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Apocalypse now (and avoid the rush): human dimensions of climate change in the Indo-Pacific.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This essay draws attention to a set of related alternatives to conventional archaeological approaches to climate change and cultural transformation. It canvasses concepts drawn from the 'new ecology', the study of societal vulnerability and from 'political ecology'. The suggestion is that archaeologists focus on

* change as a continuous variable,

* vulnerability to change as a 'socio-natural' phenomenon resting on the robustness and resilience of relations between culture and nature, and

* the effects on vulnerability of sociopolitical manipulation of access to natural resources.

Keywords: new ecology, vulnerability, resilience, political ecology

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Are cataclysms really so bad? This somewhat pointed question reflects the reality of the Melanesian world. For those island societies, what may seem to us an extreme threat is conceived as a normal part of life and accepted in all its manifestations, the good and the bad alike. People regard these phenomena as part of life, know how to cope with them and accept the inconvenience and risk that they face. Low population densities and well-organised alliances allow populations facing natural disasters to seek help among their allies and so limit the consequences of natural hazards. Since they are conceived of as "social events", disasters are not feared and can be used to regulate and adjust society. (Galipaud 2002:170)

Climate change is vying with terrorism as the existential threat of our times. Muslim and Christian fundamentalists alike are convinced it is a sign that the Apocalypse is nigh (Monk 2006) and even conservative and hitherto sceptical secular institutions such as The Economist (2006) are starting to advocate urgent action to prevent the looming disaster. The Indo-Pacific is a vital source of the sort of data concerning global climatic variability that are canvassed by Allen (2006). This means that the region plays a central role in current efforts to make sense of what might befall us as a species (see Lilley 2006a for other examples). Archaeological findings from the area are routinely incorporated in popular works concerning the global as well as more local situations (e.g. Diamond 2005, Flannery 1994) and Indo-Pacific archaeologists are regularly called upon by the popular media to discuss the implications of past patterns of environmental change and associated human action for what confronts global society now (e.g. Lilley 2006a, 2006b; Smith 2005).

All this attention places the discipline in an unusual position, insofar as it is only infrequently caught up in global affairs of such gravity (van der Leeuw and Redman 2002). If the profession is successfully to advance its own interests in this contentious milieu it must be alive to the prospect that its findings will be put to various non-archaeological uses to which those results may be empirically or conceptually ill-suited. Anyone who has had their work doctored for popular publication will know how it can have editorial spin put on it to conform to an agenda other than one's own (Spriggs 2001). The difference between my original piece on climate change in the Griffith Review (Lilley 2006a) and a much-edited version produced by the News Limited national daily The Australian (Lilley 2006b), which consistently runs a sceptical line on climate change, is a relatively innocuous case in point. This sort of thing should encourage archaeologists to reflect seriously on how they approach the human dimensions of climate change in the present as well as in the past. Of special concern are the expressly political aspects of such questions, because ultimately the solutions to whatever existential threats we face as a species, and the role the archaeology might play in such outcomes, lie in the realm of politics.

The moral of the tale

On the foregoing basis, I want in this essay to address what Spriggs (2001) has called our contes morales, the morals for our own and others' societies today that we attach to our interpretations of past climate change. I contend that archaeology's interests will be best served if we remain mindful that the catastrophist scenarios into which, in the spirit of our times, we and others commonly plug archaeological data are just one of a number of cultural constructions through which we might characterize human interaction with the natural world (van der Leeuw and Redman 2002; Pyburn 2006). They are based on an opposition of culture and nature, yet if the archaeological record is anything it is a record of intimate and historically contingent interaction between these two phenomena (van Buren 2001:144). Moreover, what the record (and especially its Indo-Pacific component; Lilley 2006c) tells us about the variability of those interactions provides very strong evidence that 'humanity interacts not directly with nature, but with its perceptions of nature. Hence ... an environmental crisis is primarily a matter of the social realm'...

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