Today, many of us are starting to feel more than a little uncomfortable about the future, particularly during 2020 when we experienced a devastating and truly global pandemic, as well the longer-term and more fundamental challenge to our existence – climate change. Leaving aside the pandemic for a moment, consider the challenge of climate change. Over the next few decades, climate change will likely result in the involuntary displacement of millions of people, in a reduction in humanity’s ability to produce and distribute enough food for everyone to eat, and a warming of our planet’s surface that can be reversed this century only through profound and sustained changes to the ways our economies are configured.
My point here is not to focus on the bad news, which has been written about at length (see this IPCC report for a robust and compelling synthesis), but on how we – humans – are likely to respond to a future rise in the ocean surface which is likely to prove irreversible any time soon. I suggest humanity will respond in two distinct ways – tangibly and intangibly. Tangible responses are easy to understand. They include coastal engineering projects that range from sea walls to tidal barrages, as illustrated below, and are commonly designed and implemented by governments. Intangible responses are less visible and certainly less easy to generalize about. Many of us pray to some deity, maybe one shared with others, maybe one more immanent, more personal.
Why do we respond in these two distinct ways? I suggest it is because many of us perceive a challenge like sea-level rise through two distinct lenses. On the one hand, we perceive it as an environmental issue that is best tackled through a pragmatic solution – so we build sea defences. On the other hand, there is often part of us which wishes that something won’t happen; we often ‘hope’ things don’t occur, that turtle nests and newly-claimed coastal lands will both endure. Why is that? It is because we feel sorry for turtles and want to help them endure. Maybe it is because we have bought a house on reclaimed land three metres above sea level (like the author has) and really don’t want it to go underwater any time soon.
Recent research involving myself and two psychologists has looked at this dualism – what they term ‘flexible attribution’ – in the Pacific islands region (see picture below) where many coastal community leaders believe equally in the power of prayer and the power of engineering, something which reflects their faith in both divine and material interventions.
But the main focus of this project is on the distant past and what we can glean about our ancestors’ responses to the long rise of sea level that followed the end of the last ice age. This was a hugely traumatic experience, one that I think we have underestimated when we consider the evolution of the human mind and all the built-in safety valves it has today. Consider this. If you were living along almost any coastline in the world seven thousand years ago, you and your ancestors would have experienced a rise in the ocean surface of around 120 metres (nearly 400 feet) within the previous eight thousand years or so. So much land would have been lost, so many places, so many associations, so much history – all drowned and most inevitably soon forgotten. Your ancestors would have been traumatized, as you are, by observing the loss of perhaps tens of kilometres of coastal land within a human lifetime. Might you suppose that this process would never end … and that one day the entire landmass on which you are living would be submerged and all your people would drown?
We might be tempted to sneer at such preposterous thoughts because today, bolstered by scientists’ understanding of the land and the sea, it is clear that there is not enough surplus water on the land (mainly as ice) to raise the ocean surface more than about sixty metres. Quito will never drown in the Pacific.
But imagine how we today would feel about climate change if we did not have a scientific explanation for it available, if we had no certainty about what is likely to happen in the future? Some of us might indeed feel less anxious today than we do. After all, the encroachment of the sea onto the land over the past couple of hundred years has not been that much, has it? And well, nobody can ‘predict’ the future, can they?
Now jump forward to the year 2100, the earth not only warmer by a few degrees on average, but the ocean surface having risen another 140 centimetres above its level in 2020. Many coastal places and coast-tethered economies have been decimated. Engineering solutions, being largely short-term, have largely failed to ‘protect’ exposed coasts. Intangible responses like prayer have become more widespread than anyone once imagined was possible because so much of our ‘growth’ up until 2020 was predicated on the assumption that humans were in control of Nature. Quite evidently, this assumption was wrong.
As reported in a 2020 article of mine, there are incredibly a few stories from a time more than seven thousand years ago that recall people’s responses to the rise in the ocean surface. The most complete stories come from Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) peoples. Two examples are given below.
The first group of stories comes from northeast Australia where “many tribes have stories recounting how the shore-line was once further out, where the barrier reef now stands”, as linguist Bob Dixon wrote. The Gungganyji people have a story which recalls how the misbehaviour of a man named Gunya caused the ocean surface to start rising here with devastating effect. But Gunya, chastened and regretful, led his people up a mountain where they made a huge fire in which they heated boulders that they then rolled down the mountainside into the rising waters, something that reportedly ‘succeeded in checking the flood’.
Anthropologist Ursula McConnel collected a similar story from the Djabuganydji people of this area who remember the time ‘when the Great Barrier Reef was all scrubland and people would hunt and roam all the way to its edge’. Then, because of the actions of a blue-tongued lizard, the ocean rose and drowned all the reef but this process stopped when a man ‘threw a hot stone into the sea to stop it coming up any further’.
In the south of Australia, similar stories come from the Nullarbor coast (pictured above), a notoriously dry treeless plain (larger than Florida, more then twice the size of Portugal). One story, collected by Scott Cane from the Pila Nguru (Spinifex People), recalls how a perverse old man once travelled across the Nullarbor systematically uprooting all the mallee eucalypt trees (shown above) on which its inhabitants depended for drinking water. As a punishment, the ocean rose up across the coastline, something that caused the Wati Nyiinyii people great anxiety – they worried that this foreshadowed the submergence of all Australia – so they ‘rushed’ to the water’s edge and hurriedly began ‘bundling thousands of wooden spears to stop the encroaching water’, something that managed to halt its rise. A wooden palisade was clearly a sea defence of the kind that many coastal communities build today in similar remote rural contexts (see below picture).
But what about the intangible responses? While it is hard to know for sure whether people were more spiritually-engaged seven thousand years ago compared to today, there seems little doubt that they were. All around the coast of Australia, we find ancient stone arrangements (like that shown below) which distinguished archaeologist Ian McNiven (Monash University) proposes to be ‘associated with ritual control of extreme tide regimes’.
Elsewhere in the world, during the rapid and prolonged period of post-glacial sea-level rise, there is evidence that coastal dwellers deployed similar spiritually-informed solutions in an attempt to counter land loss … and possible future drowning of the land. A superb example, well studied by Serge Cassen and Agnès Baltzer (Université de Nantes), is of the extraordinary stone lines at Carnac (shown below) which they conclude to ‘represent a cognitive barrier that sought to prevent movement between the physical and metaphysical world, specifically (continued) interference with the ocean surface by the divine’. They date the start of the construction of the Carnac lines to around 6200 years ago when the area was being rapidly inundated by rising sea level … and an effective and sustainable solution framed within the people’s contemporary belief system was designed and implemented. Who knows what that belief system entailed or how it (and its loudest advocates) might have been affected when it became clear that the sea level had not stopped rising.
The point of this research project is to demonstrate that we have been here before. That the challenges associated with future sea-level rise are similar to those our ancestors, seven millennia and more ago, also confronted. They tried what we are trying. And maybe there are some lessons we can learn from their efforts.