Think Like a Fish: Pacific Philosophies and Climate Change
Guest Writing by: Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond DBE CBE FBA FANAS FRSNZ FNZAH
Introduction from Michelle Bender, Ocean Rights Manager at Earth Law Center:
Pacific Islanders are considered by many to be the leaders and pioneers of ocean conservation efforts. This is because they understand better than most the deep connection and kinship the human race has with the Ocean. In particular, Indigenous peoples of New Zealand are taking the lead creating a transformation in our relationship with the natural world—rivers, national parks, mountains—and the Ocean. They recognize that the natural world is an indivisible whole, the Ocean has authority (mana) and life force (mauri), and that the Ocean and climate are inextricably tied.
Earth Law Center has partnered with groups and individuals across the Pacific, including Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and Conservation International Pacific Islands Programme plan to create a Convention on the Rights of the Pacific Ocean.
In November 2018, the first meeting of partners and groups with an interest in recognizing the rights of the Pacific produced a Statement from the Collective Thinking of those present. This statement is meant to be used to invite communities, businesses, and governments to redefine their relationships with the Ocean at local, regional, and global scales. This initiative comes at a critical time in light of international negotiations to create a new biodiversity treaty for the high seas and, more broadly, the growing global environmental crisis.
Below we share writing from Anne Salmond, a partner with Earth Law Center in the effort to recognize ‘Ocean Rights’. Anne Salmond is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland, prize-winning author on Māori life and one of New Zealand's most prominent scholars in history and anthropology. The following writing “Think like a Fish: Pacific Philosophies and Climate Change” was previously published as an afterword in the book, Pacific Climate Cultures: Living Climate Change in Oceania (De Gruyter Open Press).
Think like a Fish is a story of culture, relationships, and kinship; a story to ground us all and remind us to place ourselves within the larger Earth community, as a part of the whole; a story of what is possible if we think like a fish.
An Afterword, Think like a Fish: Pacific Philosophies and Climate Change, in eds. Tony Crook and Peter Rudiak-Gould. Pacific Philosophies and Climate Change. Pacific Climate Cultures: Living Climate Change in Oceania (De Gruyter Open Press), 155-159
His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi, the head of state of Samoa, opened this book by urging his readers to adopt a perspective based on va tapuia – ‘sacred relations between humans, animals, cosmos and the gods.’[1] He suggested we might think about climate change from the vantage-point of other life forms – a dog, perhaps, the ocean, the stars, trees, a bird or a fish; and explore Pacific worlds patterned by existential interlocks between people and other beings.
In these ways of being, balanced exchanges between different life-forms generate health, peace and prosperity, while arrogance and greed breed ill-health, poverty and conflict.[2] While equilibrium is highly prized, it is always fragile. According to Maori ancestral chants, for instance, cosmic order is established in two main ways - by affinity and alliance, when different powers come together to create new forms of life; and by contestation and quarrelling, in which different beings separate (or are separated) from each other.
According to the Te Arawa scribe Te Rangikaheke, for instance, at the beginning of the world there was just one founding ancestor, Rangi-nui the Sky Father and Papa-tuānuku the Earth Mother, a single being. For many pō (era of darkness) their children lived between them, cramped and frustrated. Weary of their confinement, they began to talk about separating their parents so that light could enter the world. Although the wind-ancestor Tāwhiri-matea disagreed with this idea, his older brothers ignored him. After many unsuccessful attempts, Tāne, ancestor of the forests, lay on his back and pushed up with his legs, forcing earth and sky apart.
As Rangi wept for Papa, his tears became rivers and lakes, and she sent up mists to greet him. Tormented by their grief, Tāwhiri-matea flew into a fury and attacked his brothers with whirlwinds and tornadoes, smashing Tāne’s trees to splinters, driving Rongo and Haumia’s root crops underground and lashing Tangaroa, the sea god into submission. In the midst of this chaos, Tangaroa’s children fought with each other. When Ika-tere, the ancestor of fish, taunted his brother Tū-te-wanawana, the ancestor of lizards, saying, ‘’You go inland, and be heaped up after fires in the fern!’ Tū-te-wanawana replied, ‘You go to sea, and be hung up in baskets of cooked food!’[3] After this quarrel, they went their separate ways.
Only Tū, the ancestor of people, stood tall in the face of Tāwhiri-matea’s onslaught. For his bravery, he earned for his descendants the right to harvest his brothers’ offspring – birds, root crops, forest foods and trees, crayfish, shellfish and fish, although they had to ask the ancestors for permission. In Te Ao Māori, as in Samoan and other ancestral Pacific ways of living, the fundamental kinship between people and other life forms is never forgotten.
