific and traditional knowledges.
IMPEDIMENTS TO SPIRITUALISATION: RELIGION AS A BARRIER
Despite the aforementioned potentials of engaging with faith‐based beliefs and institutions, not only does this receive insufficient academic attention but many extant social science accounts instead present religion merely as a barrier to effective climate change responses in Oceania. I present the evidence for this “religion as a barrier” approach, followed by its shortcomings.
Among the Pacific atoll states, climate change has been interpreted as a form of righteous punishment by some island communities (Loughry & McAdam, ; Rudiak‐Gould, ), with 56% of respondents in one rural Fijian community attributed to climate change to “divine will” (Lata & Nunn, , p. 176). In studies conducted by Janif et al. (), Fijian villagers on Viti Levu island described how climate change “means that God is punishing us” and that “it is God's will that these changes are happening.” Cyclones have been treated as divine retribution for moral transgression by Cook Islander clergy, an interpretation that Taylor () dismisses as “inappropriate and anachronistic.” Cases of climate scepticism have been documented in the Marshall Islands, bolstered by the biblical promise that there would be no second flood (the Noahic covenant) and the belief that the Marshall Islands have been given to Marshallese by God (Rudiak‐Gould, ). Similar biblical assurances have also been observed in (Loughry & McAdam, ) and (Paton & Fairbairn‐Dunlop, ; Mortreux & Barnett, ). More than half of Mortreux and Barnett's participants in Tuvalu reported that they were not concerned by climate change, and rejected predictions of sea‐level rise. Such sentiments have been echoed by Harry Tong, a former Kiribati Leader of the Opposition and brother to the recent President, who publicly stated: Climate change is an all‐natural phenomenon. You can't really do much about that, unless you can talk to God and negotiate with God … He made a promise to Noah that he will never again destroy this earth with flood. (Reed, )
Teburoro Tito, a former President of Kiribati, has also used religious grounds to espouse climate denial, contending that “God is not so silly to allow people to perish just like that” (Reed, ).
Donner () contends that one of the reasons for limited belief in anthropogenic climate change is the extent to which it offends a distinction between Earth and sky that has been found across organised religions and indigenous belief systems for thousands of years: through suggesting human influence over the climate it undermines the extent to which the sky is an unreachable domain of the Gods. While Donner suggests that this is a universal dilemma, he sees the problem as most intractable in a Pacific Island context, due to the presence of “indigenous or strongly observant religious communities” (p. 233), and notes that “in most Pacific Island nations, educators argue that the commonly held belief that the Christian God controls the weather is greatest obstacle to educating people about climate change” (p. 233).
Both denial and doomsday interpretations can inhibit proactive responses to climate change. However, I argue that the problems lie not with religious belief but with how it is being analysed and understood. I contend that these encounters with faith‐based climate change denial have led to a dismissal of the potential for religiously informed responses to climate change. This can be seen in the case of Kuruppu and Liverman (), who, based on their findings that 20% of I‐Kiribati participants used religious convictions as justification for a lack of concern about climate change, consequently accuse their interlocutors of “adopting avoidant behaviour such as faith in God” (, p. 666), suggesting the singular outcome of faith practices is inactivity and denial. According to Mortreux and Barnett “faith that God will protect Tuvalu is such a strong belief within the community that some officials identified religion as a barrier to awareness of and adaptation to climate change” (2009, p. 110, my emphasis). Meanwhile McAdam, in reference to Tuvalu and Kiribati, refers to “religion” as one of the factors that “contribute to a certain degree of complacency about environmental change” (, p. 114).
This belittlement of religious thought seems to mirror wider sentiments in the literature. For instance, this seeming antagonism between Christian thought and the capacity for pro‐environmental behaviour echoes White's () famous declaration that our current ecological predicament is a consequence of Christianity's anthropocentricism and its imperatives for humanity to exploit nature. Moreover, Haraway, while so insightful of the need for new understandings to help us “stay with the trouble,” seems to reject the possibilities of religious insights outright, as she patronises faith in God as a response to climate change, describing it as an example of “touching silliness” (, p. 3), and invokes Christianity as an exemplar of inactivity and denial, claiming that “avoidance of the urgency [of population growth] can slip into something akin to the way some Christians avoid the urgency of climate change because it touches too closely on the marrow of one's faith” (2016, p. 6). Klein's () otherwise comprehensive and inspiring volume This Changes Everything has also been similarly critiqued for its myopia when it comes to religion (Hulme, ).
