It seems almost self-evident that there were things our ancestors did in the past which we have forgotten about. Things that were attuned to the environments in which they lived, things that were not dictated by supposedly global norms.
Let’s take, I don’t know, house design. People today in most parts of the world where choices about house design are available would commonly favour something four-sided made from durable material with a slanting roof. We might suppose this is the ‘obvious’ house design, given its ubiquity, but if we go back in time just a few centuries, we would realise there was far more diversity.
Think of the disadvantages of four-sided houses – you cannot see in every direction as you can with more rounded ones. And the durable material might seem beyond criticism, for you want your house to keep standing for decades through wind and storm and even extreme waves. But at what cost? How can the material from collapsed houses be re-used, how was its manufacture ever sustainable? Such houses represent terminal material usage, most of their remnants ending up in landfill. And think of the slanting roofs, great for catching water and trapping heat, except in tropical places where heat entrapment equates with occupant discomfort and necessitates air conditioning, which is costly and sometimes unhealthy.
Are such dwellings really a global norm? Of course not. Recent research in the Pacific Islands by the author and John Campbell (University of Waikato, New Zealand) shows that ‘modern’ housing is really a late twentieth-century arrival in this vast region, introduced largely by people who were ignorant, often thought themselves superior to the ‘natives’ and undervalued their traditional forms of housing, even though these had evolved over millennia to adapt to the Pacific climate and its periodic extremes.
If you have never fallen asleep after a heavy lunch in a Samoan fale, cooled by the light sea breezes, you may find this difficult to credit; yet why Pacific Islanders scramble to build their houses from corrugated iron sheets, making them like ovens inside, seems almost inexplicable when such traditional designs are available. Likewise if you have never sat unscarred through a hurricane in a Fijian bure with its porous walls, the slope of its un-gabled roof optimally angled to withstand strong winds, watching sheets of corrugated iron become dislodged from other (more modern) houses and fly around, you may not readily understand.
The most important thing about traditional houses in the Pacific Islands and countless other ‘traditional’ societies is that they were sustainable, made from organic materials – frames, walls, floors, roofs, fibre cordage – that were easily replaceable should a building need reconstruction. In fact, from what we know about Pacific societies prior to globalisation (which began around the mid-nineteenth century), most buildings were rebuilt or reinforced every few years and even entire settlements, having exhausted surrounding food-producing environments, would shift every few decades.
It is not all about house design but also about where to live so that one was minimally exposed to the range of climate stressors associated with life in the tropical Pacific. While almost everyone living in the Pacific islands today lives close to the coast – and we think the reasons for doing so (access to sea, sand and sustenance) are obvious – this was not the case before they were reached by the tide of globalisation. While many people had moved inland to escape conflict (see my project on Hill Forts), they had also come to realise that inland living was actually less dangerous than life on the coastal fringe. In the main it was European colonizers and missionaries who persuaded Pacific Island peoples to move to the coast, a move that facilitated trade and proselytization, but ran counter to many of the people’s instincts. One example used in this research project comes from the village of Navunievu (Bua Province, Fiji) where people reluctantly moved to the coastal flat about 150 years ago, were subsequently directed to clear its protective fringe of mangrove forest (to reduce disease), and have since suffered land loss and increasingly regular flooding (see annotated picture below).
But it is also Navunievu that has come up with an innovative solution. For the village authorities now require any young man building a family house in the village to build it upslope at the back of the coastal flat. In a few decades, this will lead to the wholesale relocation of Navunievu out of danger from the rising sea level – a type of autonomous sustainable adaptation that scientists wrack their brains trying to design and drive.
It is often said that the Pacific islands are on the ‘front line’ of global climate change, the ‘canary in the coalmine’ that will foreshadow many of its impacts on the rest of the world’s coasts. Richer countries and global organizations have bought into this rhetoric, pouring millions of dollars into Pacific nations for climate-change adaptation yet – after decades of this – having few effective or sustainable results to show for their massive investment. Recent research by the author and Karen McNamara (University of Queensland) and others identifies the main reasons for this regrettable situation.
Foremost is the lack of effective engagement with Pacific island communities and worldviews, many of which privilege spiritual over scientific beliefs. The time is ripe for donors to step back and stop ‘doing adaptation’ to others, instead asking ‘how can we facilitate the process’ of effective and sustainable adaptation. This will mean shedding prejudices, questioning whether there are global solutions to local problems of this kind, and perhaps even encouraging more autonomy.
And in all this, the past is key to the future. Globalisation has failed the Pacific Islands, failed to make them an equal component of a globalised world, and in a de-globalising future world, it is time for Pacific Island people to seek ways of ensuring their future that privilege their values and their understandings.