According to the Tainui scholar Pei te Hurinui Jones, the double spiral in Maori carving, painting and tattoo embodies this swirling emergence of the cosmos.[4] Unlike the linear arrow of modernist time, Maori space-time spins in and out from an ancestral source. When the sea ancestor Tangaroa breathes in, for instance, the sea spirals down his throat, forming a great vortex (Te Parata) at the heart of the ocean; the tide goes out and people die. As he breathes out, the tide flows and children are born into the world. When Tāwhiri flies up to the highest heaven to fetch the baskets of knowledge, he ascends on a whirlwind. The spiral of space-time is at once destructive and creative.
Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Taken by an unidentified photograper. Location unknown / Public domain
To think like a fish, then, is to understand that apocalyptic storms may herald conflict and confusion, but also new forms of life. After millennia of sea living, Pacific islanders - especially fishers and navigators - are closely attuned to climatic shifts and changes. While ‘movements on the ocean are often unpredictable and surprising,’[5] their ancestors had the power to calm or raise particular winds, to smooth the sea or summon up waves to swamp the fleets of their enemies. In New Zealand, for instance, the early missionary Samuel Marsden spoke with a tohunga who controlled the winds and waters in the Hokianga harbour, and reported that according to the warrior chief Hongi Hika, the sea god Tangaroa lived in his forehead.[6] When Marsden boarded a ship in the Bay of Islands, intending to take the errant missionary Thomas Kendall back to Port Jackson in defiance of Hongi’s wishes, the ship was wrecked before it left the Bay. It was a fine, calm day, and Marsden could not understand what had happened. He had recently been told, however, about the wreck of another ship in the Hokianga, where the mate attacked some sacred rocks with a hammer, and the local taniwha (powerful water being) picked up his ship and smashed it on the rocks as he tried to sail out of the harbour.[7]
In this book, Maria Robertson describes exchanges with an elderly female navigator from Kiribati, Teueroa, and her connection with the ocean. In a deep sense, she and the sea are one. When Teueroa was born, her father took her umbilical cord out to sea and dropped into deep water, and in her early teens, she was initiated as a navigator when her father sailed out of sight of land, tossed her into the water and sailed away. When he returned to pick her up, he asked her to point out the direction of the land. Later, he taught her how to predict the weather from the winds and stars. According to Teueroa, droughts that are explained by scientists as due to climate change have already been foretold by the stars. As Robertson remarks,
[Given] the notion that the world is made of relationships, engaging in known and unknown ways, fixing and unfixing, always struggling and co-operating, the world emerges in these connections. And the notion of organised exchanges of energy … allows individuals to engage with systems and correct imbalances that could otherwise be said to be out of their control.[8]
These exchanges of energy may include songs, as well as ritual knowledge and other artistic interventions. As Elfriede Hermann and Wolfgang Kempf report, many Kiribati people address the prospect of catastrophic climate change with a prophetic song that exhorts them to ‘rise up’ and take practical action to avert the loss of their islands.[9] For New Guinea, Marian Strucke-Garbe describes powerful artistic responses.[10] Other examples include ‘Moana: The Rising of the Sea,’ a performance created by Vilsoni Hereniko at the University of Hawai’i that has featured at many international gatherings focused on climate change.[11]
In her account of Cyclone Pam in the Cook Islands, Cecile Rubow suggests that such storms (‘natural-cultural whirls’) may be reflected in ‘giant rotating, intensifying discursive systems’ that gather momentum across large networks, bringing together different knowledges and voices in ways that make different kinds of sense to different people. She suggests that ‘climate change’ is one of these spinning assemblages, sweeping across the islands and whirling together ancestral, Christian and scientific ideas, generating fear and vulnerability, practical responses and creative power.[12]
Devastation after Cyclone Pam 14 March 2015 by Graham Crumb, licensed under CC BY-SA
This sense of being caught in relational vortices and yet having the power to strike new balances also emerges in John Connell’s account of the Carteret Islanders, a population of less than 1000 people who inhabit a cluster of six small atolls off Bougainville. While these people have been described by the global press as the first climate refugees - ‘frontline victims of the excesses of capitalism,’[13] they have suffered food, cash and timber shortages for at least half a century. At the same time, tectonic shifts, seismic events, and local interventions such as dynamiting the reefs and building sea walls amplify their difficulties. Nevertheless, the discourse of climate change serves as a ‘weapon of the weak,’ giving them chances to build new lives in other places.