This rejection of religious perspectives appears to emerge from both a misunderstanding (and secular rejection) of religious thought and a desire to enforce the boundaries between the religious and the scientific. Kempf, in his review of the existing “religion as barrier” literature, notes how the attempt by communities to bring religious understandings to matters of climate science is often treated by social scientists as “an illicit melange of elements best left separate” (, p. 23). According to Kempf, faith‐based climate denial is treated by scholars such as Paton and Fairbairn‐Dunlop () as a problem and a consequence of a deficit of scientific knowledge, to be rectified by an increase in scientific information and a rejection of religious knowledge. Invocations of the Noah Story as a basis for climate change denial are delegitimised by reference to climate science, as the latter is treated as unquestionably epistemologically superior. Thus, social scientific responses to this biblical narrative centre around a purification (Latour, ) of scientific and religious knowledges, and an epistemological hierarchisation, which places religious knowledge on the very bottom tier, associated with “deviation, ignorance, passivity and maladaptivity” (Kempf, , p. 30). This purification of knowledges is evident in Reed's () account of Kiribati, which somewhat sensationally portrays the atoll nation as an ideological battleground, describing it as “a place where science clashes with religion,” suggesting the homogeneity and irreconcilability of both concepts. Yet, ironically, many of the same authors who are marginalising religious understandings are themselves also calling for greater recognition of culturally appropriate and locally led responses to climate change (Kempf, ).
Kempf's conclusions are supported by the work of Rubow (), who particularly directs her critique at Taylor's () work on cyclone recovery in the Cook Islands, which has presented some religious understandings of cyclones as an impediment to effective recovery. Rubow identifies some crucial analytical flaws in Taylor's work. She first warns against his conflation of the metaphorical and the literal, while recognising the difficulty of distinguishing the two. She also highlights the importance of acknowledging that individuals may and often do hold self‐contradictory beliefs, and that the application of beliefs is contextually contingent. Following Rubow's thoughts on this matter, in my exploration of narratives, I recognise that participants may engage in different narratives at different points, occupying multiple points of ethical understanding, some of which are at odds with others.
Moreover, Rubow rejects the presumption that divine causation mirrors direct processes of scientific causation. Instead she suggests that the two forms of explanation occupy different domains, and that “the two domains are not competing, but remain as different traditions of knowledge kept at different levels of social reality (or kept together as unsolved paradoxes)” (, p. 102). This acceptance of multiple and divergent knowledges counters the orthodoxy of knowledge purification within the literature and indicates a path by which religious knowledges can be embraced as part of a response to climate change and natural disasters.
Bubandt's vision of “symbiopolitics” (, p. 137) goes one step further, suggesting not that religious and scientific knowledges should both be acknowledged in their respective domains, but that they cannot be disentangled: any attempt at purification is hopeless. He cites the case of the explosion of the Indonesian mud volcano known as “Lusi” as an inextricable mixing of geology, politics and spirits, and therefore demonstrates the porous boundaries between humanity and nature, science and faith. Meanwhile, Donner (), while providing explanations for religious rejections of climate change, also refutes the need for purification. Rather than use the “domain of the gods” as an opportunity to condemn the place of religion in scientific matters outright, Donner instead recommends partnerships between scientists and religious figures (, p. 235).
Thus, while many existing studies of the relation between religious thought and climate change in the Pacific present the former merely as a barrier, and thereby marginalise its place in climate responses, a minority of scholars do advocate the entanglement rather than purification of scientific and religious knowledges, and I follow this latter group in exploring the balancing, enmeshing and tensions of multiple knowledges through the notion of tufala save.
