COSMOVIS explores what global environmental initiatives of the future will look like in China and Russia, two major world powers in Asia, by setting forth two key research questions: (1) How can scientists and indigenous people jointly manage climate change in regions of global climatic vulnerability and (2) What are the geopolitical causes of climate change and the policies that surround it? Two interdisciplinary research teams – the ‘China Team’ at King’s College London and the ‘Russia Team’ at the University of Manchester – have been assembled to explore these questions among indigenous populations in China and Russia. The project teams are composed of social anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science, and a philosopher of ethics. Each project member is collaborating with research partners in China or Russia, through anthropological fieldwork or qualitative interview-based research. Many of our research partners are indigenous people whose own expertise spans the natural sciences (especially permafrost studies, meteorology, forestry, and environmental science) and the social sciences (including ethnohistory, ethnology, and social anthropology). Some of our research partners are local custodians of folk culture, religious specialists, agro-pastoralists, herders, or hunters in Southwest China and Siberia. Bringing together natural and social scientists, indigenous leaders, religious specialists, and ordinary people at the ethnic borderlands of China and Russia, COSMOVIS sets out to foster the new ‘cosmological visions’ that indigenous people and scientists are currently crafting for managing climate change in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.
A cosmological vision is built upon culturally specific and religious ways of knowing or being in the world, metaphysical reflections on the universe, and often certain astronomical elements – all of which indigenous people in Southwest China, Siberia, and elsewhere tend to combine with practical environmental knowledge about their own lands that has been built up over generations. Climate change in the research sites of both project teams is currently accelerating due to past and present deforestation, which feeds global market demands for wood, paper, and other forest-derived resources even as it encourages forest fires and, in Siberia, permafrost melt that is releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and mercury at rates faster than carbon capture technologies of the future are predicted to be able to manage. Novel cosmological visions that take on board indigenous environmental knowledge and animistic sensibilities of how to relate to humans, animals, plants, things, forces of nature, spirits, and sometimes even ancestors, transcendent gods, renewable energy technologies, and science itself are needed to uncover innovative ways of coping with climate change. Lessons gathered now from the temperate highlands and uplands of Southwest China and the boreal mountains of the Siberian Arctic are providing insights, and even roadmaps, for how societies across the globe might best navigate the vicissitudes of climate change.
