Three stories of Noah: Navigating religious climate change narratives in the Pacific Island region

Abstract

This paper makes a case for spiritualising climate change, outlining the importance of bringing diverse religious understandings into climate change responses, particularly in the Pacific Island region. It situates this as part of a wider geographical project of rendering climate change locally meaningful, and story‐telling multiple climate change narratives, including Christian ones. It identifies 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 the Pacific Islands. Rather than attempting to purify scientific and religious knowledge, this paper proposes an alternative approach, tufala save: the balancing of multiple epistemologies of climate change, exploring their convergences and tensions. This paper draws on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Vanuatu, and over 60 semi‐structured interviews with religious figures and individuals engaged in climate change adaptation and advocacy across the Pacific Island region. It applies the tufala save approach in order to explore one recurring narrative, the biblical story of Noah and the flood, due to the contentious associations between this story and climate change denial in Oceania. The paper traces three discursive manifestations of the Noah story within the Pacific Islands: rainbow covenant as a basis for denial, Noah as an icon of preparation, and Islanders as unjustly outside of the ark. The contrasts between these three articulations – in terms of the relations between the different knowledges and the possibilities for climate change action they encourage and foreclose – demonstrate the heterogeneity of religious responses to climate change and the potential for fruitful connections between religious and scientific knowledges. They highlight the potential for more‐than‐scientific yet not anti‐scientific responses to climate change that are locally meaningful and morally compelling.