CASE STUDY: VANUATU, CHRISTIANITY AND KASTOM
The Pacific Island region (see Figure ) faces significant threats from climate change, including flooding, coastal erosion, sea‐level rise, changing precipitation patterns and the degradation of coral reef systems (Nurse et al., ; Barnett & Campbell, ), and holds an especial status in cinematic (Chambers & Chambers, ) and journalistic accounts (Farbotko, ) as “an archetypical ‘vulnerable‐to‐climate‐change’ place” (Webber, , p. 2717). Within the Pacific I focused particularly on Vanuatu, an archipelago of 82 islands in the South West Pacific Ocean, with a population of 272,459 (Vanuatu National Statistics Office (VNSO), ), the majority of whom wholly or primarily engage in subsistence agriculture (Government of Vanuatu, ). I selected Vanuatu as my primary qualitative case study due to the vibrancy of its grassroots climate advocacy movement (Hetzel & Pascht, ), its extensive patchwork of government and NGO climate adaptation initiatives (Vachette, ), and the substantial impacts left by Cyclone Pam only months prior to my research in 2015, an extreme weather event that was explicitly attributed to climate change by Vanuatu's Prime Minister (Walker & Farrell, ). I conducted over 60 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with pastors and religious figures from a range of denominations and with individuals engaged in climate adaptation and climate change advocacy from Vanuatu and the Pacific Island region. I complemented this with four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, and through engaging with climate‐focused theological literature emerging from Oceania.
I concentrated upon Christian faith practices, due to the overwhelming dominance of Christianity across the Pacific Island region, both in terms of its statistical prevalence and its influence as a “cultural force” (Tomlinson & McDougall, , p. 4), and within Vanuatu, where Christianity has been identified as “the key national symbol” (Douglas, , p. 161).
Yet in Vanuatu the significance of kastom cannot be overlooked (and consequently the potential tensions between kastom knowledges and scientific knowledges of climate change). Few Ni‐Vanuatu exclusively religiously identify with kastom practices – only around 3.5% of the population according to the most recent census (Vanuatu National Statistics Office (VNSO), ); however, it still culturally informs many people's spiritual outlooks. As Douglas () highlights, Christianity and kastom are both formally enshrined in Melanesian constitutions, and the two belief systems are by no means necessarily antithetical, but are instead in dialogue with each other (Tomlinson & McDougall, ). The mass conversion to Christianity has not led to a total loss of indigenous beliefs and practices, partly due to points of compatibility between Christianity and kastom (Taylor, ).
Indeed, relationships with kastom vary by denomination, with the Anglican, Catholic and Protestant churches more willing to assimilate various aspects (Douglas, , p. 160), in contrast with more vehement rejection of kastom by the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) and newer evangelical churches (Taylor, ), who often emphasise the potentially murderous dimensions of sorcery, as kastom can involve the practice of magic. According to the most recent census, 28% of Vanuatu's population is Presbyterian, 15% are Anglican, another 12% are Roman Catholic and 12% are SDA (VNSO, ). The pastors I spoke with all hailed from the four largest churches, as did the vast majority of my research participants. Thus, although this research cannot claim to speak to all Christian denominations currently present in Vanuatu, it does consider the practice of the four most popular, who collectively make up almost 84% of the country's Christian population, and who are largely inclusive of some kastom practices.
