Patrick Nunn

Traditional Knowledge and oral accounts of natural phenomena provide valuable insights into natural hazards, including volcanic eruptions. Indigenous societies with Oral Traditions have often developed culturally grounded strategies for mitigating volcanic hazards. However, the integration of cultural knowledge and scientific understanding remains underexplored in modern volcanic hazard mitigation. This study takes a qualitative approach, using examples from Australasia and the Pacific Islands, to examine how the integration of long-standing cultural knowledge and volcanological research can enhance our understanding of precursory activity, eruption chronologies, and the relative timing of past volcanic events. Additionally, it offers detailed accounts of the hazards experienced and their impacts on people and the environment. We also propose directions for future research. Whilst differing world views in the causation of volcanic activity will remain, incorporating all available knowledge on past volcanic events will help local communities in volcanically active regions become better prepared and more resilient to future volcanic activity.

Culturally-appropriate planned relocation policies are critical to enabling climate adaptation, particularly in the Pacific and Indian Oceans where rising sea levels and intensifying hazards threaten communities. Fiji and Vanuatu are frequently cited as international leaders in relocation policy, yet there has been limited critical analysis of the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of their policy frameworks. We analysed 27 institutional instruments guiding climate-induced relocation and displacement in Fiji and Vanuatu and assessed each instrument's contribution to community resilience across three dimensions: means, equity, and tradition. While both countries have developed a suite of policies that collectively support relocation, tradition – encompassing cultural heritage, attachment to place, and customary governance - is underrepresented. Successful relocation policy requires the integration of cultural and traditional dimensions alongside material and procedural considerations, particularly in Indigenous contexts where culture, identity and land are intertwined. Strengthening internal policy design capacity and fostering cross-sectoral integration will contribute to just, sustainable, and culturally-grounded relocation processes and outcomes. Insights from Fiji and Vanuatu offer valuable lessons for other nations developing culturally-inclusive relocation policy in response to climate risks.

This book chapter highlights the affinities between traditional spirituality and sustainability. Across global and local contexts, development initiatives have often privileged outsider perspectives and technocratic interventions that misalign with local worldviews. Consequently, many climate change adaptation efforts have proved ineffective and unsustainable, shaped by foreign agendas and external funding. Moreover, many traditional knowledge-holders perceive modern development models as grounded in materialism, consumerism, and excess, rendering them incongruent with their local values and cosmologies. Set against this background, the chapter calls for a paradigmatic shift in research, policy, and practice to better harness the synergies between traditional spirituality and sustainable development. Such alignment promises adaptation strategies that are not only more effective and enduring but also more equitable, ethical, and culturally grounded. The chapter also introduces this volume—Handbook of Traditional Spirituality and Sustainability—outlining its structure, thematic focus, and individual contributions across seven regional and conceptual sections.

Throughout the island groups of the western Pacific, there exist culturally-grounded protocols for acknowledging once-inhabited places that have been submerged. Such protocols typically involve signs of respect made by persons sailing over sunken places; it is commonly said that a failure to abide by such protocols may result in calamity. Associated with these protocols are sights of lands beneath the ocean surface that are inhabited in much the same way as are those on modern island coasts. Sounds and scents coming from undersea lands have also been noted in some instances. These protocols and traditions are interpreted as reconstituted memories of land sinking, often hundreds of years ago, that enabled them to be preserved and sustained in pre-literate (oral) contexts. These protocols and traditions are referenced through a spiritual lens, the provision of land and its removal from human use being regarded as divine acts that need to be constantly acknowledged. The main function of these protocols and traditions is principally historical, enabling present populations to recall place-based pasts that give them identity and entitlement. Their function is also pragmatic, concerned with having people who are alive today understand past and present risks from environmental hazards, something that is key to sustaining livelihoods, especially in such tectonically unstable environments. In an era of climate change, where many coastal settlements are likely to be rendered uninhabitable in the next few decades as a result of sea-level rise, such protocols and traditions have a role to play in helping people adapt. For they demonstrate that issues of land loss and population displacement are not unprecedented in this region—and that anticipatory adaptation is therefore desirable. While the Pacific Islands region is a good place to document and analyse such cultural protocols and associated traditions, there are signs that such cultural expressions were once widespread and served similar purposes elsewhere in the world. This study shows that dismissing such cultural protocols and stories as ‘myth’ or ‘legend’ risks losing valuable insights into human pasts, especially in non-western contexts.

This book explores the intersection of indigenous wisdom, spiritual traditions, and ecological sustainability. It brings together diverse perspectives from scholars and practitioners, highlighting how ancient spiritual practices foster environmental stewardship. Covering themes like sacred ecology, ritual-based conservation, and ethical living, this book demonstrates how traditional beliefs can promote harmony with nature. By bridging spirituality and sustainability, it offers valuable lessons for addressing modern ecological crises.

