Islands and the rise of correlational epistemology in the Anthropocene: Rethinking the trope of the ‘canary in the coalmine’

Once on the periphery of international debate, today small islands are seen by many as key to unlocking new ways of thinking about climate change and developing new practices of adaptation in the epoch of the Anthropocene. These approaches differ starkly from modernist, linear, causal frameworks that construct islands as vulnerable objects that require ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’. Instead, islands become instruments of productive knowledge,...