BEYOND THE BARRIER: A TUFALA SAVE APPROACH TO RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGES
In contrast to the epistemic purification performed by some scholars, I propose to hold various knowledges (Christian, kastom and scientific) in balance, exploring their convergences, connections and tensions, using an approach I term tufala save, a phrase borrowed from one of my participants that literally translates from Bislama as “double knowledge.” This balancing of religious and scientific knowledges is encapsulated by one participant's account of a rainbow: Oh well that's like kind of climate change, ‘cause you know the rainbow came out, that's a promise, but and then scientists say it's ‘cause of the water or something … creating a spectrum. It's good to have two beliefs. Both of them are right. (Ruth, youth climate advocate)
This simultaneous acceptance of both beliefs (that a rainbow can at once be both no more and no less than a divine covenant and the refraction of light through water droplets) challenges the hierarchy of climate knowledges, contesting the pre‐eminence of scientific forms of thought and also thereby motions to spiritualise climate discourse. Moreover, while a number of participants advocated the need for science and religion to work together, in balance, this notion of balance does not equate to an equal degree of authority or validity for the two respective knowledges. Many proponents of the tufala save approach firmly held that in this relationship Christian forms of knowledge reigned supreme. As a Presbyterian pastor expressed it: Yeah, we can by scientific research say something will happen but if God says there will be rain, there'll be rain. So, people believe that yes, we can say something, but God is sovereign. (Peter, Presbyterian Pastor)
Some participants saw the provision of scientific knowledge as a beneficent act of God. As one pastor explained “God gave us scientists to work with them on this issue,” a sentiment echoed in Paton and Fairbairn‐Dunlop's () research in Tuvalu, where some participants concluded that the scientists were a conduit for God's warnings. These approaches act as an inversion of the manner in which cultural and religious understandings are often brought to the table as a lesser complement to the overall authority of scientific thought.
Part of the impetus for this bringing together of these two forms of thinking is the cultural resonance of biblical narratives as a means of understanding climate change. As one SDA member explained it: We have stories about things in the Bible that we can relate to people, we can relate it to churches, so that it's more applicable to what we are facing now because history seems to be repeating itself … Those kinds of stories, when you talk to Christians they will understand it. (Isaac, NGO worker)
Working through the lens of religious thought can thus be understood as an avenue for situating climate change as locally meaningful and morally resonant (Hulme, ; Nunn, ).
This principle of tufala save is already being enacted through partnerships between some NGOs and churches within Vanuatu. Many Ni‐Vanuatu interviewees were open and positive about the prospect of engaging with biblical scripture as part of climate change communication, including those working on climate change from within the government. Some participants advocated the use of the pulpit specifically as a site for climate advocacy, recommending the preaching of sermons that explicitly addressed these issues. Pastors I spoke with from the Presbyterian, SDA, and Catholic Church all reported having delivered sermons regarding climate change, and a number of my Presbyterian interviewees had attended services which explicitly addressed questions around climate change and extreme weather events. However, other pastors and parishioners from a range of denominations revealed that they had not delivered or witnessed any services concerning these matters, suggesting that while the pulpit is increasingly a site for climate communication, this is far from universal, and its full potential as such is not yet being realised.
STORIES OF NOAH
To illustrate the tufala save approach, I focus on the epistemological entanglements found in different manifestations of one piece of scripture: Genesis 6–9. The story of the flood has been identified as the “archetypal account of climatic disaster and existential threat” (Hulme, , p. 83) across multiple faiths, and as an apocalyptic myth present in contemporary artistic depictions of climate change (Salvador & Norton, ). My reasons for selecting this particular story are threefold. First, it was a reoccurring feature of discussions with pastors and parishioners, and thus held meaning and relevance for many of my participants. Second, as previously described, it is central to the Oceania‐based controversy regarding the relation between religious thought and climate discourse, and has been used to dismiss the potential of biblical knowledges in relation to climate advocacy. While the Noah story has legitimised an attempted purification of scientific and religious knowledges (Kempf, ), I wish to use it as a means to explore the balance, enmeshment and tensions between different epistemologies.
And third, due to the contrast between the meanings my participants garnered from it and those present in its more controversial form, it highlights the polysemic potential of scripture. As Salvador and Norton note, “subtle changes in mythic form can fundamentally alter the construal of contemporary social and political issues” (, p. 47). I contend that different articulations of this narrative have symbolic and material power, and become entangled with particular and distinct understandings of and responses to climate change. I trace three discursive manifestations of the Noah story within the Pacific Islands: rainbow covenant as denial, Noah as preparation, and Islanders as unjustly outside of the ark. Thus, the multiplicity of interpretations possible highlights the importance, in Haraway's words, of “which stories tell stories” (, p. 39), of which readings are shared, for what reason, and to what consequence.
