Abstract
This article calls for transdisciplinary, experimental, and decolonial imaginations of climate change and Pacific futures in an age of great planetary undoing. Drawing from our personal and academic knowledge of the Pacific from West Papua to Samoa, we highlight the need for radical forms of imagination that are grounded in an ethos of inclusivity, participation, and humility. Such imaginations must account for the perspectives, interests, and storied existences of both human and beyond-human communities of life across their multiple and situated contexts, along with their co-constitutive relations. We invite respectful cross-pollination across Indigenous epistemologies, secular scientific paradigms, and transdisciplinary methodologies in putting such an imagination into practice. In doing so, we seek to destabilise the prevailing hegemony of secular science over other ways of knowing and being in the world. We draw attention to the consequential agency of beyond-human lifeforms in shaping local and global worlds and to the power of experimental, emplaced storytelling in conveying the lively and lethal becoming-withs that animate an unevenly shared and increasingly vulnerable planet. The wisdom of our kindred plants, animals, elements, mountains, forests, oceans, rivers, skies, and ancestors are part of this story. Finally, we reflect on the structural challenges in decolonising climate change and associated forms of knowledge production in light of past and ongoing thefts of sovereignty over lands, bodies, and ecosystems across the tropics.
Highlights
This article calls for transdisciplinary, experimental, and decolonial imaginations of climate change and Pacific futures in an age of great planetary undoing
For one author – Sophie Chao, a female scholar of Chinese and French descent – the visceral violence of climate change surfaced through long-term fieldwork in rural West Papua, where deforestation and monocrop oil palm developments are rupturing the intimate and ancestral kinships of Indigenous communities to their other-than-human kin: plants, animals, soils, water, ecosystems, and more (Chao, 2018a; 2019a; 2020; 2022 forthcoming)
Our second collaborative work, we draw from our insights and positionalities as Pacific scholars and climate dwellers to call for transdisciplinary, experimental, and decolonial imaginations of environmental crises and tropical futures in an age of great planetary undoing
Summary
The imagination and the climate crisis are profoundly entangled. Climate change, according to Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh (2016), is nothing less than “a crisis of culture, and of imagination.” In a similar vein, American journalist David WallaceWells (2019) describes climate change as the tragic result of an “incredible failure of imagination.” In taking the imagination as our central object of inquiry, we aim to push against the paralysing politics of despair that can so arise in the face of the climate crisis as an omnipresent and seemingly insurmountable “hyper-object” (Morton, 2013). In taking the imagination as our central object of inquiry, we aim to push against the paralysing politics of despair that can so arise in the face of the climate crisis as an omnipresent and seemingly insurmountable “hyper-object” (Morton, 2013). In our view, it is not the failure of imagination itself that is the issue. These violent exclusions call for more capacious imaginaries that are accountable to the situated and connected worlds we inherit and transmit across time, generation, and species (Winter, cited in Chao, 2019b) They demand that we cease failing those whose imaginations are occluded from epistemic and moral purview. Each offers a tentative path for worlding worlds more critically, creatively, and capaciously
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