ABSTRACT
That climate change is unambiguously an “environmental issue” is often taken for granted, sometimes even within the fi eld of anthropology. This assumption must be questioned, because the notion of an “environmental issue” is irretrievably caught up in Western notions of nature and carries with it all the liabilities and limitations of that category. In this chapter I illustrate these liabilities through my fi eldwork on climate change perceptions and responses in the Marshall Islands. I do so by applying the environmental frame to this topic to show how it undervalues the human costs of the threat and ignores Marshallese views of climate change as a cultural crisis. I argue that framing climate change as “environmental” predisposes anthropologists to adopt either an ecological-anthropology paradigm, which, in the Marshallese case, overlooks the infl uence of science communication on public understandings of climate change, or a political-ecology paradigm, which misrepresents Marshallese narratives of climate change causes and responsibility. The framing of climate change as “environmental” is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and anthropologists of climate change must remain mindful of the blind spots that it generates.