As a brief reminder of the biblical passage itself, Genesis 6–9, recounts how in response to the sin and violence that filled the Earth, God unleashed waters from windows of the heavens and the fountains of the deep, subsuming all land and wiping all living creatures from the Earth. All bar Noah, his family, and diverse members of the animal kingdom, who safely weathered the storm in an ark, hand‐built by Noah to divine specifications. After more than a year at sea, this homeless menagerie disembarked, to be welcomed by a covenant with God, in the form of the rainbow, that such a fate should never befall them or their descendants again.
The first reading: The rainbow covenant and climate denial
The ramifications of this covenant extend far beyond the Old Testament itself. As has already been described, this promise has been mobilised as a vehicle for climate change denial across the atoll states of Oceania, those countries often depicted as being on the front lines of climate change. Interviewees I spoke with who were from or had worked in Tuvalu or Kiribati reiterated the presence of this narrative, although none condoned it themselves. Some acknowledged that this reading of the Noah story impeded local attempts to raise awareness. One of my I‐Kiribati interviewees spoke despondently of the resistance she faced from elderly members of her congregation, rejecting her role as a climate advocate, and utilising the story of the rainbow in order to do so: The elderly people, they always say when I talk about climate change … ‘Oh no, this is not your task. Because you are pastors, ministers, church ministers, you have been telling us from the past until now, we are in this age now, we believe that there is a God, we've been saved … the sign of the rainbow which is the no more flood to be on the Earth to destroy the Earth. But now you are coming to tell us that this, all things like climate change, which means we are being destructed by another flood.’ So, they don't want to hear about it. (Esther, I‐Kiribati preacher)
While this narrative of religiously informed climate denial is undeniably present in the atoll states, its articulation is insufficient grounds for a widespread rejection of religious responses, as has been witnessed in the literature, for two reasons. First, the circulation of the rainbow covenant discourse, and the denial of the severity of climate change can itself be seen as an example of agency, and the reclaiming of control over Pacific Island futures. As Kempf () argues, this denial narrative has been produced as a backlash against scientific and political pronouncements that hasten the demise of Kiribati. Consequently, Kempf interprets this first reading of Noah as a “religious‐political counternarrative” (, p. 24). He observes the way it is mobilised in Kiribati by the parliamentary opposition, to delegitimise the current government and to resist the scientific narrative of climate change currently imposed upon Kiribati. Similarly, Rubow and Bird () argue that in referencing the rainbow covenant, Tuvaluans are professing a faith in the ongoing continuity of the world, in a way that reflects the interconnectedness of land–sea–air that is central to much Oceanian eco‐theology. This rejection of impending disaster in favour of continuity is confirmed by Kempf who argues that this Christian counter‐discourse gives Islanders recourse to a higher authority than that of the scientists, and allows them to project a different vision of Kiribati's future, one of “continuity and stability” (, p. 34) as opposed to total loss. This agency, expressed through disrupting the hegemony of scientific knowledge, is captured by former Kiribati President Teburoro Tito who claims “I laugh because I don't give in totally to science” (Reed, ). However, rather than this embodying a model of tufala save, this suggests an explicit rejection of one system of knowledge in preference for another.
Second, and more crucially, bible stories are inherently polysemic, and thus this is not the only reading of Noah available. I did not encounter this narrative itself during Vanuatu‐based fieldwork: it was not apparent in sermons, church publications, climate change workshops or village discussions, and when I directly asked a few NGO workers and pastors about this reading of the tale they explicitly rejected it. However, other manifestations of the Noah story did emerge.