In this swirl of ideas, Pacific peoples have also been powerfully influenced by Christian narratives. As Jennifer Newell describes for Samoa and Emilie Nolet for Fiji, Biblical stories about God driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for their sin of eating forbidden fruit; Noah building the Ark to survive the Great Flood; and the Apocalypse, when the sun scorches the earth, the rivers dry up and there is darkness and pain in the land are echoed in local debates around climate change.[14]
These mythic narratives also underpin metropolitan accounts of climatic change. Ideas such as ‘the Anthropocene’, ‘anthropogenic impacts,’ ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘resource management’ all reflect Biblical stories in which God gives Adam and Eve ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,’[15] putting people in control of the cosmos. An onto-logic in which all other beings are created for human purposes fosters a sense of exceptionalism and entitlement that helps to drive resistance to talk of climate change, biodiversity losses and related phenomena, alongside fears of Armageddon or being driven out of Paradise. It is also very different from ancestral Pacific accounts in which all living phenomena including earth, sky, winds, rivers, birds, fish and people are linked together in kin networks, powered by reciprocal exchanges.
These kin-based philosophies have more in common with other strands in Western thought, for instance those that trace back to vitalist philosophies in the Enlightenment, and ideas about the ‘tree of life’ or the ‘web of life’ elaborated by scientists including Alexander Humboldt or Charles Darwin.[16] Ideas about complex networks and systems, symbiosis and ‘holobionts’ in the contemporary biological sciences[17] all resonate closely with Pacific ideas.
In these kinds of framings, it makes sense to ‘think like a fish’ – to consider the vantage-points of life forms other than human beings on planetary processes. In the context of attempts to sustainably manage the Pacific Ocean, for example, whether through exclusive economic zones or marine reserves, these perspectives might allow us to see that fish do not register such boundaries, and to come up with devices that do not allow them to be harvested to extinction.
If people and environment, culture and nature are not divided in ancestral ways of being in the Pacific, neither are mind and matter, theory and practice. Engagements with Pacific forms of order are not just thought experiments, but also inform legal frameworks and practical action. In New Zealand, for instance, as part of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process, both the Urewera, the ancestral territory of Tūhoe people, and the Whanganui River have recently been recognised as legal beings in their own right, with their own entitlements to health and well-being.
These laws have many practical implications, and not just for Maori people. While they place obligations of care on the iwi concerned, they also fundamentally reshape relationships between all people and these ancestral beings. For the Whanganui river, its restoration becomes a right, not an optional extra; and for the Urewera, once a major national park, the iwi has initiated a regime that seeks to manage people, rather than communities of plants and animals. Once issued with tramping, hunting and fishing permits, visitors now enter into ‘friendship agreements’ with the Urewera, and are guided by young Tūhoe who introduce them to new ways of understanding this place that is an ancestor.[18]
Such philosophical experiments can also inform scientific projects. In the Te Awaroa project, for instance, funded by the University of Auckland, teams of scientists and local experts draw on mātauranga Maori (ancestral knowledge) along with an array of natural and social sciences to listen to the ‘voice of the river’ in different parts of the country, studying rivers as living systems through time, with their plants, animals and people, to inform healthier futures. In the wider Pacific, too, star navigators are again sailing across the ocean, carrying out scientific research and raising urgent concerns about the state of this great sea with its dying reefs, depleted fish stocks, gyres of rubbish and drowning islands.
In relation to climate change, Maori ancestral perspectives suggest that this is among an array of symptoms that show interlinked living systems are moving away from a state of ora (health, well-being and abundance) towards a state of mate (ill-health, dysfunction, degradation and failure). Intensive agriculture that over-tills or over-grazes the land, for example, while using many imported inputs (diesel for machinery, chemical sprays and palm kernels as feed, in the case of intensive dairying) may also degrade aquifers, rivers, estuaries and harbours, contribute to biodiversity losses through mono-cropping and deforestation, and drive climate change through animal methane emissions, deforestation and the use of fossil fuels.
To ‘think like a fish’, then, is to recognise that aspects of modernist science may be non-adaptive. In order to understand these interconnected processes, the separation of the social from the natural sciences and the fragmentation of the disciplines are profoundly unhelpful. If we are to deal intelligently with climate change, new paradigms that foster intelligent inquiry into an array of intricate relational networks and patterns of exchange among planetary systems at different scales are urgently needed.
As Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi suggests, there is also a need to live differently – to confront human greed and the urge to exploit ‘natural resources’ for short term profit by considering the interests of future generations, and to pursue reciprocal exchanges that seek balance with other life forms, however elusive. The gravity of this challenge is highlighted by Nalau Bingeding’s account of a disjuncture in Papua New Guinea between the government’s powerful rhetoric about climate change in international fora and a lack of practical action at home.[19] On the island of Gau in Fiji, on the other hand, according to Veitayaki and Holland, the inhabitants are tackling climate change on many fronts through the Lomani Gau project, informed by rigorous inquiry and ancestral precedents.[20]
Across the contemporary Pacific, many thinkers are seeking to engage with climate change and related existential challenges by weaving together ancestral ideas with insights from the contemporary sciences, and activating these through innovative artistic, political and legal devices. In the face of apocalyptic visions that engender helplessness and despair, these experiments offer new ways of thinking, a sense of resilience and hope, and a will to take practical action:
As my mentor Eruera Stirling used to chant:
Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Listen! Listen! Listen!
Ki te tangi a te manu e karanga nei To the cry of the bird calling
Tui, tui, tuituiā! Bind, join, be one!
Tuia i runga, tuia i raro, Bind above, bind below
Tuia i roto, tuia i waho, Bind within, bind without
Tuia i te here tangata Tie the knot of humankind
Ka rongo te pō, ka rongo te pō The night hears, the night hears
Tuia i te kāwai tangata i heke mai Bind the lines of people coming down
I Hawaiki nui, i Hawaiki roa, From great Hawaiki, from long Hawaiki
I Hawaiki pāmamao From Hawaiki far away
I hono ki te wairua, ki te whai ao Bind to the spirit, to the day light
Ki te Ao Mārama! To the World of Light!
FOOTNOTES
[1] Efi in Crook and Rudiak 2018, 5.
[2] Ibid, 3.
[3] Te Rangikaheke in Curnow 1983, 254.
[4] Jones 1959, 232.
[5] Robertson in Crook and Rudiak 2018, 36.
[6] Salmond 2017.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Robertson in Crook and Rudiak 2018, 45.
[9] Herman and Kempf in ibid, 20-28.
[10] Strucke-Garbe in ibid.
[11] Steiner 2015.
[12] Rubow in Crook and Rudiak 2018, 31.
[13] Connell in ibid, 58.
[14] Newell and Nolet in ibid.
[15] King James Bible, Genesis 1:28.
[16] Reill 2005, Normandin and Wolfe, eds. 2013; Lash 2016.
[17] Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber 2012, 326.
[18] For more detailed accounts of these experiments, see Salmond 2017.
[19] Bingeding in Crook and Rudiak 2018, 101-112.
[20] Veitayaki and Holland in ibid, 89-100.
REFERENCES
Crook, Tony and Rudiak-Gould, Peter 2018. Encountering Climate Change and Scientific Prophecy in Oceania.
Curnow, Jenifer 1983. Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke, M.A. thesis, University of Auckland.
Gilbert, Scott F., Sapp, Jan; and Tauber, Alfred L. 2012. A Symbiotic View of Life: We have never been Individuals.’ The Quarterly Review of Biology 87/4, 325-341.
Jones, Pei te Hurinui 1959. King Potatau. Wellington, The Polynesian Society.
Lash, Scott 2016. Life (Vitalism). Theory Culture Society 23, 323-329.
Normandin, Sebastian and Wolfe, Charles T. eds. 2013. Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science 1800-2010. Dordrecht, Springer.
Reill, P.H., 2005. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Salmond, Anne 2017. Tears of Rangi: Experiments across Worlds. Auckland, Auckland University Press.
Steiner, Candice 2015. A Sea of Warriors: Performing an Identity of Resilience and Empowerment in the Face of Climate Change in the Pacific. The Contemporary Pacific 27/1, 147-180.
About the Author
Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond DBE CBE FBA FANAS FRSNZ FNZAH
Anne Salmond
Anne Salmond is a Distinguished Professor in Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. In 2013 she became the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year. In 2017 she hosted Artefact, a TV series about the power of iconic taonga (treasures), past, present and future; with more episodes to come in 2020.
Dame Anne has written many prize-winning books on Māori life and early cross-cultural encounters in Aotearoa, Tahiti and the Pacific, and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
She has a strong interest in Maori and Pacific philosophies relating to land and sea, and a fascination with voyaging, reflecting on these in her latest book Tears of Rangi: Experiments across Worlds, a finalist for the Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding from the British Academy.
Anne Salmond is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2018 she was awarded a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of lifetime achievements in research.
Dame Anne served on the founding Board of Te Papa Tongarewa and the Experts Advisory Committee for the Taputapuatea World Heritage site in Ra’iatea. She is the patron of many cultural and environmental organisations, and co-founder of the Waikereru Ecosanctuary in Gisborne (https//www.waikereru.org).