Mapping Everyday Waters: Scales of Sea Level Rise and Poetic Cartographies in the Marshall Islands

This paper contends with the cartographic visualizations of sea level rise and the human-environment relationships they create focusing on the Marshall Islands. Building on critical cartographies, this paper problematizes mainstream climate change maps, which often adopt a settler-colonial imaginary of the globe and appear scientific through datafication. I argue that cartography of climate change cultivates exploitative and extractive relationships with the environment, meanwhile critical Indigenous articulations of sea level rise perpetuate kinship and reciprocity with the ocean through notions of relationality and genealogy. Specifically, mainstream climate change maps make the existence of small islands invisible, turn lived realities into quantified abstractions, and project climate struggles to the future and elsewhere, producing hypervisible island paradises. Alternatively, Indigenous poetic cartographies honor place-based specificities, account for the materiality of sea level rise, situate climate change in daily settings as everyday catastrophes, while presenting island spaces as beautiful places to protect. Identifying Indigenous cartographies as the alternatives to knowing climate change beyond science and caring for the environment beyond technocratic solution, this paper concludes by stressing the importance to learn from Indigenous community stewardship and traditional knowledge, and the agency of the ocean as a life-giving force.