The second reading: Noah as icon of preparation
In a post‐Cyclone Pam Port Vila, awash with discourses of national resilience and sacks of donated rice, the story of Noah was repeatedly invoked as a parable for the need for greater preparedness. One SDA member explained: People in the past they have faced famine, they have faced flood … I mean, we as Christians, we believe in the story of the flood, there was a flood. So, Noah prepared, he prepared. He built a boat so that he can save all the animals. (Isaac, NGO worker)
I encountered this interpretation in discussions with pastors from the Presbyterian Church, the Anglican Church and the SDA, as well as from Ni‐Vanuatu NGO workers and youth climate activists. In contrast to the first reading – where the story of Noah was used to enable climate change denial – the second reading uses Noah as an instructive against the dangers of denial itself. As one climate adaptation project worker presented it: Noah's story is a good one that I think I've used … when it came to hard questions which were asked and I can feel that these questions are doubts, doubt questions from community then I use this to push it if I know it is a religious community. So, I will say the example of Noah. He warned people on the vision he saw but they were ignorant, and then what happened? (Sarah, NGO worker)
Thus, here the story of Noah is not a vehicle for doubt, but explicitly mobilised as a weapon against it, encouraging shameful identification not with the successfully prepared Noah, but with the doubting masses who foolishly did not heed the signs.
Explicitly drawing parallels between Noah's predicament and Vanuatu's current challenges with respect to climate change adaptation and enduring extreme weather events, some pastors encased the biblical teaching in the language of disaster risk reduction. For instance, one official from the Presbyterian Church described how: God talks to Noah and he starts to prepare. Many people laugh, but he does it. When disaster strikes, he is prepared and puts all the animals inside. The same as with climate change, the same as with tsunami. They reach land, the dove goes out, they are at the rebuilding stage, building it back up again. The disaster strikes because there was a covenant with God before, and it is broken. But a new covenant is made and they can rebuild. (Cornelius, Presbyterian Church)
Far from the world‐changing and apocalyptic, the eventual receding of the waters is envisioned as a familiar, manageable and predictable point in a cyclical disaster response process: “the rebuilding stage.” This reframing of scripture within NGO discourse is also apparent in the Pastors and Disasters handbook, a guide which has been circulated to some Anglican ministers in Vanuatu, where Noah's acts of preparation are framed as “a strong risk mitigation plan” (Episcopal Relief and Development, 2014, p. 1.1).
As well as Noah, the figure of Joseph was invoked by a handful of participants as an icon of sage preparation. Thus, additional biblical stories were used to bolster the narrative of Noah. One SDA interviewee drew explicit parallels between the seven years of famine the Egyptian people faced and the ongoing threat to Ni‐Vanuatu food security presented by climate change: Joseph, during the time of famine, famine in Egypt, there was seven years of harvest and seven years of drought, you know? For that seven years it is the seven years of preparation. You must have plenty food and everything. And after seven years, that's climate change. (Isaac, NGO Worker)
As a slight variant, another SDA member also emphasised the pertinence of Joseph's actions but interpreted the plentiful and lean years in Egypt as corresponding to the annual cycle of extreme weather events in Vanuatu. Some of these preachers they preach about Joseph's time, the drought, the seven years plentiful and the seven years of drought. And that we translate it into Vanuatu per year on a yearly basis six months safe climate conditions, and six months disaster climate. So, what we are trying to learn here is to make people prepare within the six months, prepare for shelter and food preservations and then we wait for the next six month seasonal which is not really safe season for climate. And then we see how, if any cyclone happen to come, at least people they are ready and using those concept, those principles from the Bible. (Adam, ecumenical organisation)
Thus, rather than potentially having to prepare for an open‐ended and ongoing state of suffering (when the famine acts as a substitute for climate change), the years of famine are normalised and brought within the framework of a manageable and predictable regular cycle, akin to the reference to the post‐flood period as the “rebuilding phase.” This manageability, achieved partly through a linguistic fusing – an NGOisation of scripture – is also apparent in the same participant's contextualisation of the story: “We have lessons learned from the drought in the Bible where Joseph was the key coordinator in Egypt” (Adam, ecumenical organisation).
As well as bestowing Joseph with an incongruous title, more redolent of international development discourse than Genesis, he incorporates the ever‐present post‐Pam evaluative mantra of “lessons learned.” Again, this tone is echoed by Pastors and Disasters, in reference to Genesis 41. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Burundi describes how the Pharaoh acts by “choosing Joseph to become the steward of that huge DRR project for the Egyptian people” (Episcopal Relief and Development, , p. 1.4). However, this does suggest the potential for an affinity between spiritual belief and adaptive practice as Archbishop Ntahoturi further affirms that “disaster preparedness is an ideal for everyone who loves the Lord and His creation” (2014, p. 1.4).