Ideal for researchers, environmentalists, and spiritual custodians, including traditional knowledge holders and faith leaders, this book is a vital resource for understanding the role of cultural heritage in creating a sustainable future. Themes explored include the spiritual connection between humans and nature in indigenous traditions, how religious ceremonies and practices promote environmental protection, moral teachings rooted in traditional worldviews that encourage sustainable living, and the integration of belief systems with ecological activism.

Drawing on contributions from every inhabited continent, the book offers a uniquely global perspective on the intersections of spirituality, culture, and sustainability.

Ancient coastal tales reveal deep memories of land, sea, and survival.
What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches, and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss, and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. It is a compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.

Through a study of Ra Province (northeast Viti Levu Island, Fiji) involving both archival research and community engagement, we highlighted a long history of Indigenous population mobility. Many coastal settlements have mostly undocumented histories of relocating inland due to shoreline retreat and land loss over recent decades. Studies of Navutulevu and Vunitogoloa use oral histories and nineteenth-century accounts to show this. More recent autonomous relocations, identified through field surveys in Madhuvani and Navuniivi, are regarded as ‘invisible’ because such major adaptation responses are not usually included in most formal or published reviews of community relocation in the Pacific.
Based on our results and a broader understanding of societal evolution in the Pacific Islands region, we concluded that population mobility and settlement relocation have historically been common on (comparatively small and remote) oceanic islands, often in response to changing environmental conditions. Therefore, the possibility of future relocation might seem less intimidating for many coastal residents because of this history. The idea that future relocation is rare and therefore requires extensive funding and policy support, rooted in post-globalization norms, is inaccurate. In reality, it could undermine the resilience of Pacific Island communities by dismissing their histories of autonomous adaptation.

Investigations of a 3000 m2 shell-dense island surrounded by mangroves off the coast of Culasawani, a very lightly inhabited part of northern Vanua Levu Island in Fiji, suggest it is likely to be a ‘midden island’ rather than a (tsunami) wave deposit. Building an island that reaches 60 cm above mean high tide, the shell-dense deposit (70%–90% shell) averages 20–40 cm thick and appears unstratified, characteristics that initially suggested that it was a wave deposit. Subsequent investigations included four 1 × 1 m test pits and showed all shellfish remains in the island sediments to be from edible species and associated with pottery fragments. Ten radiocarbon ages cluster around a median age of 1190 cal BP (760 CE/AD) with a range of 1530–910 cal BP (420–1040 CE/AD). The clustering of these ages and the nature of the shellfish remains lead to the preferred interpretation of this shell-dense island as a true ‘midden island’, created either by people living on/above the site or by people who processed shellfish there before transporting its flesh elsewhere for consumption. If the Culasawani island is a midden island, then this is the first to be recorded in the South Pacific west of Papua New Guinea.

Imagine you were one of the first groups of people to arrive by boat on an island in the middle of the tropical Pacific Ocean in ancient times.

You had been at sea for weeks, your concern growing as your supplies were exhausted and you had to depend on the fish and the birds you could catch…and the rain that fell from time to time.

Then the high islands you had been searching for appeared faintly over the eastern horizon, so you steered a course towards them.

Quenching your thirst from the rivers you found there, you looked for a ready source of food and found abundant shellfish, clinging to rocks or buried in the sand of the shallow sea floor and the mud of the river estuaries.

You gorged yourself on the soft parts of these shellfish, discarding their hard shells in piles along the shoreline.

And these piles grew. And grew. Until…

Scientists in the 21st century start exploring these remarkable shell middens, revealing history, geography – and the dietary preferences of the people who lived in such places long, long ago.

Australian Indigenous Oral Traditions preserve transgenerational memories of geological (and other environmental) events, including hazardous volcanic activity. Details within these recollections are increasingly being recognised for their potential to inform geoscientists and ethnographers about deep-time landscape evolution and related geological processes. Many traditions recall impactful events that changed or created particular landscape features that are well remembered in Indigenous narratives and are plausibly linked to identified locations. Such stories (or ‘geomythologies’) also may include eye-witness accounts of sea-level rise, meteor impacts, tsunami, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in some cases dating from the Early Holocene (11.7 ka BP) and possibly earlier. Despite enduring memories of eruptive events in Australia, not all volcanism has associated stories, raising questions about the reasons for why some stories may have survived and others did not.

This paper builds on global research into the longevity and accuracy of oral traditions and argues that Australian Aboriginal traditions of volcanism include some of the oldest such narratives of their kind in the world. It also demonstrates how efforts to ‘authenticate’ them (from Western literate-scientific perspectives) can provide a pathway for integrating Indigenous knowledge and academic scientific approaches. This study examines the presence and absence of oral traditions across mapped volcanic provinces and identifies a correlation between story occurrence and areas of geologically recent activity. It also finds a consistent absence of such traditions where eruptive activity is known to predate archaeologically constrained human occupation of the region.