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, laboratories for investigation and learning, fundamental to an alternative, correlational, epistemology. In analysing these approaches, we take the prolific trope of islands as the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ in order to draw out the ontological implications of instrumentalising islands as ‘correlational machines’ in the Anthropocene. We raise fundamental problems with this literal instrumentalisation of islands and islanders, drawing out how these logics reduce island life to merely sensing and attuning to the co-relational entanglements of the Anthropocene, rather than offering higher normative aspirations for political change.

中文翻译：

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群岛与人类世间相关认识论的兴起：对“煤矿中的金丝雀”的概念的反思

曾经处于国际辩论的边缘，今天，许多人都将小岛视为开辟人类世界新思维方式和发展适应新习惯的关键。这些方法与现代，线性，因果框架完全不同，后者将岛屿构造为需要“保存”或“保护”的脆弱物体。取而代之的是，岛屿成为生产知识的工具，用于调查和学习的实验室，是替代，相关的认识论基础。在分析这些方法时，我们将多产的岛屿作为“煤矿中的金丝雀”，以得出将人类工具化为人类世的“相关机器”的本体论含义。