Thus, this second narrative of Noah – emphasising preparation and climate belief as opposed to denial – was also reinforced with other biblical stories, and through a merging of NGO and theological discourse, indicating the multiple knowledges that participants were engaging with. Not only did scientific communications regarding climate change confirm biblical predictions, but kastom knowledges were crucial for responding to these revelations, as traditional methods of house building and food preservation were widely endorsed as appropriate cyclone responses. At this epistemological intersection stands the icon of the resilient and resourceful Noah, allocating responsibility for climate adaptation – and for some participants, climate change more broadly – to Ni‐Vanuatu communities. However, in other renderings of the tale, Noah's role was less celebrated, and responsibility differently distributed.
The third reading: Those outside of the ark
The third and final reading of this tale emerged during an interview with Ezekiel, a church‐based Tuvaluan climate advocate who was actively working to contest the rainbow‐covenant‐as‐denial discourse in his home country and to generate new scriptural understandings. This reading stands in contrast to the first, as it reaffirms faith in the covenant while denying its relevance to climate change due to the latter's anthropogenic rather than divine origins, and thereby like the second framing emphasises the need for human action. But it also refutes the basic premise of the second framing, by rejecting the presentation of Noah as an aspirational figure. In his radical re‐reading, echoing dimensions of liberation theology, Ezekiel argues that: Sometimes we tend to ignore the cries of those who were outside the ark. And many animals died outside the ark. And we also tend to ignore those kinds of readings. We always go to the conclusion that Noah was the hero in the story and he should be praised for what he has done. But disregarding the cries of those who were outside of the ark. Those outside the ark need to be liberated and I think God is with those who are outside the ark. God is struggling with them, trying to alleviate them while Noah he is enjoying the luxury life, you know. And … I think we can identify ourselves with those who are outside the ark. Those who don't have the resources to be on Noah's ark. (Ezekiel, Church of Tuvalu)
Another Tuvaluan scholar, Reverend Lusama, General Secretary of the Ekalesia Kelisiano Tuvalu (the Tuvalu Christian Church), mirrors Ezekiel's scorn for Noah who is “enjoying the luxury life” while many around him drown: We have seen that the ark has taken a sharp change in shape and form, it has ceased of being a lifeboat, it has ceased to be a divine instrument of life affirmation, but it has become a human made ark, which favors not the innocent but the value of money. It ignores the cries of the poor, the powerless and the marginalized while it tends to the voices of the rich and the powerful … Therefore, the boarding ticket onto our present ark is no longer innocence, but profit. (Lusama, , p. 92).
Thus, those whose actions perpetuate ecological destruction are rewarded, while the innocent are punished. In Lusama's words, “literally, they are overboard while the guilty are on‐board the ark of salvation” (, p. 97).
While this reading is theologically unorthodox, it is highly pertinent to the question of how climate change is framed. It forefronts the suffering of those during the flood and extends this concern beyond the human. With the mention of the “many animals” who died outside the ark, Ezekiel invokes the sentiments of multi‐species compassion highlighted by Kate Rigby () in her reading of the ark. With popular media discourses ever regurgitating representations of Tuvalu as a sinking paradise – the canary in the global coal mine – it is not such a conceptual leap to consider those so imminently threatened as those outside of the ark. It also resonates with a model of industrial climate change blame (Rudiak‐Gould, ), thereby aligning with prevailing academic analyses of Islanders as severely experiencing climate injustice (Rudiak‐Gould, ).
