A Dirtification of Economy from a Pacific Eco-Relational Perspective

Upolu Lumā Vaai is Professor of Theology and Ethics and Principal of the Pacific Theological College in Suva Fiji. He is a member of more than ten international research organisations and journals including the recently established Advisory Board of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, University of Oxford.

During the summer of 2020, the Wendland-Cook program hosted a series of webinars under the theme: Liberating People and Planet: Christian Responses at the Intersection of Economics, Ecology, and Religion. Originally planned as an in-person conference, these webinars featured insights from theologians and scholars of religion reflecting on our climate and economic crisis. The original papers are being prepared for a book to be released in 2021.

In preparation of the book release and to contextualize the webinars, we featured brief overviews of each of the chapters in an Interventions forum. To see the entire forum, click here. This is Upolu Vaai’s contribution to the forum.

A Dirtification of Economy from a Pacific Eco-Relational Perspective

Upolu Vaai

September 10, 2020

The Pacific region is overwhelmed by multiple layers of a destructive development narrative:

1.) The region is the first to feel the impact of the climate crisis;

2.) The most overexploited under the onefication economic model of the rich corporations;

3.) The pressure of the renewed colonial "Pacific rush” narrative accompanies the recent geopolitical interests on the region of the rich powerful nations;

4.) The neglect of the grassroots community spirituality in the narrative;

5.) And the new bush for sustainable development wrapped within the obscured promises of the ‘blue growth’ development paradigm.

The impact of all of these is first felt by the Pacific dirt communities daily.

In the dirt communities, dirt is not negative as profiled by conventional colonial thinking. Dirt is wholly part of Pacific identity and everyday economic life and wellbeing. Hence any economy that is not “down to dirt” and removed from the dirtified economic ways and interests of the communities is considered a digestive and a cleansing system of power.

Alongside the many efforts outside the church to challenge the dominant colonial development narrative, the recent shift led by the Pacific churches through the work of the Pacific Theological College and the Pacific Conference of Churches attempts to create a new Pacific Household story for development that is Pacific, ground-up, and informed by life-affirming worldviews and faith and indigenous spiritualities of the Pacific dirt communities.

Eco-relationality focuses on the de-onefication of economy and reframes development from the perspective of the multiple eco-relationships that are deeply connected to the dirt identity of the communities and are often ignored by the mainstream one-dimensional neoliberal economy. In this chapter, I see the Pacific eco-relational lens as fundamental to Pacific dirt identity and propose a much needed “dirtification of economy,” if we are to liberate and address the injustices imposed by the dominant economic systems on the grassroots communities.

Such a project brings in the much needed question of the place of God in solidarity with the dirt and the repositioning of human identity and responsibility in the story of development of the Pacific dirt communities.