Anthropological Futures Conference, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, June 12-13, 2010 Towards an Ecopoetics of Oceania: Worlding the Asia-Pacific Region as Space-Time Ecumene Rob Wilson (rwilson@ucsc.edu ) (Keynote address for 21st Annual Conference, “Crosscurrents: New Directions in Pacific and Asian Studies,” UH at Manoa School of Pacific and Asian Studies, March 10, 2010) ---Dedicated to Theophil Saret Reuney, Chuukese teacher, translator, & poet. I: Counter-conversions toward “Oceania” I want to start this talk by invoking three “local” images of the Pacific Ocean: local in this sense meaning the Monterey Bay in central coast California where I have lived and worked since moving there from Hawai’i in 2001. But when I use the term “local” it still has the resonance of place-based specificity, agonistic struggle for social justice and native recognition, and the globally entangled dialectics of world systems I had learned in Hawai’i from 1976-2000 and tried to articulate in Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (2000) as well as later essays. The first image is of the human-dwarfing and fully admirable redwood sequoia trees in Santa Cruz, which have partly survived for centuries on fogs that come in from as far as China and as near as Hawai’i, and are now threatened with drying pine needles and diminishing size by shifting thermal patterns. The second is of the ocean floor at Monterey Bay, which is becoming a one-ton layer of human discards (like artillery shells, fishing lines, bottles and plastic remainders) despite the vigilant environmental efforts of many forces and agencies. The third more apocalyptic image, which many of you are familiar with, forms a kind of collective work of global-capitalist postmodern art (so to speak): our global-waste installation in the ocean commons created by a productivist ethos and ecological unconsciousness. I allude here to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of detritus twice the size of Texas and weighing some 100 million tons that lies just below ocean surface between California, Hawai’i, and Japan (the so-called Northern Pacific Gyre) and is being formed out of throwaway bottles, chemical sludge, and polymers harmful to marine wildlife. 1 I invoke these three “ecopoetic” images, at the outset, and others could be multiplied (say of Tuvalu disappearing due to global warming and rising tides, the military buildup and 1 This paragraph draws on recent information from the following sources accessed online: Paul Simons, “Weather Eye: Disappearing Fogs of the Pacific Coast,” London Times (Feb. 25, 2010); Jane Palmer, “Junk accumulating on Monterey Bay ocean floors: scientists find increasing levels of debris in the deep sea,” Santa Cruz Sentinel (Feb. 2, 2010); and Maggie Shiels, “Boat made of trash [the Plastiki] prepares to set sail,” BBC News (March 3, 2010). 1