These three tellings of Noah showcase different tensions and entanglements between scientific, religious and kastom knowledges. In the case of the first story, there is evidence of an antagonism between knowledges, as opposed to a tufala save balancing of multiple ways of knowing. Tied to this pitting of the scientific against the religious, there is a consequential belittlement or distancing of religious modes of thought (and consequently a failure to recognise their value) by scholars who are disturbed by the climate scepticism (and anti‐scientific sentiments) present in the narratives. There is also an emphasis by advocates of this narrative on faith in divine protection in a manner that inhibits action, and excludes the scientific. Meanwhile both the second and third stories demonstrate productive convergences between scientific and religious knowledges, yet convergences that produce very different and even contrary political imaginaries. While the second narrative places responsibility on individual Islanders to prepare for climate change – taking responsibility into their own hands – the final articulation emphasises the responsibility of industrialised nations, who through their excessive emissions have cast innocent Islanders overboard.
None of these narratives are the right one: none should be treated as an exclusive vehicle for future climate communication. But the diversity of courses of action they demonstrate suggests the richness and heterogeneity of religious responses to climate change and the potential for fruitful connections between religious and scientific knowledges. They demonstrate the potential for more‐than‐scientific yet not anti‐scientific responses to climate change, which are locally meaningful and morally compelling.
CONCLUSION
Stenmark () asserts that story‐telling helps to ameliorate an excessive dependence upon myths of the Absolute. She defines such myths in terms of an indisputable and infallible certainty beyond the human. Such myths can motivate us in times of despair yet can also inhibit action if they create an expectation of a certainty that can never be met. She argues the latter to be the case with climate change as a “wicked problem,” as no one neat, certain solution can be reached. The attempts by social scientists to treat religion as a barrier and to negate religiously based narratives of climate denial with increased quantities of scientific knowledge can be read as a suffocating entanglement in myths of the Absolute. To counter such myths Stenmark recommends embracing the ambiguity, complexity and partiality of story‐telling. Such an approach encapsulates the method of story‐telling I have demonstrated in this research. Stenmark observes that one should “explore the plurality and multiplicity within each story” (p. 932), as I have done through eliciting three diverse and contrary readings of Genesis 6–9. She also contends that stories let us “hold these different perspectives in tension without ever resolving them” (p. 932), a practice embodied by tufala save and the balancing of different epistemologies of climate change. My efforts to represent such a plurality of narratives suggests a means of story‐telling the ambiguities and complexities of climate change.
In this article, first, I have looked beyond institutional capacity and also considered different religious narratives, thereby addressing the shortage Haluza‐DeLay () has identified of social scientific accounts that consider how religion shapes what people are saying and doing about climate change. Second, I have attempted to challenge scholarly representations of religion as a barrier to climate change communication, and instead highlighted the potential of religious belief as a resource that can motivate preparatory actions or bolster framings of climate injustice. Third, in identifying these instances of thought and action, I have sought to elucidate the heterogeneity of religious responses, demonstrating the compatibility of climate change adaptation and biblical understandings, and the importance of balancing multiple epistemologies of climate change, including navigating relationships between traditional knowledge and Western science. These different combinations of knowledges and ethical positions generate different narratives – different readings of the Noah story – that present different potential responses. No one narrative will resolve all the questions of ethics, responsibility and meaning that surround climate change. As geographers we can play a role in navigating alternative locally embedded narratives of climate change, and placing them in dialogue with other framings in order to expand our understanding and our capacities for action.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was funded by a 1+3 Economic and Social Research Council postgraduate studentship (award number ES/J500185/1), held at University College London, Department of Geography. I am indebted to all the friends and participants in Vanuatu and Australia who generously shared their insights with me, and to 350 Vanuatu and GIZ for hosting me during my fieldwork. Additional thanks to Wolfgang Kempf for his thoughts on an earlier draft. Enormous gratitude goes to my supervisor Sam Randalls for his comprehensive, insightful and supportive guidance throughout the PhD. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed, helpful and encouraging comments.
ENDNOTES
1001Kastom can be defined as “indigenous knowledge and practice” (Taylor, , p. 139), or “the hybrid set of discourses and practices that encompass the cultural knowledge, sociality, and social processes that are unique to ni‐Vanuatu” (Mitchell, , p. 37).
1002All participants referenced in this piece have been anonymised and are Ni‐Vanuatu, unless otherwise stated.
1003Namely Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
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1 Department of Social Sciences Media and Communications – Anthropology, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK; Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK