Peter Rudiak-Gould is currently studying his doctorate and conducting fieldwork on people's perceptions of climate in the Marshall Islands.

To live in the Marshall Islands is to live next to the sea. These thousand-odd coral islands between Australia and Hawaii total only 70 square miles of land, and the country's highest point barely reaches 10 meters above sea level. Nowhere in the country can one escape the sound of waves.

For the Marshallese people, the ocean has always been a source of both sustenance and danger. But nowadays, climate change is causing the sea to shrink as a resource and grow as a threat. As waters rise, the islands will not "disappear", but become increasingly prone to erosion, typhoons, floods, well water contamination, and coral bleaching. There is a very real possibility that the country's 60,000 indigenous inhabitants will have to leave their homeland in the next 50 years.

            Coping with climate change always involves a struggle between denial and acceptance. I found this to be true both for myself and for the Marshallese community on remote Ujae Island, where I lived first as an English teacher in 2003-2004 and again in the summer of 2007doing research for my M.Phil in Social Anthropology. The signs of the rising ocean are plain to see on this island: beachside trees are falling, shores are retreating, and ancient graveyards are eroding. Yet most locals avoid the issue, and sometimes even claim that there is no problem. At the same time, a number of people speak openly about their fears of smaller, less fertile, more vulnerable islands, and the looming possibility of mass exodus. I felt the same conflict in myself: during my first stay in the country, I was aware of climate change but dismissed it as an abstract threat, too distant to deal with now and too frightening to fully confront. This summer, however, the media coverage and the overwhelming visual evidence on Ujae Island forced me to accept the reality of sea level rise. For the people of the Marshall Islands, and now for myself, climate change is here, now - not somewhere else, sometime in the future.

            So it is almost comforting that we are already seeing and feeling the effects of global warming. Such evidence inspires action because it makes denial harder and harder to sustain. Not only that, it can actually make the problem less frightening. I found that, contrary to what I expected, it was precisely when I accepted that climate change was happening that it ceased to terrify me. What may happen in the future is always scarier than what is happening now - and that is why learning about frontline states like the Marshall Islands may lead to empowerment rather than despair.

The Marshallese, almost all of them Christian, often interpret sea level rise in religious terms. Local people point to God's promise to Noah that he would not flood the earth again. According to some, this means that sea level rise will not happen, but according to others, this means that it must be humans, not God, who are creating the problem - God believes we are ruining his beautiful creation. This shows that religious belief, which is sometimes dismissed by climatologists as an irrational obstacle to proper understanding of the problem, can lead to acceptance and action just as easily as it can lead to denial and misunderstanding. The Pope's recent interest in combating climate change shows that the idea of religion as a positive force in environmentalism is gaining ground internationally.

We must not think of the Marshallese as merely victims, and certainly not as passive. To do so would be to deny the ability of people - all across the globe and through time - to adapt to all sorts of changes. It is too early to abandon hope for a resilient Marshall Islands. Meanwhile, the belief that displacement would guarantee the death of identity and self-determination is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this does not change the fact that sea level rise is a grave threat to entire nations, and evacuation is not to be taken lightly. It is the duty of Western citizens and governments to help prevent this forced relocation, and - if worst comes to worst - to accept the people as refugees. Some scholars are uncomfortable with calling such migrants "refugees", but there can be no other word for people forced by others' negligence to leave their homes of 2000 years.