Priests in the observatory: rethinking climate science and religion in a warming world

ABSTRACT This essay considers the possibilities of re-thinking what a climate change observatory might be. Rather than reproducing science as usual, climate change observatories assembled with faith institutions, might open new potential for experimental environmental knowledge practices. The essay examines these ideas through an account of an experimental environmental observatory based in churches in the Solomon Islands.

changes (sea level rise, shoreline change, storm duration and intensity). The idea was to use an existing network of Anglican Churches as observatories because there were not sufficient government infrastructures to undertake the task. A conventional approach would have been to fly in scientists and infrastructures from powerful wealthy states but this would have reproduced colonial forms of development, entrenching local dependence on foreign know-how and aid. Instead, I was interested in an observatory system that could contribute to creating grassroots conditions for the creation of local skills, knowledge, infrastructure, and self-determination. Imagining that churches could perform the functions of observatories opened up a series of possibilities for re-imagining the production of climate knowledge. First, it would mean piggybacking on the existing infrastructures of Anglican Churches such as the circulation of people and objects in the archipelago via the churches vessel The Southern Cross. It would also mean utilising pre-existing reliable structures of worship: every church had a priest or lay-person who looked after church services on a strict schedule. In broad terms, the necessary social and material infrastructures already existed for basic scientific observationregularity, discipline, networks, and hierarchies of information flow. The headquarters of the Anglican Church in Honiara could act as the central archive for observations.
My proposal had the enthusiastic support of the Archbishop of Melanesia, local, British, and Australian bishops, as well as oceanographers in the UK and Australia who were keen to participate because they saw the dearth of on-the-ground observations in the South Pacific, a region at the frontlines of the climate crisis.
The project, however, was not meant to enlist local observers in a far-away place for the production of conventional climate change data in metropolitan centres in the Global North. The ambition of the project was to re-think what it meant to observe climate change. It was clear from the very beginning of my time in the Solomon Islands that climate change was conceived through a Christian lens. 3 Rising sea levels and increased intensities of storms, for instance, aligned with already familiar biblical imagery. It was also clear for many bishops and priests that I spoke with in Honiara that the causes of climate change were the responsibility of the wealthy west and its twinned histories of colonialism and industrialisation. A number of bishops I spoke with were interested in Ecotheology, a tradition related to Liberation Theology but more deeply grounded in the Christianity of the Pacific. They were also influenced by environmental struggles emerging from the Cold War period and anti-nuclear protests in the region. Ecotheology, in the vision of these bishops and priests, was also a decolonial form of Christianity because it looked to Pacific traditions of environmental knowledge which predated missionisation in the late nineteenth century and, in many instances, they saw persisting in the present. Knowledge about ocean patterns, fish communities and habitats, seasonal cycles, mangrove behaviour and resilience, had been severely threatened by Christianisation but were also being revived. For a number of Bishops I spoke with, Christian missionaries fundamentally misunderstood the environmental impact of local religions and as a response the bishops were experimenting with new assemblages of Christianity and local spiritual practices.
The opportunity to build a climate change observatory within churches allowed for the possibility to bring all of these things together. In my view, it simply is not enough to use citizen science as opportunities for scientists to access the free labour of enthusiastic laypeople or reinscribe Global Northern standards of doing climate science. 4 The Anglican Church of the Solomon Islands as an observatory opens the possibility to think anew what it means to observe and document a changing world; it creates the opportunity to imagine the observatory as a physical space in which multiple ways of knowing nature converge: Christian, Global Northern climate science, indigenous, pre-and post-colonial. This could then, perhaps, shed some light on how to think the global nature of both climate science and the global effects of climate change. It is a commonplace for geographers to analyse the uneven global effects of climate change, but at the centre of that is still the question of what makes the globe. Likewise, climate science is understood to be an exemplary global science. But does rethinking the production of climate change observatories also help us re-think the nature of the globe beyond the familiar categories of the local and global? If the globe is viewed from the Solomon Islands it is at once Christian, precolonial, yet utterly contemporary; the globe from there is already opened by ways of knowing that are at once mythical and scientific. Noah's staff is embedded in one of the islands, other islands were pulled up from the water in mythical time by a boy who was fishing; an observatory of the present can bring these stories together, assemble them in new configurations to help make a changing climate newly legible.
By the time that the COP26 delegates rolled out of Glasgow, the Anglican Church of Melanesia Environment Observatory had finished its first one-year trial taking measurements at four churches in the archipelago. The observatories were measuring rainfall, temperature, water levels, beach profiles, and shoreline positions. Data was being collected and prepared for open access distribution on the observatory web platform. 5 One member of the team circulated part-time between the sites to collate data and provide technical support. One year on, the observatory is looking to expand. The challenges are substantial enlisting participants, the lukewarm commitment of a new Archbishop, a busy church organisation with many demands on its attention, newly complicated geopolitical conditions in the South Pacificbut the local and international enthusiasm for the observatory is acute. There is very little work that is trying to re-imagine the social role of the climate change observatory in a warming world, let alone envisioning how observatories can become new contact zones between religion and climate science. For this, the Solomon Islands is truly at the vanguard. Sadouni (2022). 2. Human geographers and historians of science have long acknowledged that the distinction between religion and science is porous and complex. See, for instance, Ethan Yorgason and della Dora (2009). There remains, however, very little work in either field on how climate change science is inflected by religion. 3. See also Crook and Rudiak-Gould (2018), Bobbette (2019), and Fache and Fair (2020). 4. I acknowledge that many conversations around citizen science and participatory science have sought to engage with similar critiques and to rethink the nature of participation in the production of knowledge. See Dawson et al. (2020) and Skarlatidou et al. (2022). 5. See https://acomobservatory.wordpress.com/monitoring-sites/.