Abstract
Given that almost every Pacific Island resident is spiritually engaged to a degree that is uncommon in western secular societies, an evaluation of the role of religion in climate-change adaptation in this exposed region is overdue. This chapter explains the nature of Pacific Island people’s religious engagement, its undoubted links with culturally-grounded tradition, and its importance in rationalizing extraneous phenomena like climate change and determining communal action in the face of its impacts. Each chapter of this book is summarized. The need to reassess the roles of different agencies in climate-change action in the Pacific is explained, as is the importance of effective action for survival.
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Notes
- 1.
When Fiji chaired COP-23 in 2017, it introduced the concept of talanoa or constructive storytelling, a Pacific way of discussing issues to reach a shared understanding and move forward (Winkler and Depledge 2018).
- 2.
In the Christian bible, it is said that God allowed Satan to test the faith of the ‘blameless upright’ man named Job and see whether, in the face of repeated hardships, he would ever renounce his faith—which he did not.
- 3.
The earliest-known colonization of oceanic islands in the Pacific is that of the Mariana Islands (northwest Pacific), plausibly from Luzon (Philippines), about 3500 years ago, a journey that involved an open-ocean crossing of at least 2300 km (almost 1500 miles) (Hung et al. 2011).
- 4.
This extends beyond traditional ways of coping with environmental adversity into things like the use of traditional pharmacopoeias for primary health care and the attainment of food and nutritional security through a return to more traditional diets.
- 5.
This phrase was introduced in Epeli’s 1993 book (Hau’ofa 1993) and was conceived to emphasize the contrast between the common outsider impression of the Pacific as a vast ocean peppered with small islands and the common insider view of the Pacific as a ‘sea filled with islands’. It is an issue of perspective that underpins contrasting worldviews. An excellent discussion of the evolution of the Pacific as ‘Earth’s empty quarter’ was given by Gerard Ward (1989).
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Nunn, P.D., Luetz, J.M. (2021). Beyond Belief. In: Luetz, J.M., Nunn, P.D. (eds) Beyond Belief. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67602-5_1
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