THE SLOW DEATHS FROM CLIMATE CHANGE: A Planetary View from Papua New Guinea

Abstract

How do we tell the stories of climate change? This essay explores the slow violence and death experienced by marginalized, racialized, indigenous bodies as climate change differentially impacts communities across the globe. Paying attention to locations beyond the spectacular events that have come to be associated with climate change, the article highlights violence and death on the margins, and the complex planetary relationships that make such violence both possible and nearly imperceptible on the global stage. By taking a planetary view of localized violence, the article traces the precarious positionality of communities such as those living in villages in rural Papua New Guinea, villages at the heart of the ethnographic account. It contributes to our theoretical understanding of climate change as a planetary process, with varied local manifestations, and in doing so highlights indigenous ideas and scholarship about the role of place in the violence of loss.