ABSTRACT
The people of the Marshall Islands have been told their country is doomed and have seen confirmatory omens in their backyards. This book has endeavored to show how locals react to this specter and why. It has shown how the idea of global anthropogenic climate change, originally a foreign scientific notion, has become local, disseminated through Marshallese society and interpreted through Marshallese concepts and values. Marshall Islanders have, to use Broad and Orlove’s (2007) coinage, “channeled globality,” remaking a global discourse in their image and harnessing it for their own parochial ends. Yet even as the Marshallese vision of climate change is culturally specific, it is a recognizable instance of that larger discourse, a variation on a theme. Marshallese views of climate change are in fact part of the global discourse, and the existence of such local instances in a variety of societies is what makes the discourse global. Thus Marshall Islanders, through climate change, have become “transnational locals” (Lahsen, 2004).
