4 Crafting Certainty in Liquid Worlds: Encountering Climate Change in Kiribati

Abstract

Szerszynski and Urry suggest, using metaphors of orientation, that environments affected by climate change are lost, unfixed, with no destination ahead. They further point out that atmospheric science exposes the weather to technological intervention in order to reign in it (Szerszynski & Urry, 2010: 4). One could unpack Szerszynski and Urry’s passage and ask: What is the need for reading the weather if it is stable and predictable? And, conversely, how can one read the weather if it is absolutely contingent, uncertain, or chaotic? Reading the weather becomes a skill when the environment rests on principles of uncertainty and certainty, of contingency and stability. In this article, I explore how people in the Pacific live in and make sense of changing environments. The navigation skills found in Kiribati will provide the empirical material for this purpose. I argue that both certainty and uncertainty are key to understanding how people navigate the oceans and predict changing weather patterns. Certainty and uncertainty exist, not in a dualistic relationship, but in an interconnected and organic relationship side-by-side. One does not exclude the other. And I show that engaging in understanding how the environment works and anticipating how the future will unfold are still important to people living in environments affected by the unpredictable wanderings of global anthropogenic climate change. Places impacted by global climate change have been described as increasingly uncertain for the people living there as the environment is dramatically reconfigured (Crate, 2011: 179-80). Hence, tremendous scientific efforts are invested in modelling the impact of climate change in the future. But numerous uncertainties and unknown factors are unavoidable (see for example Barnett, 2001: 982; Hulme, 2010: 271; Mitchell & Hulme, 1999: 59; Szerszynski & Urry, 2010: 1-2). In fact, Michel Callon et al point