In 2019, at the UN Climate Action Summit, Greta Thunberg gave an impassioned speech which rippled through the world, imploring people to take a critical look at the current climate change discourse.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!,” Thunberg stated.

Her speech called attention to an often-overlooked aspect of climate action: how we choose to talk about it. Linguistic Anthropology claims that language is social action, or, as Laura Ahearn (2001) states in her article “Language and Agency,” “people do things with words” (p. 111). The words that one uses to discuss climate action directly impact the way the world responds to, acts upon, and considers climate change and its impacts.

Choosing to discuss climate change as a distant issue takes away from the immediate nature of the crisis. In media and political discourse, climate action conversations are typically focused on economics, the future, and the potential for disaster. This discourse is built by global authority figures from powerful nations who see climate change as a distant disaster, in both location and time. However, as Thunberg points out, climate change is already wreaking havoc in communities across the globe, costing lives, damaging communities, and altering ecosystems. With global discourse focused on the “far-off” devastation of climate change, it de-centralizes narratives of the communities that are seeing real and devastating impacts everyday and calling for action.

Sinking Islands Call for Action

Current scientific research indicates the Pacific Islands are the most impacted by the effects of climate change, suffering from ocean acidification and rising sea levels. These rising sea levels encroach rapidly inland as many of the islands are low-lying and small. Kiribati, a nation of 33 low-lying atolls, is grappling with these rising sea levels and trying to come up with a plan of action for its people. Every island in the nation is no more than 4 meters above sea level, and every inch of sea level rise has immediate effects on the residents.

In the UN’s Development Programme video Kiribati – A Climate Change Reality, they interview residents who convey their struggles and fears as the sea encroaches on their homeland. One resident, Boobu Tioram, explains how rising sea levels have forced him to move is home three times in the last ten years. Ending his interview with a tired phrase: “but what can we do?” Other residents discuss their fears and apprehensions about migrating off the island, as rising sea levels will make the nation uninhabitable in the very near future.

In an interview with Anote Tong, President of Kiribati, he discusses the importance of action.

(2:32)
01 “One thing that I want and I’ve always emphasized is that
02 W-we never wish to be refugees (1.8) and we would be
03 refugees if we don’t do anything now because a refuge::e
04 is a-a response to an ex-an unexpected event. Okay? but
05 we know it’s coming. so we should be acting accordingly,
06 beginning from now. And then we would have o::ur
07 people if they need to migrate, to mi::grate with dignity
08 not as refugees.”

Here, Tong is expressing the subtle distinction between having the agency to do something about their crisis versus having to sit back and wait for complete devastation for any outside assistance. With his emphasis in line 03 on “now,” he is calling for immediate action from the world to help mitigate the crisis of sea level rise as it is happening, not in the future. He is careful to focus on the action and agency of his people, rather than the eventual victimization a refugee would experience. Tong’s distinction echoes a study on the representation of Pacific Islands and Climate change in newspaper reporting from Shea, Painter, and Osaka (2020). In their work, the authors discover an overemphasis on the vulnerability of Pacific Island communities, positioning the Pacific, “as a site for climate catastrophe, rather than climate justice.” The depiction of Pacific Islander communities as vulnerable and victimized, focuses the discussion away from what could be done and instead toward the sad story of climate change.

Climate change is a well-accepted scientific theory and many parts of the world are already feeling the impact of it. The current narrative of climate change is often focused on economics, distance, and vulnerability, but climate change is impacting communities directly. Climate action and discussions should centralize human-forward narratives from indigenous and directly impacted communities, shifting narrative away from victimhood, building focus on regional actors and voices. Environmental discussions centering indigenous and locally centered narratives, focuses on the nexus of the issue for these communities- what they are actually experiencing and how they want to take action.

References

Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. “Language and Agency.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (1): 109. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109.

Malin, Becky Alexis-Martin, James Dyke, Jonathan Turnbull and Stephanie. 2019. “How to Save a Sinking Island Nation.” August 15, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190813-how-to-save-a-sinking-island-nation.

McCarthy, Joe. 2020. “Why Climate Change and Poverty Are Inextricably Linked.” Global Citizen. February 19, 2020. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-change-is-connected-to-poverty/.

NPR Staff. n.d. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit.” NPR.Org. Accessed November 23, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.

Shea, Meghan M., James Painter, and Shannon Osaka. 2020. “Representations of Pacific Islands and Climate Change in US, UK, and Australian Newspaper Reporting.” Climatic Change 161 (1): 89–108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02674-w.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2009. Kiribati – A Climate Change Reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIG7vt1ZPKE.

As theorized by linguistic anthropologist Bernard Perley in a recently published article, translocalization is the act of adapting non-Eurocentric ways of bernknowing into modern social contexts as a method of resistance against disempowering (usually colonial and imperialist) hegemonies. A salient example of such is found in the Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ.

In Lakȟótiyapi, the language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux Nation, the prayer Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ can roughly be translated as “all my relations” or “all are related.” In English, is often used to describe a concept of interconnectivity that relates to the idea of one’s obligation to maintain proper relations with one’s relatives. It is important to note that historically this phrase has been the subject of cultural appropriation and has been misused as a greeting by non-Lakota persons.

Despite instances of the phrase being culturally appropriated, the concept it communicates is one with applications in other contexts: The idea that all is interconnected with all else in some way, a notion that has become increasingly accepted as humanity’s empirical understanding of the world we live in has developed, and our understanding of environmental systems has improved. In Lakota and neighboring Indigenous American societies, the concept of relations extends not just to familial relatives or other humans in general, but to features of the landscape that are not considered animate by wider society: Trees, rivers, mountains, plants and animals can all be referred to as “relatives”. That is to say, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ is an assertion that all elements of our environment are interconnected, and that actions we take that affect part of our natural environment ultimately have the potential to affect everything in the environment. Because of its applicability to issues of environment, this phrase is intrinsically tied with social justice and has been used in the same activist contexts as mni wiconi (“water is life” in Lakȟótiyapi) and “Defend the sacred”, rallying cries for movements that have mobilized to fight the danger posed by the expansion of oil pipelines that would cause and have caused environmental damage to the surrounding ecosystems and communities they would traverse.